Floor 5: Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 273 (exiting Lewitt)
Overview
Gallery Wayfinding
You are in the Sol LeWitt Wall Drawing 273 Gallery. LeWitt's Wall Drawing 273 covers seven walls in this gallery from top to bottom. As you walk through the gallery, you will be surrounded on all sides with colorful, intersecting lines that radiate across the white walls.
You've entered at the back of the long, rectangular gallery in the right corner. You are facing a partial wall that intersects the gallery from the right, creating a smaller sub-gallery, which is the space you will enter into first. This smaller sub-gallery extends a few paces towards your left and then opens on your right into the larger portion of the gallery.
The exit to the Sol LeWitt Open Cube Interpretive Space is in the front left corner. The QR code is at the threshold on the right wall, marked with a perpendicular tactile floor strip.
Label
"I did not invent the cube, pyramid, or any other geometric figure.
(My art is not about inventing forms, but using them as building blocks.)"
—Sol LeWitt, 2007
Using straightforward lines, squares, and cubes as his basic elements, Sol LeWitt (born 1928, Hartford; died 2007, New York) created rigorously systematic works of art that are often visually surprising and arresting. LeWitt devised rule-based systems that yielded multiple variations of repeating geometric forms, sometimes pushing the work’s internal logic to the edge of irrationality. Over the course of his career, he made drawings, prints, photographs, artist’s books, and sculptural works he called "structures." Each medium offered a distinct set of opportunities to put a concept in motion and let it run its course.
LeWitt argued that the idea behind a work could itself qualify as art, distinct from the act of executing it. His wall drawings, six of which are on view in these galleries—from his very first, devised in 1968, to one of his last, from 2008—demonstrate this approach. After every exhibition these works are painted over, yet each one continues to exist as an idea and a set of instructions to be carried out again and again in different locations by trained assistants. Depending on the hand of the draftsperson and the conditions of the installation space, it will change slightly each time it is re-installed.
The wall drawings on view in the next several galleries were installed in 2026 by Yuka Ezoe, Lacey Fekishazy, Sarah Heinemann, Clifford Hengst, Jen Hitchings, Gabriel Hurier, Evangeline Neuhart, Mitzi Pederson, Kate Rhoades, Emily Rose Rudnick, Michael Benjamin Vedder, Arthur Wechsler, and Jean Pettigrew Whelan.
Family Label
Sol LeWitt loved working with simple lines and shapes. He wrote many instructions for making drawings, like a composer writes music. For him, the instructions were the art! It was up to other people to follow his "sheet music." These drawings were made by trained artists following the rules LeWitt made during his life.
Related Media
Artwork Label Text
Sol LeWitt on conceptual art.
SFMOMA interview (1999); re-edited 2022
Single-channel video, with sound, 4:29 min
Transcript
Sol LeWitt:
Conceptual art. It's an art that is basically based on ideas: the idea, the concept, would drive the work. Once the idea was presented, then the work would be done.
I started going to Italy in the 70s and being close to the large-scale frescoes that were all around. It made it seem that it was a natural way of making art. And once you start on the idea of the wall, then it becomes the whole wall.
I started to do things with pencil and went to, gradually, to crayon. As the walls became larger and the spaces larger, it was a natural kind of medium to use to cover large areas in a fast way. And then gradually I started to use color.
The idea is that the color theory and printing theory is that you just use the primary colors and, from those primary colors, all the other colors could come out of them.
The Abstract Expressionists would make large, very large paintings, but they were still like easel paintings done large, instead of using the wall, or the room, or the building, as a focal point for making art.
When I do a wall piece, I don't go and do it with a brush. I do it as a plan, as a drawing, and then other people can read the plan and do it. The underpinning, theoretically, could be said that: to separate the idea of art from the idea of craft—not that craft is a lower or less exalted activity, but there is a difference, and it’s a historic difference.
