François Morellet/Sol Lewitt: a Case Study Revisited

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François Morellet/Sol LeWitt: A Case Study Revisited

yvE-ALAIN BOIS

In an essay on pseudomorphism (published in the Fall 2015 issue of this journal), I discussed at some length the stunning resemblance between François Morellet’s 4 Double Grids (0°, 22.5°, 67.5°), dating from 1958, and the 195th page of Sol LeWitt’s book Arcs, from corners & sides, circles, & grids and all their combinations, published in 1972, as well as the rather sad polemic that this resemblance elicited.1 In summary: the director of Galerie m, in Bochum, placed a full-page, illustrated advertisement in the February 1973 issue of the Milan-based journal Flash Art, implying that LeWitt had plagiarized Morellet and two other artists represented by his gallery, Jan Schoonhoven and Oskar Holweck. In the June issue of the journal, LeWitt responded by pointing out what radically differentiates his piece from Morellet’s painting, despite their morphological similarity, and by lambast- ing the pseudomorphic argument as superficial, ignorant, and ahistorical. He added that until the summer of 1972, he had never seen a work by Morellet. This, it turned out, was probably false: LeWitt had obviously forgotten that he must have seen 4 Double Grids (0°, 22.5°, 67.5°) in the Responsive Eye exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965—he was reminded of this occurrence by one of the many people, mostly artists, who joined the polemic that filled the “letters to

1. See “On the Uses and Abuses of Look-alikes,” October 154 (Fall 2015), pp. 127–49. The por- tion dedicated to the LeWitt/Morellet case in that essay was “cut and pasted” from a lecture solely dedicated to the issue, given in 1992 at the 28th International Congress of Art History, held in Berlin, and published in the proceedings of this symposium. Due to the “confidential” nature of that publication, it had gone utterly unnoticed. A scholar as scrupulous as Lynn Zelevansky, for example, obviously did not know about it when she tackled the same topic in her excellent “4 Grids: François Morellet at the Crossroads,” published in the bilingual catalogue of the exhibition François Morellet, 1926–2006 etc. . . . Recent Novelties (Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Angers, 2006), pp. 14–25. The present essay is also partly the result of a cut-and-paste operation, as portions of it are lifted from my Berlin talk, though these are updated, as I benefitted from the publication of an anthology of Morellet’s writings and interviews, whose first edition appeared in 1999 (Mais comment taire mes commentaires [Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts]). But for a few exceptions specifically signaled, the quotations used hence- forth are from the third (revised) edition published in 2011. Among the many surprises this corpus of texts provides, one in particular struck me: In a short article from 1987 entitled “Courants alternatifs et lumières clignotantes” (pp. 135–37), Morellet muses about the cyclical nature of taste and specifically refers to the study by A. L. Kroeber on recurrences in the morphology of female dresses during three centuries of European history, a study to which I had paid particular attention in my piece on look- alikes mentioned above.

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the editor” section of Flash Art until its October–November 1973 issue.2 Several years later, in the catalogue of his retrospective exhibition at MoMA (1978), LeWitt conceded that this was indeed quite possible.3 Rather than assuming that he had been lying by omission in his response to the ad, only to finally admit his debt five years later, in the face of evidence, I proposed that he was right both times: he had both seen and not seen some of Morellet’s works prior to the summer of 1972—it all depends on what one means by “seeing.” That is, he had most likely “seen” the very work by Morellet illustrated in the Flash Art ad at the Responsive Eye exhibition (or at least in its catalogue), but it would have barely reg- istered, if at all. In the context of that busy, eye-needling show, entirely devoted to Op and Kinetic art (and derided by American art critics as a climax of kitsch), he could not but have missed the systematicity of the work in question, which would have appeared as yet another highly forgettable example of the moiré effect so favored by Op artists such as Bridget Riley, whose 1964 Current was reproduced opposite it in the catalogue. Let us first unpack the Op art issue, before turning to the notion of systems that is so crucial to Morellet’s endeavor. Though a founding member of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art visuel, or GRAv, which began its activities in Paris in 1960 and quickly became (before its dissolution in 1968) a major force behind the short-lived success of Kineticism, Morellet never considered optical effects to be anything but side effects of his systems: This Op art thing has really bothered me. Personally I don’t regard myself as an Op artist. Of course, if, for example, I come up with a whole program involving superpositions of two grids, it may well happen that these two grids will form a moiré effect (if they are very tight, and with just a slight offsetting). This is a very Op art result. It doesn’t interest me. But I don’t give a damn about my own taste, and since I want to respect the system, no matter how it develops, I have to show this result. What annoys me is that I’m quoted much more often in books on Op art, for example, than I am in books on Minimal art, or on Conceptual art. This is partly due to a geographical division that is commonly made: Europe = Op art and Kineticism; USA = Minimal and Conceptual art. In Op art I obviously appreciate the cold side, the anti-

2. The polemic was extremely harsh, beginning with an incoherent rant by Alexander von Berswordt-Wallrabe, the director of the Galerie m, and the mention by the Flash Art editor, Giancarlo Politi, that he had received a postcard from Lucy Lippard accusing the journal of being “fascist” for having carried the ad (this was the only defense LeWitt received, besides Politi’s own reply to the Galerie m director; the least one can say is that Lippard’s word choice was particularly inappropriate, addressed to an audience who had a pretty clear notion of what fascism actually was). Most of the venom was directed at American cultural imperialism, at the behavior of American artists when installing exhibitions of their works in Italy, at their utter disregard for their European colleagues, at the market for being biased in their favor, etc. The angry reader who specifically referred to the inclu- sion of Morellet’s piece in the Responsive Eye exhibition was a man named Rolf Breger. 3. LeWitt, untitled statement, in Sol LeWitt (New york: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), p. 120.

