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Sol LeWitt
Incomplete Open Cubes, 1974

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Incomplete Open Cubes
Artist name
Sol LeWitt
Date created
1974
Classification
installation
Medium
wood, paint, gelatin silver prints, and ink on paper mounted board with transfer type
Dimensions
sculptures: 8 × 8 × 8 in., framed works: 26 × 14 in., base: 12 × 120 × 216 in.
Date acquired
1997
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund purchase: gift of Emily L. Carroll and Thomas Weisel, Jean and James E. Douglas, Jr., Susan and Robert Green, Evelyn Haas, Mimi and Peter Haas, Eve and Harvey Masonek, Elaine McKeon, the Modern Art Council, Phyllis and Stuart G. Moldaw, Christine and Michael Murray, Danielle and Brooks Walker, Jr., and Phyllis C. Wattis
Copyright
© The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/97.516.A-KKKKKKKKKK
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Audio Stories

LeWitt on these unfinished forms

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NARRATOR:  

In Incomplete Open Cubes, Sol LeWitt has drawn a wealth of sculptural options from that simplest of three dimensional shapes: A cube. In fact, this piece was born of LeWitt’s quest for all of the ways of not making a cube, of the cube not being complete. Each possibility is mapped out three times for emphasis: As a three-dimensional model, as a two-dimensional drawing, and as a photograph. Sol LeWitt.  

 

SOL LEWITT:  

Well, with some of the three dimensional open cube pieces, the idea part is simple, but the visual perception is complex. If you make a drawing of each side, for instance, it’d be a square grid. But when it becomes three dimensional, you look at it, it becomes chaos. And then you walk around it again and you see it in different lines of sight, it becomes orderly again. So uh, that’s what happens, but you don’t think of it ahead of time— it just does happen.  

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