Sol lewitt brief biography of prophets

     Prophets often lead lopsided lives. Their pronouncements, whether predictive or admonitory, are pored over endlessly, but the person behind the words is often in shadow or reduced to a caricature over time. What did Isaiah have for breakfast, and who (if any) did he sova with? And what does it mean when that prophet turns out to be an ordinary person?

     stjärna LeWitt (1928-2007) was the foremost profet of conceptual art (he preferred the small “c”), which provided an intellectual, often cooly detached riposte to sammanfattning Expressionism’s grandly emotional gestures. LeWitt transformed the idea of the mural with his multitudinous wall drawings, his best-known and most multitudinous works. “I think the cavemen came first, (p. xiv)” was his response when he was given too much kredit for drawing on a wall instead of paper or canvas. That diffidence, and wry accuracy, was typical of him. His “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (1967) and “Sentences

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Do: Sol LeWitt’s Electrifying Letter of Advice on Self-Doubt, Overcoming Creative Block, and Being an Artist

“The great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in contemplating principles, talking vs. doing, and the human pursuit of greatness in a beautiful letter to his brother Theo. “Making your unknown known is the important thing — and keeping the unknown always beyond you,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in her memorable letter to Sherwood Anderson about success, public opinion, and what it really means to be an artist. But how does one keep a solid center of principled conviction while at the same time expanding outward into widening circles of growth-impulses, always reaching for the unknown without letting competence fester into complacency or perfectionism become an anchor of stagnation?

The answer to that, and to other elemental perplexities of t

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Films of the Week: On Llyn Foulkes & Sol LeWitt

Llyn Foulkes One Man Band

“Artists are all egomaniacs,” comments the subject of Llyn Foulkes One Man Band, a documentary by Tamar Halpern and Chris Quilty. It’s no slur on Foulkes to say that he’s no exception (he certainly comes across as volubly, even morbidly preoccupied with his own life and travails). But all artists? What about the kind that attempt to dissolve or conceal their ego in their art, even detach their self from the finished product altogether? What about an artist like Sol LeWitt, to whom this week’s other artist documentary is dedicated?

LeWitt (1928-2007) produced a vast array of work, in two and three dimensions, sometimes site specific, often in the form of sets of instructions to venues for their installation. In Chris Teerink’s film (titled Sol LeWitt), we meet a number of curators—notably in the Netherlands, where LeWitt had a devoted following—as well as an Italian carpenter who worked on a Le