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message. But it’s pretty obvious, I think, that if I’d really wanted to pester people’s eyes, I would hopefully have come up with things that are more effective than my little parallel lines.4 Of course, this is a postfactum declaration (made in 1975), and it cannot be denied that Morellet had also been interested in, among other things, “pestering people’s eyes,” notably with his flashing neon works that harnessed retinal after - effects, developed from 1963 on. But the fact is, the kinetic aspect of his production during the 1960s (almost entirely abandoned by the time of the ad in Flash Art) determined the public reading of his entire oeuvre and prevented it from being taken seriously in America: occasional Op effects garnered all the attention and hid the systematic nature of the work. Morellet’s mention of Minimal and Conceptual art brings us back to the polemic, for there we are clearly on LeWitt’s turf. On the one hand, I cannot agree with what Morellet seems to imply (that he should be considered a “precursor” of Minimal or Conceptual art—as I have often repeated, quoting verbatim the great his- torian and philosopher of science Alexandre Koyré, “to envisage someone as a precursor is the best way to preclude the possibility of understanding their work”)5; on the other hand, it is true that Minimal and Conceptual artists entirely overlooked a whole range of European artistic practices, like that of Morellet, in which they could have found quite a few things worth reflecting upon. It is fair to say that the New york artistic climate that led to Minimal and Conceptual art, in the early ’60s, was extremely chauvinistic. The extraordinary arrogance of Donald Judd’s famous statement in his interview with Frank Stella and Bruce Glaser, for example—“I’m totally uninterested in European art and I think it’s over with”—was largely based on ignorance.6 Judd, as is well known, was referring to what Stella called the “relational aesthetic” of most postwar European abstraction, the traditional post-Cubist mode of composition on which a great majority of the European production was then based (“you do something in one corner and you balance it with something in the other corner.”)7 In doing so, Judd was overlooking the rich European tradition of non-compositionality, to which Morellet never tired of paying homage: Russian Constructivism (particularly Rodchenko); the “Art Concret” launched by Theo van Doesburg in 1930 and developed by the Swiss Max Bill and Richard Paul Lohse; Strzeminski’s Unism; the monochromes not just of yves Klein but also of Piero Manzoni and of the whole

4. Gislind Nabakowski, “Fragen an François Morellet,” Heute Kunst (Milan) 10–11 (June– August 1975), reprinted in François Morellet (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), p. 200. In 1989, responding to a student who asked about the positive and negative aspects of the GRAv’s activity, Morellet placed “not to have reacted enough to the entanglement of the group in the Op art–kineticism fad” on the negative side of the ledger, along with having spent too much energy discussing “bureaucratically ideological problems.” François Morellet, “Lettre à une étudiante,” reprinted in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 147. 5. Quoted by Georges Canguilhem, Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris: vrin, 1970), p. 22. 6. Donald Judd, in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd” (1964), reprinted in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (New york: Dutton, 1970), p. 154. 7. Frank Stella in Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” p. 149.

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Zero group in Germany (with which Morellet was affiliated); Ellsworth Kelly’s Paris period random grids and multipanel paintings; the early Jesús Rafael Soto (not to speak, of course, of the early Morellet). Which is not to say that Judd’s or Stella’s ignorance was necessarily deliberate, as several Flash Art readers insinuate in their letters (very little of this European tradition was on view in New york, even in the ’60s), or that, as Morellet assumes when he wants to be accounted for as a Minimal or Conceptual artist, there was no difference between his position and theirs. In order to explore that difference, let us look briefly at Morellet’s early career. The founding experience, he has stressed many times, was his discovery of Max Bill’s work while in Brazil in 1950 (the Swiss artist had just had a retrospective there and Morellet met a swarm of his devotees). It took two years for Morellet to absorb Bill’s lesson. By 1952, he had fully grasped Bill’s notion of systematic art— that of an art entirely programmed by a set of a priori rules, an art that in principle leaves no room for the subjectivity of the artist and the arbitrariness of composition—and, moreover, he had gone further than the Swiss artist in this direction. Contrary to what his various manifestos stated from the late 1930s on, Bill always remained concerned with issues of taste, of compositional balance, of equilibrium. It is not by chance that he would become the heir of Georges vantongerloo: just as in the paintings of the old member of de Stijl, a veteran of geometric abstraction, the arithmetic computations or algebraic equations that Bill presented as a justification for the formal arrangement of his works were more often than not unverifiable smoke screens, while color, an important feature of Bill’s canvases, was always conceived by him as a surplus, as a supplement ungoverned by the system. very early on, Morellet set out to purge those elements of personal taste—which seemed to him akin to the worst aspects of European postwar abstraction—from his systematic approach. His first attempts in this vein, indeed, regarded color. In Red on Light Red, Red, Dark Red, Black, and White of 1953, for example, five square wood panels hung

