Sol LeWitt. Lary Bloom

Jewish male students at New Britain Senior High, Solly joined a Jewish club. His had about forty members. Jaffe, one of the members, recalled:

      Every Monday we had a meeting in the Main Street office of the B’nai B’rith which sponsored us. You could play pool, cards. We had a Ping-Pong table, and it was a place where we could meet and talk … not much else to do in the middle of the war. Nobody had [a] car, gasoline was rationed, so very little dating was done. Even if you had a car, the kids didn’t have driver’s license[s]. The ration was something like three gallons per week. We had parties—very few. Later on we had basketball uniforms and played other sports. Sol played in some of it. In baseball and football, he was a not a star.³⁷

      And, Jaffe says, Sol never wanted to play quarterback or be the leader. That was the quality that led to a deep misunderstanding between the two that threatened their friendship. The annual election for officers of the club was coming up. To the surprise of everyone, particularly Jaffe, Sol decided to run for president against his cousin, David Sokol, and asked for Mort’s vote. As Jaffe recalled: “I told him I couldn’t do it. He asked me why not. I told him, ‘I never thought you would run. And I already promised your cousin my support.’ Well, Sol lost by two votes. If I had voted for him, it would have been a tie. After the election he came over to me and was very angry. He said, ‘Well, you’ll never be president.’ Then a week later, I came to a poker game. He gave me a dirty look as if he was going to kick me out, but he didn’t.”³⁸

      Jaffe would go on to become a professor of marketing at Baruch College, part of the City University of New York. He kept in touch with his old friend through the years and sometimes expressed surprise that LeWitt would want to be so famous. That had not necessarily been his goal when he applied for college at sixteen (the age at which he graduated from New Britain Senior High). His mother; his much older cousins, Bella and Nellie; and other relatives urged him to follow his late father’s path and go to medical school, but he had no interest in it and instead wanted to pursue art. He once told an interviewer, “I couldn’t think of anything else.”³⁹ But that response downplayed or ignored the passion and cleverness he had shown in art classes. A family compromise was finally reached: LeWitt would apply to Syracuse University, where he would get a solid education, but where there was a respected school of art.

      On May 29, 1945, the New Britain seniors graduated. A special edition of the Red and Gold Review, the school newspaper, featured details about the commencement, photographs of and pieces by seniors, and local advertisements. On page 3 were twenty photos of seniors who received scholarships and awards. LeWitt’s photo is in the third row, second from the left, and the paper reported that he had received the Parker Reading Prize, “given through a competitive examination under the supervision of the head of the English department.”⁴⁰

      There is also a quote from LeWitt: “Let us search continually for Beauty. For it is only in Beauty that we shall find full happiness. If we are unable to find Beauty in the Arts, we should keep searching and perhaps it will appear in the commonplace. Let us always try to enrich our thoughts through new experiences: for thought is really Life’s only reality.”⁴¹

      Here, then, is direct evidence of his ultimate pursuit—art as thought rather than as object. It may be reasonably presumed, of course, that this was only a notion at the time. But here an entry in a school newspaper is a serious statement from a young man who will make ideas his life’s work.

      His mother, however, still hoped that her only child would follow her late husband’s path. As LeWitt put it in a 1974 oral history interview at the Smithsonian:

      In a way I was rebellious, because my family was middle-class, and my mother really wanted me to become a doctor, and one thing I didn’t want to do was to chop open people and look inside of them…. I didn’t think that that was any good. I didn’t want to be in business; it was a boring kind of a life, it seemed. [Being an artist] was a way of asserting my independence…. It was something I could do. I wasn’t precocious at all.⁴²

      There was nothing for him in New Britain except his mother’s love, which he treasured, and the affection of a handful of relatives. The city itself held no opportunity in his view, because of its archconservative tastes in art and the laborious summer jobs he needed to take that had him sweeping streets and clearing manhole covers. Jaffe thought that there was some kind of family conspiracy: although the LeWitts and even the Appells had a variety of enterprises, Sol was never invited to work at any of them.

      Aunt Luba might have been able to use him in the grocery store, but she continued to struggle, particularly after becoming the defendant in a lawsuit. A customer complained that she had bitten into a piece of bread made by the Schneider and Pomerantz Baking Company and was injured by a tack. She won her lawsuit against Luba, who was not able to recover the money from the supplier until much later.⁴³

      Aunt Luba adored Solly, as did Bella and Nellie, who helped fill in what was missing in his family. Even so, the teenager never warmed to New Britain, though he was respectful in his public comments, and apparently resentment to the city mounted.

      In the first major interview that the adult LeWitt granted (in 1974 to Paul Cummings for the Smithsonian Institution), he specified his frustrations:

      I reached the point in high school where I had to go away to school, and by that time I had gotten to the point where it wasn’t so much that I wanted to be an artist, it was just that I couldn’t stand the life of the town, of this society. I just couldn’t. It was more of an act of rebellion I think than a positive act of wanting to be an artist…. If I were living in these days, I would go into some sort of political activity, or say, in the ’60s, I certainly would be in some political activity. Although I was interested in politics or political activity, there just wasn’t any real road that I could see. Being an artist is something that was in a way rebellious, in a way individualistic, and, in a way, it was an act of rebellion against … the bourgeois kind of society I was brought up in.⁴⁴

      Thirty-three years earlier, he had expressed this view in a very different way. Before he left for Syracuse, he wrote a poem, called “Ode to My Home Town,” on the same typewriter that his father had used for his short stories:

      New Britain, oh New Britain,

      You moth-eaten town,

      Your dirty old buildings,

      Should all be torn down.

      Your winters are cold

      Your summers are hot,

      The air is so foul

      With mildew and rot.

      The land of bad colds

      Of sore throats and the flu,

      Of sick aching headaches

      And pneumonia, too.

      You’re a blot on the landscape

      The nation’s eyesore,

      Your people dull-witted

      And God what a bore!

      The home of dumb cops

      And bumpy thoroughfares,

      With your stinky old busses

      And ten cent fares.

      You live among filth

      And you don’t mind the smoke

      You thrive on the filth

      And to you it’s a joke.

      Your beautiful starlings

      Fly through the trees,

      And the smell from the shops

      Is what you call breeze.

      You make us pay double

      For all you can sell,

      But after the war

      You can all go to hell!

      And when