Wall Drawing 413

Drawing Series IV (A) with color ink washes. (24 drawings.)

March 1984

Color ink wash

LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut

First Installation
Moderna Museet, Stockholm

First Drawn By
David Higginbotham, Jo Watanabe

MASS MoCA Building 7
Second Floor

In the early 1980s, Sol LeWitt began to use India ink and colored ink washes, which are applied to walls with soft rags, a technique that creates jewel-tone colors and gives the works a fresco-like quality. LeWitt frequently applied the same systems to this new medium that he had used when working with pencil. He assigned gray, yellow, red, and blue ink washes to stand in for the four basic types of line; gray ink wash took the place of vertical lines, yellow replaced horizontal, red replaced diagonal left to right lines, and blue was used for diagonal right to left.

In Wall Drawing 413, LeWitt executed his Drawing Series IV using ink. Between 1969 and 1970, he created four drawing series on paper. In each series he applied a different system of change to each of twenty-four possible combinations of a square divided into four equal parts, each containing one of the four basic types of lines LeWitt used. The result is four possible permutations for each of the twenty-four original units, which are presented in a grid of twenty-four sets of four squares, each divided into four equal parts. In Drawing Series IV, LeWitt used the ‘Cross Reverse’ method of change, in which the parts of each of the original units are crossed and reversed. When drawn on the wall in ink, the irregular, colorful patterns made by these permutations become boldly evident. At MASS MoCA, Wall Drawing 413 is displayed across from Wall Drawing 414, a gray iteration of the same drawing series.