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in a row match the descriptive title (a more exact description would have been “Red on light red, red on red, red on dark red, red on black, and red on white,” but it would have contradicted Morellet’s rule of economy). Each panel has a dif- ferently colored ground on the center of which a small square of the same red (let’s call it “neutral red”) is painted, this figure entirely disappearing in the sec- ond panel (red on red) since in it figure and ground are of the same neutral red. Needless to say, the fact that the color of the central square is identical in all five panels, curbed by the interaction of colors (explored at the same time by Josef Albers, another hero in Morellet’s canon), is almost impossible to perceive even though it is straightforwardly declared in the title of the work. A striking difference with Bill’s work is the extreme simplicity of the system and the clear refusal to meddle with it—which is perhaps the most important ethic principle underlying Morellet’s production throughout his long career. Red on light red . . . , perhaps a little too demonstrative and painstakingly peda- gogic, embodies another aspect of Morellet’s early output: it was planned and realized as an empirical experiment (one constant, the central red square; and one variable, the background color). This experimental method governed a siz- able proportion of Morellet’s early production (and it would be what first brought the members of the GRAv together), though, wary of its scientific pretense, he would soon more often than not appeal to it in a parodic manner. In the early ’50s, however, irony was not yet built into Morellet’s system. His works then were conceived as part of a very serious inquiry into the minimum required to produce an abstract painting (this accounts for the progressively lessening role of color in his painting throughout the decade). An early step in that direction was Painting of 1952, in which, as in Frank Stella’s aluminum canvases ten years later, the structure

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is entirely deduced from one generative arbitrary element (in Stella, it is the shape of the canvas; in Morellet, the position of one broken line—the only one to have three segments, two of them adjacent to the vertical limits of the canvas—with which all the others align). Because it was still based on an arbitrary choice, this work led Morellet to a radical experiment, his 16 Squares of 1953, for which he cal- culated that no less than eleven decisions presided over its elaboration (two for the format: a square with sides of a certain length; five for the elements: lines, their two directions, their number, and their width; one for the interval that uniformly sepa- rates them; two for the colors: white and black; one for the lack of texture).8 The hilarious essay in which Morellet made this absurdist computation (eleven decisions necessary to draw a simple modular grid!) was, once again, written much after the fact (in 1980), but when comparing 16 Squares with the works of Bill and other Concrete artists, one cannot but note its reductive tenor. (There are many other examples of such reductionism in his early work; Parallel Lines of 1957 [reproduced on page 134 of the present volume], might even win the competition for the most drastic diminution of necessary choices. If one follows Morellet’s com- puting rule, one finds that even fewer decisions led to the elaboration of this work than to that of 16 Squares).9 Bill had always wanted to channel “inspiration” through mathematical ordering; by the time he painted 16 Squares Morellet already wanted to find a way to get rid of inspiration altogether. A quasi-dadaistic disgust for the romantic myth of the artist undermined his adherence to the rationalist ideology of Bill and his school. Morellet would later note that Bill’s lack of humor thankfully prevented him from fully embracing the artistic credo of the Swiss artist, and that what really interested him in Concrete art was its “exterminator-of-subjective-decisions side.”10 But this did not become immediately clear to him, and until 1958 Morellet elaborated many systematic works that were governed by anti-compositional strategies, such as symmetry or an allover structure, that did not run counter to Bill’s program (though it should be said that until well into the 1960s Bill was not particularly fond of untempered symmetry or unadulterated alloverness). Painting of 1954 (reproduced on page 139), for example, is a refinement of the green and white Painting of 1952 I just mentioned, in that the system takes into con- sideration the proportion of the canvas (the generative core is the central vertical line divided into thirds). Concentric Right Angles of 1956 (reproduced on page 145) employs a similar (and yet much simpler) generative structure. But soon Morellet grew restless within the confines of Bill’s programmed art. One can see him toying with systems that leave greater room for indeterminacy. From Yellow to Violet (1956), might have represented a breaking point: in it Morellet vigorously asserted the system he employed—and this in an area, color, that had been abandoned to arbitrariness by Bill—but, for all the efforts he

8. See Morellet’s text “Why Was I Unable to Write an Article for Quad?” in the present issue. 9. Here there are nine choices: the same number for the format (2), for the intervals between elements (equal in width to the elements themselves) (1), for colors (2), and for the lack of texture (1), but just 3 (as opposed to 5) for the elements themselves (lines, in only one direction, with the number of stripes determined by their width, which is that of the intervals). 10. François Morellet, “Réponses aux questions de Sonja” (2008), in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 290.

