forms the heart of LeWitt’s collection and that this exhibition explores through the lens of drawing specifically. Why drawing? Indeed, an exhibition could profitably focus on a broad range of media in LeWitt’s vast collection, including painting, sculpture, and, in particular, photography. One answer is that the collection manifests extraordinary diversity in drawing, ranging from classic examples of conceptual drawing from the movement’s key players to less familiar gestures by under-known artists that investigate the parameters of mark-making in unexpected materials and formats. With diagrams for musical scores by Steve Reich and Philip Glass joining fiber works by Kazuko Miyamoto and language pieces by Pat Steir and Carl Andre, the collection presents an expansive perspective on drawing that provides an instructive model for contemporary artists seeking to liberate the medium from rigid categorization. But there is more to it than this. Drawing is not simply a crucial component of the collection LeWitt assembled; it is also vital to the aesthetic principles that ground the conceptual movement at the collection’s core. With the exception of a few Japanese prints purchased during his military service in the Korean War, LeWitt began collecting in the early-to-mid 1960s, trading pieces with friends in New York who were likewise interested in an active exchange of ideas. Artists within the community supported each other by exhibiting together, writing about each other in journals, and exploring and testing new concepts. For LeWitt and his peers, dialogue was the antidote to the insulated egoism typical of abstract expressionism, and drawing the alternative to its assertion of the autonomous self-sufficiency of paint on canvas. It is no coincidence that the LeWitt Collection, built upon a ready flow of working sketches, diagrams, and the like, was initiated at a moment when drawing was coming into its own as an independent art form. As Bernice Rose has eloquently outlined, the elevation of the sketch had already begun under abstract expressionism as the notion of unfinish gained acceptance. But it was really in the 1960s, with the emergence of conceptual art, that the value of drawing’s status as a place for ideas to be proposed and worked through (rather
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