Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid

This book was published in connection with the exhibition Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid at the Williams College Museum of Art in 2012.

Sol LeWitt: The Well-Tempered Grid is the first exhibition to focus on the centrality of the grid in LeWitt’s art. The exhibition highlights LeWitt’s use of the grid as a generative matrix for his artistic production over the span of nearly five decades, from 1960 until his death in 2007.

Inspired by his first encounter with the work of photographer Eadweard Muybridge in the late 1950s, LeWitt began experimenting with a loosely structured grid in several large oil paintings of 1960, based on the Muybridge motif of a running man. By 1962 he had simplified his use of this format to exclude figurative elements, and by 1964 he was making his first wall-mounted grid structures. When LeWitt made his first wall drawings in 1968 he used the grid as the underlying structural principle. Thereafter, grids became a pervasive matrix in all of the media in which LeWitt worked—three-dimensional “structures,” drawings and gouaches on paper, photographic cycles, artist’s books, furniture and wall drawings.

Fully illustrated with 95 color images and a plate section, the book includes three essays: Charles W. Haxthausen on LeWitt’s relationship to the grid and classical music, especially Bach; Christianna Bonin on LeWitt’s relationship to Richard Serra and the wall drawing; and Erica DiBenedetto on LeWitt’s 1980 artist’s book, Autobiography, a publication consisting solely of 1,101 photographs of LeWitt’s New York studio. The contents are organized over 128 pages in nine-part grids.