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deployed, the systematic nature of the work is elusive to the beholder. The painting is, roughly speaking, conducted as a verification test of various color theories holding that red and blue are middle colors on the spectrum, but it seems almost pretty, its colors more the result of subjective taste than of a quantitated mode of gradation.11 Morellet in fact did not like the painting and confessed that he only showed it, and years after its completion at that, because friends persuaded him that it had to be seen, “if anything, because of a certain American ‘star.’”12 (What he is alluding to, and this is another case of pseudomorphosis, is a series of works based on concentric squares that Stella painted in 1962—the most famous of which is probably Jasper’s Dilemma; needless to say, the distribution of colors in this series is far from systematic). It was around 1958, I think, that Morellet realized that Bill’s systematic program was flawed. Until then, even if he was skeptical about its grand rationalist claims, about the cogito ergo sum of geometric abstraction, the artist had not yet identified the root of the problem—namely, that one cannot entirely suppress choice, arbitrary decisions, and thus composition. That, as long as the painter retains total control of his canvas, even if the system he devises is entirely imper- sonal, he cannot but subscribe to a romantic dream according to which, through the example of his art, through the rational and relational ordering of his canvas, he is helping to shape the universe, or at least he proclaims such a mastery to be possible. Thus, in order to counteract the arbitrariness of subjective choice that even the most determinist system could not entirely suppress, Morellet adopted chance (absolute lack of system, absolute arbitrariness) as a master organizer of his work—something that Bill would never have accepted as part of his own arse- nal. (It is also in 1958 that Morellet began working with superimpositions of grids, as if he had wanted to propose in the realm of the consumption of his works—the perception by the beholder—an equivalent of the indeterminacy he had just welcomed in the realm of their production). Let us note in passing that this import of

11. This work was reproduced in my essay on pseudomorphism in October 154 (Fall 2015), p. 148. For a precise description of the system used by Morellet for the color gradation in this work, based on exact proportions in the optical mixing, see Serge Lemoine, François Morellet (Zürich: Waser verlag, 1986), pp. 114–16. 12. Morellet, quoted in Lemoine, François Morellet, p. 116. Zelevansky addresses at greater length the resemblance between Stella’s 1962 series and Morellet’s 1956 painting (“4 Grids: François Morellet at the Crossroads,” pp. 19ff). In an exhibition with a typically comic title (Quand j’étais petit je ne faisais pas grand, which literally translates as “when I was small I did not do big [things]” but figuratively as “when I was young I was not very tall”), at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris in 2007, Morellet juxtaposed eleven of his 1952 paintings to their massive enlargements (he multiplied the sides of each painting by four). Though he admitted having been piqued when he saw reproductions of Stella’s work, he recognized that size matters: “I would not want people to believe that with these very minimalist works I am positioning myself before the Americans and that the fact that I had made them in a small format is just a detail. It’s not true. I did not have the guts to realize them in a large size and that’s my great mistake. Scale was the great invention of the Americans. I had not understood Barnett Newman because I’d only seen his paintings in reproduction. When I discovered them, I realized that their dimension changed everything, and the same is true for the large Pollock canvases.” In “Entretien avec Didier Fiuza-Faustino,” in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 279.

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randomness did not happen in a vacuum: Morellet knew nothing at the time about Cage and experimental music, but by his own account he was clearly indebted to Ellsworth Kelly, whom he befriended in Paris, particularly to what the latter told him about the works that Hans Arp had shown him in his Meudon stu- dio, such as the Duo-collages made with Sophie Taeuber-Arp in 1918.13 Morellet’s most famous works involving chance are certainly the paintings and silkscreens called Random Distribution of 40,000 Squares Using the Odd and Even Numbers of a Telephone Directory (reproduced on page 144). These works, dating from 1960, are each made of a square field divided allover by a regular grid into 40,000 blocks and then painted in a binary fashion (blue or red in one painting, orange or green in another, gray or yellow in a third, etc.) according to a series of numbers that, as indicated in the title of the work, were picked out of a phone book. But this self-effacing mode of organization had already been implemented in 1958 with three works based on the number pi, the most successful of which being Random Distribution of 2 Squares Using the Numbers 31-41-59-26-53-58-97-93 (reproduced on page 174). It was not actually governed by chance. On the contrary, Morellet used a known number, pi, to place two black squares on four white surfaces each divided by a regular grid of twenty-five blocks, thus emphasizing the total lack of intervention of his own taste. In Morellet’s words: [I]f you look at the result of the four pictures using the first 16 digits of pi, it almost looks too good to be true. Let’s first be objective: in no. 1, the two squares end up in the same place, and turn into one; then the two squares end up in a symmetrical position in relation to a diagonal (in no. 2), in relation to two median axes (in no. 3), and in relation to a single median axis (in no. 4). Now, let’s have a lyrical and “cultural” commentary: for no. 1, we could talk about the double materiality of the black square; in no. 2, we could comment on the elegance of the imbalance, very Japanese; in no. 3, we could note the sheer classicism, and in no. 4, the sculptural heaviness. And whether we’re dealing with triangles, lines, or large surfaces, the results are all just as interesting (they all come bearing pseudo-messages). Mondrian could really have had it much easier, when it came to placing his lines and giving them their thickness, if he’d realized that with his system—whatever he did— he would have won each time.14 As with several other declarations that I have been quoting, it is retrospective: the irony that characterizes it (particularly with regard to art criticism and any form of interpretation) only began to appear under Morellet’s pen during the ’60s. A

13. See Morellet’s conversation with Christine Besson in the catalogue of the exhibition François Morellet, peintre amateur: 1945–1968 (Angers: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1997), p. 29, and Morellet’s short essay entitled “65, 38, 21, 4, 72 . . . ,” Tate Etc 16 (Summer 2009), p. 73. 14. Morellet’s statement was first published in 1986 by Lemoine, François Morellet, pp. 129–30. It is undated, unlike other statements quoted by Lemoine, so one might assume that it was written in response to questions by this author.