Parallel of other arts, architecture or music, whereby the composer doesn't play all the instruments or any of them, and the architect doesn't build the building. You think all the ideas are good but some of them crash, and you don't know until you do it. You pick up a bad idea, then you discard it and figure out a different way of doing it. It may turn out good again.
Sometimes, you do something that jars you out of your present thinking and sets you off in a different direction, just by doing something with a different medium or a different space. People tend also to keep doing what's comfortable to do, and you need some kind of outside shock to set you off in a different direction.
To me, art is a means of transmitting my ideas to someone else through that medium, which is what we call art.
Objects
1 object in the order you'll encounter them from this entrance. Select an object to view details.
Artwork Label Text
September 1975
First drawn by: Arnon Ben David, Phillip Bender, Lakey Comess, Yona Fischer, Teresa Gejer Spitzer, Sol LeWitt, Meira Rappaport, Serge Spitzer, Hadas Tamir, Asher Tlalim, and Miri Tlalim
First installation: Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Graphite and crayon on seven walls
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Acquired by the Fisher family, 1993
The instructions for this ambitious seven-part wall drawing are built into its lengthy title. As in most of LeWitt's Locations wall drawings, the placement of each line is defined in relation to the architectural features of the walls—here, the center, corners, and midpoints of each side. Despite their precision, the guidelines leave the door open for remarkable variation. When Wall Drawing #273 is executed in a new location, it changes according to the particular layout of the walls and their dimensions. Additionally, LeWitt entrusted future drafters to make critical decisions that affect the work’s final composition.
Family Label: Step 1, step 2...
Trained artists drew these lines on the walls. They used red, yellow, and blue pencils and crayons to follow Sol LeWitt's instructions. Each wall has to have the same number of lines, but the artists choose how many.
Spend some time walking around the room. Can you guess what his other instructions were?
Visual Description
Seven gallery walls—some the size of movie theater screens, though several stretch far wider and are the size of highway billboards—are uniformly painted white and overlaid with a regular grid in thin pencil lines.
Dozens of thicker straight lines in red, blue, and yellow crayon extend from multiple anchoring points including the center of the wall, the corners of the wall, and the midpoints of the top, bottom, and side edges of the wall. As a result, several bursts form at these spots, creating denser radiations of lines that dissipate elsewhere on the wall as the various lines come to stops at different points on the grid. The yellow lines—though more subtle from a distance than the blue and red lines— form an intense radiating spoke at the center point of some walls.
Each of the seven walls portrays different arrangements and colors of lines. On the wall directly across from the entrance from the Sol LeWitt Gallery, blue lines radiate from all four corners of the wall toward the center. This wall extends horizontally from the long right wall of the gallery, dividing the gallery into two spaces.
The narrow wall to the right of this entrance contains red lines that radiate from the midpoints of each side toward the center.
The wall to the left of this entrance contains yellow lines that form an intense and concentrated radiating spoke at the center point of the wall. The lines stretch from the center all the way to each side, up to the ceiling, and toward the floor. The yellow lines are somewhat faint against the white wall.
The wall perpendicular to this wall is very long and stretches the full length of the gallery. The lines on this wall include red lines that radiate from the midpoints of each side toward the center; blue lines that radiate toward the center from the corners of the wall; and yellow lines that radiate from a concentrated burst of yellow near the center of the wall. Near the concentrated burst of yellow, there is a large glass cutout window that looks into a collaborative art-making space called Co-Lab. The lines continue uninterrupted past the window.
The wall opposite that wall includes blue lines that radiate from each corner of the wall toward the center, as well as red lines that radiate from the midpoints of each wall. The lines continue uninterrupted across a doorway in the center of the wall.
On the other side of the horizontal wall that divides the gallery, red lines radiate from the midpoints of each wall toward the center. There are also bright yellow lines radiating from a concentrated yellow burst in the center of the wall.
On the wall opposite this horizontal wall, at the far end of the gallery near the entrance to the LeWitt Interpretive Space, blue lines radiate from each corner toward the center of the wall. There are also bright yellow lines radiating from a concentrated yellow burst in the center of the wall.