Among the widely diverse methods and media grouped under the umbrella term Conceptual or “idea” art, LeWitt’s practice and philosophy have been articulated in various writings. For LeWitt, art is premeditated in the precise meaning of that word: all decisions concerning the idea and execution are made beforehand. Accordingly, the “idea is the machine that makes the art,” while its “execution [is] a perfunctory affair” entrusted to fabricators other than the artist². LeWitt’s mature work, described by one critic as “the look of thought,”³ includes wall drawings, books, and three-dimensional works he terms “structures.”

LeWitt began his career as a painter. Incorporating Eadweard Muybridge’s (1830–1904) serial photographs of movement studies with text, he adopted a three-dimensional format that he considered both painting and sculpture⁴. In the early 1960s he began to produce wall reliefs as well as suspended and tabletop structures. These were square or boxlike constructions made of painted canvas and wood that included pierced or projecting forms as an exploration and further extension of the picture plane into space. During this early period he also experimented with the idea of seriality and the relation of intervals within individual structures. His first modular or unit-based structures of 1964–65 were painted black, which the artist ultimately found too expressive; by the end of 1965 the structures were painted white, a change that allowed the wall pieces to integrate visually with the wall and, as he believed, suppressed their emotive content. At the same time he arbitrarily decided on a ratio of 8:5:1 representing the measurements of space intervals to the structural elements within individual works.

LeWitt’s first modular cube structure, six by six by six feet and based on large open-framework cubes in rows of three, was made in the winter of 1965–66. The 1976–77 series, to which the Museum’s Cube Structure Based on Nine Modules belongs, includes eighteen structures, each containing at least one row of each of nine possible row lengths: the smallest row consists of one cube (the modular unit) and the longest nine cubes. While the artist might resist such a comparison, the physical manifestations of this idea resemble pristine honeycombs with portions precisely removed to create pyramids, wedge forms, and inversions in contained pockets of negative space. Six of the structures in the series are wall mounted and extend outward into the viewer’s space; the other thirteen, including the Museum’s structure (the second in the series), rest on the floor, rising to just above waist height; thus the perceptual and spatial encounter differs with each work. In each structure the plane of the wall or floor restates a side (or sides, in the case of a corner piece) of the overall cube, and the remaining sides are implied, left to be visualized or mentally completed by the viewer.

The Museum’s structure presents one “facade” in which the rows are stepped from a base of nine modular units to one unit at the apex; each succeeding row has one unit less than the row below. (This face is matched by the same configuration on the “top” of the structure. The opposite “facade” is a side composed of full rows of nine units, as is the base or side on which the structure rests. From one viewing point the perimeter outlines a triangle backed by a square; from the opposite view, or “side,” the structure appears to be a wedge or prow shape. The height of the structure complicates the viewing experience. At eye level with the sculpture (achieved only by bending down or kneeling) there is an unimpeded view through the form. From the perspective of a standing adult, the lattice of open cubes creates distinctly different geometrical patterns that optically shift in corridors of receding perspectives as the viewer moves or changes vantage point.

The Museum’s sculpture strongly suggests an architectural form, in particular a stepped pyramid or ziggurat. LeWitt had worked for the architect I. M. Pei (b. 1917) in the 1950s and would later affirm that architectural structures were a greater influence in his work than sculpture⁵. In 1966 he wrote admiringly of New York City’s ziggurat-style office buildings, acknowledging that some of them could be seen as works of art⁶. His description of the development of these buildings, whose configuration was determined by the parameters of style adjusted to purpose and city zoning codes from 1916 to 1960, closely parallels the tenets of his own “multiple modular method.”⁷  He draws the comparison himself by equating the zoning code with an idea that would give a work of art its defining “outer boundaries.” His description of the ziggurats could be equally applied to the Museum’s sculpture: “There is also a logic in the continually smaller set-backs, which allow for intricate geometric patterns. By having to conform to this rather rigid code, aestheticism was avoided, but the code was flexible enough to allow great originality of design.”⁸

By LeWitt’s definition, the serial artist “does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise.”⁹ Although the artist claims no particular interest in the visual impact or appearance of the work—stressing content (idea) over formal concerns—the viewer may still experience an aesthetic or even emotional response in an encounter with the object, whether it takes shape as a three-dimensional structure or a two-dimensional wall drawing. Once the idea is commuted as physical form it becomes subject to a number of influences, including those endemic to its construction or execution, for example, variations or imperfections introduced by the fabricator, as well as the external effects of the environment. This is true of the Museum’s sculpture, which changes as shadows are cast by, across, or within the latticed grid. Its spare white traceries and form could easily be perceived by a viewer to have an evocative or even “beautiful” appearance. While Conceptual art prizes the idea rather than the physical form it may engender, as Robert Rosenblum has written, it is “finally the visible works of art that dominate our attention.”¹⁰  Indeed, it is diffcult to deny the sensory appeal of LeWitt’s more recent wall drawings, which are lushly colorful and even theatrical in impact.¹¹

Intended to speak to the intellect, LeWitt’s ideas are expressed in forms that have a basis in mathematics but may find a closer counterpart in music, which combines a theoretical as well as “applied” process: music can exist as composed text (notation) on the page or as an idea, but it is also realized as sound, with differences introduced by individual performers.¹² This analogy is especially applicable to LeWitt’s wall drawings, which begin as instructions to be translated and to some extent interpreted through execution by others. As LeWitt has claimed, “Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists,”¹³ and it is this creative tension—between idea and object, between precise definition and the sometimes subtle variables introduced through their implementation—that informs works such as the Museum’s sculpture.

1. For example, the artist’s well-known "sentances" and "paragraphs" on Conceptual art; see LeWitt 1967; LeWitt 1969.
2. LeWitt 1967, par. 2
3. Subtitle of Kuspit 1975.
4. New York +, MoMA 1978, pp. 50-59
5. Colpitt 1990, p. 81.
6. LeWitt 1966 Arts, p. 25.
7. LeWitt 1967, par. 8.
8. LeWitt 1966 Arts, p. 24.
9. LeWitt 1966 Aspen, unpag.
10. Rosenblum, "Notes on Sol LeWitt," in New York +, MoMA 1978, pp. 15-16.
11. As Ulrich Loock states in Bern + (1989) 1992, pp. 7-9, in the more recent wall drawings the balance has been shifted toward perceptual issues rather than rigor of concept. In their execution, "taste" sometimes becomes a criterion by which some decisions are made: "the precision of verbally formulated plans appears to decrease in the extent to which th evisual phenomenon…increasingly acquires sensorial complexity" (pp. 8-9)
12. Rosenblum in New York +, MoMA 1978, p. 20; Lippard in ibid., pp. 24-25.
13. LeWitt 1969, sentence 1.