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reaction to the pretentiousness of discussions inside the GRAv, and notably to the group’s political posturing, it testifies to a growing admiration for Duchamp and his skepticism, beginning in 1965.15 The assertion about Mondrian, pertaining to what could be called the Oedipal aspect of Morellet’s demythologizing enterprise, is in itself rather dubious—if only because Mondrian did not have a system in Morellet’s sense of the word (with the exception of his nine modular grids of 1918–19, his art was entirely relational, which is to say compositional, and based, as he insisted many times, on intuition).16 In fact, when Morellet offered a systematic rendition of Mondrian’s 1917 Composition with Lines, he demonstrated, a contrario, that the Dutch artist’s search for a “dynamic equilibrium” was incompatible with what he, Morellet, often self-mockingly dubbed the “pasteurized” nature of his own production.17 In Dashes 0°–90° of 1960 (reproduced on page 130), the short horizontal and vertical black lines of Mondrian’s first really abstract painting are transformed into a regular network that is optically hyperactive but, as a pure allover, formally entropic. It is now that we must resume our examination of the LeWitt/Morellet com- parison. Most advocates of Morellet’s art stress his relationship with Bill and Concrete art (he is even described, in the Flash Art ad, as a representative of the “neue konkrete Kunst,” a label he did not fancy18), while it is my contention, as I just surmised, that by 1958 he had embarked on a venture that can be affiliated with Bill’s schemes only through a most formidable blindness. True, he believed then, and would still for a few more years, in some kind of experimental notion of art, akin to the empirical concept of experimental science (in the late ’50s and early ’60s, statistics and information theory were widely discussed in European art discourse—by Umberto Eco and Abraham Moles among many others—as a weapon against rationalist subjectivism). But his doubt concerning reason grew steadily throughout the ’60s, and he welcomed the explosion of 1968 as a confir- mation of his own anarco-dadaistic proclivity. Thus he stated in an interview given in 1985: “I would say today that I was in fact more attracted to logic than to rationalism. Rationalism is, according to my dictionary, a doctrine, a belief, while logic is a science and most of all it goes hand in hand with the absurd and does not imply something ‘reasonable.’ As for math, I never went beyond a sixth grade

15. On the illusions of the GRAv, particularly the group’s claim that the ludic participation of the public or the fabrication of multiples would have a “revolutionary” political effect, see Morellet’s interview with Nabakowski, “Fragen an François Morellet,” p. 200. See also, in the same catalogue (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1986), Christian Besson, “Entretien avec François Morellet,” in which Morellet speaks about his early enthusiasm for the Marxism of Georg Lukács (p. 126). In his 2005 “Entretien avec Natacha Pugnet,” Morellet noted: “We were then unbelievably pretentious: We not only thought that our art was not elitist but that we had to bring the good word to the street.” In Mais comment taire . . . , p. 260. On Duchamp’s indifference and on the abuses of interpretation, see “J’aime bien Duchamp” (1974), in Mais comment taire . . . , first edition, p. 62. 16. This issue led to a fax exchange between with Morellet and myself in March 1993. He published one of the faxes he sent me in the first edition of Mais comment taire, p. 194. 17. In a brief 1979 text entitled “S’exprimer” (to express oneself), Morellet writes: “My systems only express themselves, and they do so precisely. My paintings are, I hope, perfectly pasteurized, com- pletely artificial.” In Mais comment taire . . . , p. 68. 18. See “Un musée d’art concret idéal” (1997), in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 222.

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level.” 19 Morellet is here quite close to LeWitt’s position when it comes to the con- tradiction between reason and logic, at least the elementary mathematical logic that both use in their work: “In a logical thing,” LeWitt writes, “each part is depen- dent on the last. It follows in a certain sequence as part of the logic. But, a rational thing is something you have to make a rational decision on each time. . . . you have to think about it. In a logical sequence, you don’t think about it. It is a way of not thinking. It is irrational.” 20 Many other parallels could be drawn between the two artists besides their poor math skills—their common early fascination for Samuel Beckett’s work, for example, or the dread of any kind of personal expres- sion in their art, the longing for meaninglessness, the deadpan humor (though on that latter score Morellet easily wins the contest). 21 Above all, it is the fact that both use systems, and sometimes quite similar systems, that concerns us here. It is Morellet’s systematicity that is said to have prompted the Flash Art ad, the director of the Galerie m being tired of hearing from collectors and art critics that LeWitt was “so much more systematic than Morellet.”22 yet for the French artist, LeWitt’s work was not systematic enough. When he finally referred to the Flash Art affair, Morellet’s comments were tongue- in-cheek: “The real amateurs knew that no confusion was possible, and they knew how to appreciate in Sol LeWitt this sensibility, this versatility that is the attribute only of true artists, as in his lines drawn freehand or above all the capricious systems whose program is invisible.”23 He was more direct when he wrote to the French Conceptual artist Claude Rutault: “the blurry separations of the first [black] Stellas or the freehand lines of Sol LeWitt’s [wall] drawings are full of a sensibility that does not belong in their work.”24 The reproach against the “sensibility” is part and parcel of Morellet’s quest for impersonality, his anti-fetishism, and his loathing of the “taste for the badly made that led industrialists to invent machines able to make visible knots in linen fabric, cracks and spots on ceramic ware, irregular edges of brown sugar cubes,

