“In terms of ideas the artist is free even to surprise himself.”
T he wall drawings of Sol Lewitt, one of the most influential American artists of this century, are regarded as a genuine breakthrough in his career and a significant contribution to the emergence of Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, when Lewitt first began making abstract, graphite drawings immediately on the surfaces of walls. Based on a set of precise and simple instructions conceived by Lewitt to achieve “the greatest possible two-dimensionality,” each wall drawing exists first and foremost as an idea that can be disseminated widely and executed by different persons in a variety of locations without Lewitt’s presence (Ulrich Loock, “Wall Drawings by Sol Lewitt,” in Sol Lewitt Wall Drawings 1984-1992, Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1992, p. 7.). Nonetheless, in the words of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Lewitt’s monumental “wall drawings may be detached from his hands, but they are plugged into his heart” (Andrea Miller Keller, “Varieties of Influence: Sol Lewitt and the Arts Community,” in Sol Lewitt: A Retrospective, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 78).
A testament to the immediate force and lyricism of Lewitt’s mid-career work, Wall Drawing #650, Continuous forms with color ink washes superimposed, is based on a diagram conceived by Lewitt at the same time he was developing his two and three-dimensional Complex Forms in the late 1980s. Beautiful and dynamic, Lewitt’s Continuous Forms span entire walls and are composed of polygonal planes, often filled with bold, multicolored combinations of ink washes. In an interview with Andrew Wilson published in Art Monthly (no. 164, March 1993, p. 3), Lewitt explained that his Complex Form and Continuous Form wall drawings “evolved from the renderings of a cube and became more and more complex.” Wall Drawing #650, first drawn in August 1990 by assistants David Higginbotham, William Morris, and Elizabeth Sacre for the main dining room of the Standard Club, a private club in Chicago, is a stunning example of the collaborative and participatory nature of Lewitt’s work, as well as the purity, playfulness, and openness that characterize his ambitious oeuvre and largely unparalleled approach to art production.
