Sol LeWitt was one of the most important artistic voices of the last four decades. With Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, and Mel Bochner, LeWitt was among those artists of his generation who wrote about art alongside their practice, reflecting his conception of "the artist as a thinker and originator of ideas rather than as a craftsman."
Much of LeWitt's work explores permutations of the grid—the square and the cube—in both two and three dimensions, discarding, as he said, "the figure, the word, and the symbol." In the midsixties, these explorations became more systematic, often examining all the variations of a form in a rigorous application of seriality, as in Series 1-2-3. These permutational sequences grew in part out of his deep interest in music—Bach's Goldberg Variations were a favorite—in which groups of notes were combined, inverted, and recombined. Work of this sort, along with important theoretical essays such as "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art," made LeWitt a leading figure in the development of both minimal and conceptual art, two important tendencies of the 1960s that were joined in their rejection of art making as a reflection of an individual's psychic interior. For LeWitt, the pursuit of art's intellectual, rather than emotive, foundation was also in keeping with the artist's own deep-seated personal modesty.
Beginning in 1968, LeWitt drew directly on the wall rather than on a secondary surface such as paper. This new genre of work put ground and support literally and conceptually on the same plane, fusing the work of art with its architectural surroundings. From the early 1970s, his wall drawings each comprised a set of instructional directives in their subtitles—at times quite loose—to be interpreted and executed by others (Wall Drawing #65 and Wall Drawing No. 681 C). LeWitt likened his instructions to musical scores, with the artist assuming the role of the composer and each installation of a work exhibiting variations in the manner of different musical performances.
LeWitt's generosity was legendary. Committed to cultivating a sense of artistic community, he famously offered encouragement and support for other artists. LeWitt traded work with almost any artist who wanted to exchange with him. Through these exchanges and purchases, the artist built an important collection of contemporary art. LeWitt was a founder of Printed Matter, a nonprofit exhibition space and bookstore for artists' books.