19. Besson, “Entretien avec François Morellet,” p. 126. 20. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Press, 1990), p. 58. 21. For Morellet’s discovery of Beckett in 1951 (through Jack youngerman and his wife, Delphine Seyrig), see Besson, “Entretien avec François Morellet,” p. 116. As for LeWitt, he declared in an interview with Andrew Wilson in 1993: “I was very involved with writers like Samuel Beckett who were also interested in the idea of absurdity as a way out of intellectuality. Even a simple idea taken to a logical end can become chaos.” Reprinted in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di A.E.I.U.O, 1995), p. 124. Rosalind Krauss famously drew a parallel between the obsessiveness of LeWitt’s seriality and the behavior of Beckett’s fictional character Molloy in “LeWitt in Progress” (1977), reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 245–58. 22. François Morellet, quoted in Lemoine, François Morellet, p. 259, note 29. 23. Ibid. 24. François Morellet, “Correspondance avec Claude Rutault” (1978), in Mais comment taire…, first edition, p. 72.

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etc.”25 The arguments that the trembled lines of LeWitt’s drawings (just as those of Agnes Martin’s canvases) might have to do with a deliberate will to institute a two- tier perceptual response to the work (from far: blurry; from close: revealing the irregular texture of the ground), or that (in the case of drawings on the wall) they were merely recording irregularities in the surface of inscription, were not enough to assuage his allergy to the romantic cult of the handmade.26 More interesting, however, is the allusion to “all the capricious systems whose program is invisible”

25. François Morellet, “Géométrie iconoclaste et géométrie accidentée” (1981), in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 90. 26. In 1991, giving various reasons for why he was finally exhibiting drawings that were thirty or forty years old, he remarked, half-jokingly: “I like the idea of showing that I was familiar with this traditional sensibility of the line (the imperfections of the process or of the hand that Stella, LeWitt, Mangold, etc., exploited so well), of showing that if this sensibility appeared nowhere in my paintings, it was not from cultural ignorance or congenital insensibility.” “Pourquoi trente ou quarante ans après,” in Mais comment taire . . . , pp. 159–60.

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in LeWitt’s work because it reveals a more fundamental (and perhaps more elusive) aspect of Morellet’s pursuit. On that issue I believe that Morellet was somewhat mistaken. For, at least until the mid-’70s, thus prior to the Flash Art ad, LeWitt abided by the same cardi- nal rule as Morellet (the American’s capriciousness would come later, in the ’80s, when he began a lifelong love affair with the frescoes of Piero della Francesca, Giotto, and company): the system must be simple and visible as such, requiring no elaborate explanations. In case the beholder missed the elemental system in place in any of his works, LeWitt often underscored its simplicity via a diagram. As far as I know, Morellet, until the late ’70s provided such information only after the fact: his text on his 40,000 Squares series, realized in 1960, was not published until 1971, for example.27 Unlike LeWitt, he might at first have been overconfident with regard to the legibility of his systems. A case in point is Random Distribution of 2 Squares . . . , mentioned above: without the diagram provided by Morellet, which reveals the manner in which he ascribed each of the first eight digit pairs of pi to a specific square in a 5 x 5 grid, there is no way for a spectator as mediocre in math as I (and I assume quite a few people fall in this category) to be able to “verify” the

27. See Morellet’s text “40,000 Squares” in this issue. The essential catalogue of his 1977 retrospective at the Nationalgalerie Berlin, which traveled to Baden-Baden and Paris, and in which he published many explanatory diagrams regarding his previous work, was a turning point. After that, Morellet would always pen a short note when exhibiting new works if he felt that their title itself did not convey enough information about their process of elaboration.

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Sol LeWitt. Wall Markings. 1968. © The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

work, to use the language of experimental science that Morellet cherished at the time. To take a converse example in the LeWitt ledger: despite its capricious appearance, a drawing in pen and ink on paper such as Straight and Not-Straight Lines (1972) can be redone by anyone who follows the definitions placed at the beginning of each vertical and horizontal row in this 10 x 10 grid. Ergo: simplicity and visibility (or intelligibility) of the system are not always concomitant. In fact, and this is a key difference between his work and that of LeWitt, Morellet often took advantage of such a discrepancy—especially with his superimpositions of grids or patterns that yield wholly unexpected results: the beholder, if

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LeWitt. Straight and Not-Straight Lines. 1972. © The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

motivated enough to unravel the system, is inevitably surprised by its simplicity and the minimal number of decisions it involved, and takes pleasure in that discovery.28 In certain cases, already in the ’60s and more and more throughout the ’70s when he took to heart Emil Cioran’s apology of frivolity, this discrepancy became a parodic weapon: he would use a simple system in order to generate a image that looks no less arbitrary and subjective than the most deliberately

28. On this issue, see Max Imdahl, “Grilles se déformant and Deux trames superposées,” in François Morellet (Berlin, Baden-Baden, Paris: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris, 1977), pp. 35–47.

