LeWitt Turns the Logical Into the Spiritual

Are you sitting down? Paying attention? Had your coffee?

Good. You’re going to need to be comfortable, not to mention wide awake, to get all the way through the next paragraph. It’s just one sentence, but it’s enough to make the eyeballs roll up inside their sockets. Ready? Here goes:

“A square, each side of which is equal to a tenth of the total length of three lines, the first of which is drawn from a point halfway between the center of the wall and a point halfway between the center of the wall and the upper left corner and the midpoint of the left side to a point halfway between the center of the wall and a point halfway between the center of the wall and the midpoint of the bottom side; the second line is drawn from a point halfway between the start of the first line and a point halfway between the center of the wall and the upper right corner and. . . . “

OK, OK, I’ll stop! That’s only about one-third of the full sentence, which in its entirety tells with great precision just how to execute Sol LeWitt’s 1975 “Wall Drawing #232.” But you get the idea.

And idea is the operative word when it comes to LeWitt, an artist central to the emergence of Conceptual art as a potent force between 1965 and 1975. “Wall Drawing #232” is just one among 40 wall drawings in the retrospective of LeWitt’s murals and sculptures, currently having its debut at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to Chicago and New York. (It won’t visit Los Angeles.) As with all of them, the instructions for “#232” are written right there on the gallery wall, next to the drawing, in a do-it-yourself spirit of artistic full disclosure.

The amazing thing is this: However abstruse, clotted and mind-numbing the instructions to LeWitt’s wall drawings can be, that’s exactly how simple, refreshing and deeply soul-satisfying the drawings themselves always turn out to be. LeWitt, like some latter-day Rumpelstiltskin, spins straw into shimmering strands of gold.

He begins with rigorous systems, tight logic and exacting rational thought--and then performs an alchemical transformation. Spiritually exquisite flights of visual imagination emerge. Brought together in abundance for a retrospective, the result is a knockout. LeWitt emerges as the No. 1 visual poet for the Age of Information.

The show is also wonderfully well-timed. The last LeWitt retrospective was in 1978, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and it came about a dozen years into the artist’s mature career (he was born in 1928). Since then, Conceptualism has been thoroughly absorbed into established artistic process, both in the United States and abroad. It has become an academic art, long on received knowledge and short on imagination. Thirty-five years of LeWitt’s accumulated art has the tonic effect of reversing those poles.

In the first gallery, which includes the tentative, sometimes clumsy steps taken toward what would become his mature work, LeWitt’s prospects don’t look too good. “Objectivity,” as the title of a 1962 painting announces, is what he’s struggling with. Similar efforts were being made by many artists of the day, artists determined to sweep away the tired subjectivity of Abstract Expressionist art.

But by 1966 LeWitt had made his first masterpiece--”Modular Cube,” an open-framework sculpture assembled from white wood, whose cubic form is composed from 27 smaller cubes. Three cubes wide, three deep and three high, the “Modular Cube” employs a systemic structure that viscerally short-circuits subjective taste.

As the artist’s expressive self disappeared from sculptural view, a crisp, clear breeze blew through art. Seeing clearly, without sentiment or heroic posturing, is central to this art.

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It’s important to remember the social context in which the pressing need for clarity arose. From the multifarious civil rights movement to the debacle of Vietnam, sentiment and heroic posturing were not in short supply in American life in the chaotic 1960s; seeing clearly was at a premium.

At the museum, the entry wall outside the first gallery does include some instructive early drawings by LeWitt, which date from 1958. Made during a sojourn to Italy, the ink drawings include one of supplicants venerating the Christian cross, sketched from a fresco cycle by Piero della Francesca in an Arezzo church.

Looking back from LeWitt’s mature work, the drawing is like a primer for things to come. It’s linear and flat, without shading or dimension, and the face of each figure is blank. The formal clarity of Piero’s geometric compositions is famous, and frescoes are executed directly on the wall.

LeWitt’s wall drawings, begun in October 1968, constitute his most original--and influential--contribution to contemporary art. Today it’s easy to forget that Jackson Pollock’s big drip-paintings from 20 years before were conceived at mural scale (mural meaning the rather modest size of a wall inside a New York apartment) and therefore easy to miss the savvy way LeWitt built on (and transformed) Pollock’s critical precedent.

LeWitt kept Pollock’s nonfigurative linear tangle, but he drained from it every drop of personal expressiveness: Posting instructions on how the wall drawing had been executed meant, in theory, that you could do it yourself at home. Then he fused the linear image to the wall, making it an inseparable feature of the environment.

Visually, the soft web of color in “Wall Drawing #65” (1971) may be the most closely articulated descendant of Pollock in this thoroughly captivating exhibition. Its title even sounds something like a verbal description of a Pollock: “Lines not short, not straight, crossing and touching, drawn at random using four colors, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the entire surface of the wall.”

Not all the wall drawings are as textually complicated as the one whose instructions were partially quoted at the top. “10,000 Lines 3-inches Long” (1972) or “A square divided horizontally and vertically into four equal parts, each with a different color and line direction” (1969) are descriptions easy to read and drawings simple to imagine.

Still, when you encounter them actually drawn on the wall the effect is uncanny--literally preternatural, so radically unlike phenomena encountered in nature as to be exhilarating. To Pollock’s famous declaration, “I am nature,” LeWitt’s art steadfastly replies, “I am culture.”

Perhaps the artist’s own maturity has something to do with the stunning and resilient clarity in his work. LeWitt was 38 when he made “Modular Cube” and over 40 when he did his first wall drawing. These are not the works of an artist just starting out. Their simplicity is too hard won for that.

The retrospective, organized by curator Gary Garrels, looks surprisingly fresh. Best of all it confirms for the artist an enviable place: LeWitt is to the white cube characteristic of contemporary architectural space what Giotto was to the chapels of early 14th century Italy.

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* San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., San Francisco; (415) 357-4000, through May 21. Closed Wednesdays.