© The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
On view
Theodora Walton William Walton III Pavilion
Untitled,
1982
More Context
Handbook Entry
Sol LeWitt made vital contributions to both Minimalism and Conceptualism, which dominated the artistic landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. Minimalism emphasized geometry and modularity, while Conceptualism privileged ideas over objects and process over product. Methodical, austere, and emotionally restrained, LeWitt’s sculptures generally consist of three-dimensional grids whose proportions are based on those of the smallest individual unit and whose overall configuration is deduced from predetermined ratios, as in the case with <em>Untitled</em>, created for LeWitt’s friend, the artist Fred Sandback. Such an approach was intended to relieve the artist from having to invent, compose, and express. Despite the complex mathematical calculations it entailed, though, this technique was too intuitive, absurd, and compulsive to merit the term logical. "Conceptual artists," LeWitt wrote in 1969, "are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach."
Information
1982
Purchased by the Princeton University Art Museum, 2006.
- "Acquisitions of the Princeton University Art Museum 2006," Record of the Princeton University Art Museum 66 (2007): p. 41-74., p. 72
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collection (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 56 (illus.)
- Princeton University Art Museum: Handbook of the Collections (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Art Museum, 2013), p. 56
