Wall Drawing 1247

Scribbles 7. (PW)

August 2007

Graphite

The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

First Installation
Pace Wildenstein, New York

First Drawn By
Charles Allen, Takeshi Arita, Andrew Colbert, Sarah Heinemann, John Hogan, Gabriel Hurier, Sara Krugman, Roland Lusk, Anthony Sansotta, Michael-Benjamin Vedder

MASS MoCA Building 7
Third Floor

In 2005 Sol LeWitt began a series of ‘scribble’ wall drawings, so termed because they required the draftsmen to fill in areas of the wall by scribbling with graphite. The use of graphite represents a return to the medium used in LeWitt’’s earliest wall drawings. The scribble series also returns to the vocabulary of LeWitt’’s early works in that many of the scribble wall drawings use the simple geometric shapes that first appeared in LeWitt’’s works of the 1980s. Wall Drawing 1247, for instance, depicts an ‘X’, which LeWitt used in many of his crayon drawings of the mid-eighties.

Unlike these earlier drawings in which the shapes appeared flat, the ‘X’ in Wall Drawing 1247 somewhat possesses the illusion of depth. In his scribble drawings LeWitt explores gradations of tone made with varying densities of scribbles. As a result of these changes in tone, the ‘X’ in Wall Drawing 1247 appears as a crossing of two cylindrical volumes. The reflective sheen of the graphite lends these volumes a metallic appearance. However, the ends of the ‘X’ are cut at precise right angles which counteract the form’s depth and reinforce the flatness of the wall.