SFMOMA, Part 44: Floor 5, Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form.
It's a solid thing in a room of suggestions. Painted wood, just under five feet tall, a blocky tower with a step cut into it — you can walk all the way around, and the far side is different from the near side, the way a building is different from its blueprints. After a room full of graphite lines and brass grids and prints of cubes taken apart, this is the cube put back together. It has weight. It throws a real shadow.
Sol LeWitt's 12 x 23 x 12, 1996, is on view on Floor 5 as part of Calder, Kelly, LeWitt: Fundamentals of Form, in Reimagined: The Fisher Collection at 10. Paint and wood, 28 3/4 × 28 3/4 × 56 inches, from the Doris and Donald Fisher Collection. Entry is included with general admission; SFMOMA, 151 Third Street, is open Mon–Tue and Fri–Sun 10 a.m.–5 p.m., Thu noon–8 p.m., closed Wed.
The easy reading is: a column, a pedestal with nothing on it. But the subject is sharper than that. For thirty years LeWitt had been taking the cube apart — drawing it, gridding it, permuting it, refusing to let it be a solid thing. The Structures of the nineties reverse the entire project: the cube filled back in, mass instead of line, a tower you have to walk around instead of a diagram you read off a wall. The title is just the dimensions, the most deadpan label in the room, and the object is anything but. This is late LeWitt, and late work always knows something the early work was too busy to say.
1996: mass after line
The arc is worth holding in your head. The 1968 wall drawings were pure idea — erasable, re-executable, the artist's hand deliberately beside the point. The seventies structures were open frames: cubes you could see through, systems displayed like skeletons. But by the nineties, LeWitt was building blocks — solid, painted, chunky forms that stack and step and loom, cousins to Brancusi's Endless Column and to the ziggurats of the ancient world. Something had changed in the relationship between the idea and the thing. The idea no longer needed to stay immaterial; it could afford to be heavy. 12 x 23 x 12 doesn't illustrate a system. It occupies space the way a small building does, and dares you to call that a lesser kind of thought.
The late style question
Eleven years later LeWitt was dead — 2007, New York — and the wall drawings kept going without him, executed from his instructions in museums around the world, exactly as he had designed the system to allow. That's the strange afterlife of this object: the solid tower can't be redrawn by assistants. It has to be shipped, installed, insured, walked around. Of all LeWitt's late works, the Structures are the ones that refuse the elegant immortality of the wall drawings. They insist on being things — things with weight, things that take up floor space, things that will outlast their maker only as long as someone keeps paying for the freight. There's a tenderness in that stubbornness. The man who freed art from the object spent his last decade making objects that couldn't be freed.
The show, again
Stand in the Floor 5 gallery and line up the three decades in your sightline: the faint graphite square from 1968, the brass palindrome from 1979, and this painted tower from 1996. It reads like a life. The young artist dissolves the object into instructions. The middle-aged artist rebuilds structure as syntax. The old artist lets the structure stand up and take the weight. Same mind, same cube, three different answers to what an idea is allowed to be.
I put my hand near it — not on it, near it — and felt the temperature difference between the painted wood and the air. The instructions never told anyone how to make that. 🌁
Timeline — Sol LeWitt
1980s — The Forms Derived from a Cube prints and the turn to color: after the Spoleto years, graphite gives way to vivid ink washes learned from Giotto's frescoes.
1985 — Forms Derived from a Cube in Color (Simple and Superimposed) & Black & Gray: the cube as print, as color field, as pure permutation on paper.
1990s — The Structures: solid painted-wood towers and blocks, the cube filled back in after thirty years of being taken apart. 12 x 23 x 12 (1996) is built in this period.
2007 — Dies in New York on April 8, at 78. The wall drawings continue without him — executed from his instructions, exactly as the system was designed to allow.
2008 — Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective opens at Mass MoCA for a 25-year run: 105 drawings, one long argument that an idea can outlive its thinker.
Today — 12 x 23 x 12 on view, 151 Third Street