Conceptualist pioneer Sol LeWitt dies aged 78

Sol LeWitt, the American artist who helped establish Minimalism and Conceptualism as major movements of the post-war era, died yesterday in New York after complications from cancer. He was 78.

LeWitt was the opposite of the celebrity artist and tried to suppress media interest by refusing to pose for pictures or give interviews. He turned down awards and particularly disliked having his photograph published in newspaper and magazines.

LeWitt's deceptively simple geometric sculptures and drawings and brightly coloured wall paintings established him as a high priest of modern American art. Much of his art was based on variations of spheres, triangles and other basic geometric shapes.

His sculptures were often based around rows or stacks of open, connected cubes and used precise, measured formats and carefully developed variations.

He gave them titles such as Modular Wall Structure and Double Modular Cube, and some were huge towers or pyramids that were displayed outdoors.

Joanna Marsh, a curator at the Wadsworth Athen-eum in Hartford, Connecticut, where LeWitt was born in 1928, said: "It is not an overstatement to say that he was one of the most influential American artists of the 20th century. His work has had a profound influence on future generations of artists and will continue to have an impact."

In the catalogue for his 1978 retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, the curator of drawings Bernice Rose said his drawing directly onto museum or gallery walls "was as important for drawing as Pollock's use of the drip technique had been for painting in the 1950s".

LeWitt was born to Russian immigrants. His father died when he was aged six and he was brought up by his mother and an aunt.

He completed an art program at Syracuse University in 1949, telling a reporter years later that he studied art because he "didn't know what else to do". LeWitt then spent two years in the US Army during the Korean War but he never went into battle.

In 1953 he moved to New York, just as abstract expressionism was gaining public recognition. He held a variety of short-term jobs, including working as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art.

His first solo art show was at the John Daniels Gallery in New York in 1965 and he taught at several New York art schools. By the mid-1960s, LeWitt had begun to experiment with wall drawings, an idea which was considered radical because he knew they would eventually be painted over.

The drawing was done by a team of assistants following instructions based on an idea outlined in a diagrammatic sketch.

"An architect doesn't go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick. He's still an artist," said LeWitt, explaining why he did not do them himself.

"When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art."

He produced some 1,200 wall drawings throughout his career. The idea behind them was to merge the drawing with the architecture, and call into question ideas about permanence, value and conservation.

But his first wall drawing, part of a 1968 display in New York, was so striking that the gallery owner could not bring herself to have it painted over as LeWitt had intended. She insisted that he did it himself, which he did without hesitation.

LeWitt lived for much of the 1980s in Spoleto, Italy, before returning to Connecticut in the late 1980s. He is survived by a wife, Carol, and two daughters.

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