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baroque late Stella, for example.29 This ludic aspect of Morellet’s practice is direct- ly opposed to the ethos of exhaustivity that, with few exceptions, characterizes LeWitt’s work until the mid-’70s, an ethos according to which, once a system has been determined, all its possible applications have to be realized. Occasionally Morellet admits to following such a rule of exhaustivity, if a given system can only engender a limited number of results, but this is extremely rare, given his over- whelming and often stated preference for systems whose outcome is not only potentially infinite but also infinitively varied. Speaking about one of his systems involving the odd and even digits of pi, which he had devised in 1958, he remarked that it could be developed ad infinitum, but that “the path of develop- ment would look like a straight, paved alley, without any surprise and getting bor- ing way before the infinite.”30 In other words, while LeWitt’s use of systems rules out the possibility of declaring “et cetera,” as Rosalind Krauss brilliantly demonstrated years ago, Morellet shunned redundancy and advocated economy: “To do as little as possible” was one of his favorite mottos, which played a major part in his admiration for Duchamp. As Morellet was well aware, the infinite potentiality of the systems he con- trived carried with it the same danger that perturbed Duchamp—that of the return of personal taste, of choice (something to which he never ceased to profess his aversion). In his thoughtful letter to Rutault from 1978, he admits that this is an issue that had bothered him “for the last twenty-five years,” thus since the very beginning of his career as a systematic artist. When a system can generate an infini- ty of cases, he notes, there are two possibilities: 1) I realize just one (but which?)

2) I realize those that show at best the scope of the system’s applications. And I don’t feel prouder for that. Take the principle: “to super- pose several patterns of parallel lines with different inclinations.” The only consequent decision would be to do like Lawrence Weiner and to exhibit this proposition itself. To show only one example would be the worst. It would look as if I chose it as the most beautiful.31

29. “I eventually came to realize that one of the capacities of my systems, and not the least, was to simulate, to parody authentic artistic movements, illustrated by real masterpieces executed by real artists and involving innumerable subjective and brilliant decisions. I knew, of course, that my systems could disguise simple elements into pseudo-Constructivist works, and I accepted that fact, but I did not like those systems enough then to let them do whatever they could: pseudo-Impressionism, pseudo- Expressionism . . . up to the pseudo-rococo of today.” François Morellet, “Les cheminements de pi,” in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 239. 30. Ibid. Given the embrace of Duchamp by many Conceptual artists, it is rather surprising that LeWitt did not share this enthusiasm. In response to Andrew Wilson’s question, “how important to you was Duchamp’s example?” LeWitt replied: “Duchamp was making a different kind of art evolving from dada and surrealism. These forms are absolutely conceptual, but I was not interested in them.” In Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, p. 125. 31. François Morellet, “Correspondance avec Claude Rutault,” in Mais comment taire . . . , first edition, p. 73.

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Opting for limited systems of which all combinations could be carried on within a single serial work (the words “all combinations” often figures in his titles), LeWitt dodged the booby trap of personal taste that both he and Morellet abhorred. He even managed to apply his serial procedure to language, a notori- ously open-ended system: the seventy-four variations that he concocted on the telegram that his friend the artist On Kawara sent to him (“I am still alive. On Kawara”), using exclusively those words, seem at first to represent only the tip of the iceberg, an arbitrary selection among hundreds of other possible permuta- tions—until one realizes that each of the phrases he devised is semantically plausi- ble, that each of them could actually be uttered during a conversation (“I AM STILL, ON KAWARA; I AM STILL ON KAWARA; I AM ON KAWARA; I AM, ON KAWARA; I AM ON, KAWARA,” etc.)32

32. It should be noted that in concocting these variations, LeWitt benefitted from the first name of the Japanese artist, On, which he could also employ as a preposition since, by only using capital letters, he was eradicating the difference between proper names and nouns.

