Sol LeWitt was born in 1928 in Hartford, Connecticut, to Eastern European immigrants. After early art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum, he earned a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, and was drafted in the Korean War in 1951, where he began collecting art during his time spent in Japan. Moving to New York in 1953, he studied at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts), worked in graphic design, and later took an entry-level job at the Museum of Modern Art, where he met artists Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, Lucy Lippard and Robert Mangold. Together, through the "Sixteen Americans" exhibition, they were introduced to the work of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg.
Influenced by Russian Constructivism and Eadweard Muybridge's sequential photography, LeWitt developed serial, gestural, geometric and sculptural works throughout the 1960s. He then applied the same system of permutations and variations to his prints, drawings on paper and drawings on the wall.
Sol LeWitt executed his first wall drawing in 1968 at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, introducing his radical approach of emphasizing the premise of the artwork over the final product. In the 1969 essay Paragraphs on Conceptual Art, LeWitt declared, "The idea becomes the machine that makes the art." LeWitt's wall drawings therefore became instructions for installation which were executed by assistants, reflecting his philosophy that the original idea as formulated in the artist's mind superseded the art itself.
After his first retrospective at MoMA in 1978, LeWitt moved to Spoleto, Italy, where the frescoes by Filippo Lippi, Masaccio, Giotto and Fra Angelico inspired a transformation in his work and he began to experiment with ink, a nod to the local Trecento and Quattrocento works. LeWitt's ouevre, spanning wall drawings, prints, and modular structures, consistently emphasized systems, permutations, and the physical versus the abstract. Celebrated worldwide, his work continues to be reinstalled posthumously, most notably at Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, on view until 2033.