Sol LeWitt at PaceWildenstein and Paula Cooper

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As is well known, Sol LeWitt's monumental wall drawings are produced by other artists following his careful instructions. Thus it was possible, at PaceWildenstein and Paula Cooper this winter, to view a group of "Scribble Drawings" that LeWitt did not live to see executed. (He died earlier in 2007.) Coming and going on command, LeWitt's wall drawings happily live on in ways that ordinary drawings might not. If the latter vanish, they are forever lost. With LeWitt, concept triumphs over the ephemerality of matter and the hand of the artist. Sol is the Latin word for sun; coincidentally, these late drawings seem to be about the struggle between darkness and light, constituting a solemn coda to a vast, varied, thought-provoking and visually compelling oeuvre.

A huge cube (16 feet to a side), covered on its four visible faces with various amounts of graphite, stood at the center of Paula Cooper's capacious main space. The title, A cube with scribble bands in four directions. One direction on each face. 2007, allows a certain openness in interpretation; LeWitt, however, provided small ink drawings on graph paper to clarity matters. Yet LeWitt's projects involve not only a rejection of the autographic but also of predictibility, for no two drawings made after the same instructions can ever be identical. I was reminded of this as I confronted the powerful set of parallel vertical bands that covered the entire height and width of the front face of the block. These thick black bands, built up freehand in thin graphite loops, gradually dissolved along their peripheries into thinner bands of bright white exposed plaster. The opposite, back side of the cube was covered with horizontal bands. The right face of the cube (considered from the room's entrance) carried bands rising diagonally at a 45-degree angle from left to right, and the left face with bands rising from right to left. Viewed head-on, the bands appeared to tremble, recalling Ross Bleckner's 1980s stripe paintings. The push-and-pull effects optically dissolved the hard surface of the block. However, its solidity returned along its edges and corners, where antithetical bands failed to align.

LeWitt's last scribble drawings are emphatically about process. Their roots go back to Leonardo, master of chiaroscuro, and even more to Seurat, in whose drawings the conte medium, varying subtly in density, and playing with the tooth of the paper, manages so magically to convey atmospheric transitions from light to darkness as well as solid form. At PaceWildenstein, the walls served as support for large, mostly square drawings, generally 8 by 8 feet. Once again, they were limited to black and white and the infinitely minute gradations between poles of darkness and light. In places, they gave way to sudden dramatic shifts. Some of the drawings appeared to float in front of the wall, or behind it, as if not anchored to them, which was nice.

Here we were most often looking at vertical or horizontal adjacent zones of varying widths. I cared less for compositions in which the changes from one area to another were more abrupt. Wall Drawing #1246, for example, was divided sharply down the center, creating a vertical diptych, with the wide, short, dark horizontal bands at the top and bottom of the right panel starkly contrasting with their opposites on the left. The result appeared dry and formulaic--though LeWitt did not shun that either. What is admirable in his work is its broad range of visual sensations and attendant feelings his seemingly endless expanse of ideas and his perseverance in carrying a series through many permutations. LeWitt took risks up to the very end. This is what we want from art.

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