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This play on language’s permutational potential and the limits that grammar imposes on it is rather exceptional in LeWitt’s oeuvre, and to my knowledge he rarely indulged in it. Morellet, on the contrary, reveled more and more in similar games as the years went by, especially after the dissolution of the GRAv, whose theo- retical defense of play as an essential human activity, even as a political one, had only been very timidly carried on in practice. Humor had always been a quality he most favored in literature—he inherited from his father a fondness for the French satirical writer Alphonse Allais, and he particularly enjoyed Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, which he discovered in 1948 through a theatrical version—but it is only after 1968 that his passion for language games became public.33 A great amateur of puns, he delighted in palindromes or in fake translations based on homophony. The title of his anthology of essays and interviews, for example, is Mais comment taire mes commentaires: the six-syllable sentence roughly translates as “But how to silence my comments,” a self-mocking allusion to his loquaciousness; but read aloud it sounds as if one is stuttering since phonetically the last three syl- lables exactly repeat the first three.34 It is also after 1968 that, abandoning the kinetic hardware (mobile metallic grids, neon tubes) that governed the bulk if his production during his GRAv years, he returned to painting but with a new twist: from then on, almost invariably, his painting left the circumscribed surface of wood panels or canvases to invade the surrounding space. This led him to pay increasing attention to the materiality of the support, which until then had to be textureless, and to the disorderly impact that the irregularities of its surface might have on the geometric figures he traced on it (the first work in this vein was the simple grid he taped with strips of adhesive on a façade of the neo-baroque Hotel de Rothschild in Paris, which then hosted the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, at the occasion of his retrospective there in 1971). Eventually, this would prompt his interest in the spacing of works of art in galleries and museums. Noting that, with the triumph of the white cube, it is “only during the ’60s that the reciprocal repulsion of works of art began to wreak havoc,” he conceived in 1996 of interventions solely based on the “in between elements” (the empty wall space between works of other artists, doors, windows, radiators, toilets, etc), putting to

33. He was also very fond of Queneau’s permutational book, Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) as well as, later on, the works of Georges Perec and of other members of the experimental group Oulipo, founded by Queneau. He was moved to learn that it was not just a coincidence that one of the characters in Perec’s novel La vie mode d’emploi (Life: A User’s Manual) was named Morellet. See “Ligne de fuite: Entretien avec Alice Fleury” (2007), in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 283. 34. The 1999 text entitled “Mais comment taire mes commentaires,” which Morellet reused as the title of his anthology of essays and interviews, introduced a suite of 111 palindromes, all including the word art, which he concocted with his son (Mais comment taire . . . , pp. 243–46). On fake translations, see those he imagined in 2002, in Mais comment taire . . . , pp. 250–51. One of Morellet’s first works, Sculpture to be Read (1949), was a wooden anthropoid figure entirely covered with the inscription of a poem in phonetic writing, à la Queneau or Jean Dubuffet.

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comic effect strategies that had long been established with a more militant intent by various Conceptual artists usually grouped under the label of Institutional Critique.35 But this does not make Morellet any more a follower of, say, Michael Asher, than LeWitt’s 1972 superimpositions of arcs, grids, and circles make him a follower of Morellet. The trajectory of each of these artists has its own logic; they each arrived at results that might look similar, but only from a superficial, morphological point of view. With regard to LeWitt and Morellet, their premises are often identical (both rejected the arbitrariness of composition and the subjectivism of gestural abstraction), their respective toolkits also have many elements in common (the means of achieving non-compositionality are not in large number, especially when restricting oneself to the language of geometry), but as in any other case of pseudomorphism, the works themselves have a different meaning, or assert differ- ently their author’s craving for meaninglessness, because the historical and geographical context of their occurrence is different. The ten years or so separating the early systematic works of Morellet’s from those of LeWitt, not to mention the ocean in between, necessarily modified the conditions of possibilities in the artistic field. Unlike Morellet, LeWitt did not have to extirpate himself from the tradition of European geometric abstraction in order to generate his grids, and even less to torpedo, within that tradition, the one branch then still active (Bill’s konkrete Kunst) that had at first seemed to eschew subjectivity. Conversely, he had to respond to Pop art which was barely on the radar screen of artists based in Paris (they long saw it as little more than a tired and edulcorated version of dada that one could easily ignore).36 Even when the paths of Morellet and LeWitt seemed to cross, they remain in fact parallel. Asked in 2002 by the kinetic artist Getulio Alviani to send him a short autobiography “for a catalogue that probably never appeared,” Morellet wrote: A monstrous son of Mondrian and Picabia, I developed, since 1952, a whole program of systems, as rigorous as they are absurd, using the simplest elements of geometry (straight lines, curves, planes . . .) with the most diverse materials (painting, grids, lamps, neons, steel, adhesive tape, tree branches . . .) on all kinds of support (canvas, walls, screens, mirrors, water, statues, architec- ture, landscapes . . . ).37

35. See “Entre autres à Brême” (1996), in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 218. 36. Morellet recalls that he rather liked Pop art when he was exposed to it, but that he was rather surprised by its “softened dada aspect, almost gentle.” To Christian Besson, “Entretien avec François Morellet,” p. 119. 37. François Morellet, “Pour Getulio,” in Mais comment taire . . . , p. 252.

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LeWitt’s 1980 Autobiography, just as deadpan, emphasizes repetition and homo- geneity rather than variety and heterogeneity. This little-known masterpiece of the photo-book medium consists of the entropic documentation, nine images per page (disposed in a grid, of course), of LeWitt’s habitat. In showing us details as banal as the electric plugs of his loft (two pages) or his collection of pots and pans (four pages), it deliberately mocks the autobiographic genre (and by extension, the whole biography industry, that calamity of an age that confuses literature with spectacle) while reminding us that artists are not the demigods the market would like to make of them: They still have to plug in their appliances for them to work. A similar will to demystify is at the core of both artists’ oeuvre, but each went at it in his own way.

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