Sunday, August 12, 2012

Artist 17:Sol LeWitt


Sol LeWitt was born in Connecticut in 1928.  He originally pursued a career in art as a rebellion against the norm of having an industrial job.  He attended Syracuse University where he discovered lithography and won an award allowing him to spend time in Europe studying the work of the old masters.  In 1951 he was drafted for the Korean War and was assigned to Special Services where it was his duty to make posters.  While in Korean he also traveled to Japan, in both countries he spent time visiting different shrines, temples, and gardens.  After the war he moved to New York, where he took classes at Cartoonist and Illustrators School while having a design internship with Seventeen magazine.  In 1955 LeWitt became a graphic designer for an architecture firm, during his time with the firm he created the concept that the idea itself is the art.  He is said to play a leading role in conceptual art.  He believed that an artist should be able to conceive of a work then delegate that idea to others to make, this led him to give his assistants vague instructions on how to create a piece so that the end result would not totally controlled by him.  LeWitt died in 2007 at the height of his career.

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