LeWitt House in Praiano

By Martin Friedman 2/1/09

Praiano Although Sol LeWitt never learned to speak Italian because of poor hearing, he could read it and write it. According to his widow, Carol, he studied the conjugation of verbs intensely to avoid using an improper formulation. His ties to Italy could not have been stronger. His first Italian journey was to Naples, in 1950, and, beginning in the early ’70s, he traveled the country extensively, familiarizing himself with its historic art and architecture, and meeting artists, collectors and owners of galleries showing contemporary art. His wall drawings are a continuation of the venerable Italian wall-painting tradition. 

View Slideshow Detail of Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing #1231: Concentric Arches (Scribble), 2007, black pencil, approx. 8 by 7 feet overall. All photos this article, unless otherwise noted, Anthony Sansotta. All works at the LeWitt residence, Praiano, Italy.; Wall Drawing #1232: A Circle with Color Arcs in Four Directions, 2007, color ink wash, approx. 8 feet high.;

A particular blend of his sensibility and the Italian context can be found just over 40 miles south of Naples, along the rugged Amalfi coast, in the small town of Praiano, a near-pueblo of startlingly white dwellings overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. The one that belongs to Carol LeWitt dates from the 1600s, when it was a farmhouse on a vast tract of land. Over the centuries, the house sheltered animals in its lower level and human inhabitants above.

It changed with time from a partly agricultural domicile to a purely domestic one and  was thoroughly renovated in the 1830s.

Last summer, Carol, who inherited the house from her Italian grandmother in 1980, invited my wife, Mickey, and me to spend a few weeks there. Though she would not be able to join us, Carol wanted us to see Sol’s wall drawings. The house is reached by driving along a road marked by dramatic hairpin turns. Off one of those turns is a steep ramp that must be ascended on foot. At the top is a narrow lane, its high, craggy stone walls festooned with intense violet bougainvillea. Along the lane are black-painted iron gates above houses of vaguely Moorish, undulant contours. Steep stairs lead down to their front doors.

Vincenzo Galano greeted us at the bottom of the ramp upon our arrival. An amiable, attentive man in his mid-50s, Vincenzo looks after Carol’s house during her absences. He is also segretario comunale, the town’s manager. Carol describes the Galanos as her adopted Italian family. Vincenzo led the way along the lane and down 50 daunting steps. When he opened the door, we were enthralled: three of Sol’s wall drawings were visible from the entrance. The first was a large, dazzling circle of multicolored bands; the second, to the left of the door, a black and white drawing of nesting tubular arches; the third an atmospheric square floating over a fireplace. Further exploration would reveal two more wall works: a finely drawn network of arcs, circles and grids in a curved alcove in the master bedroom, and four ovoid cartouchelike shapes featuring bands of color, where the four walls meet the vaulted ceiling of the second bedroom.

Carol LeWitt was born Carol Androccio, in Newark, N.J. She met Sol in 1975, just after he bought a house in Spoleto, a town about 80 miles north of Rome; they first went to Italy together the next year, stopping in Praiano, where Carol’s grandmother, Letizia Fusco, was living at the time. Upon being introduced to Sol, she asked him directly, “What does your father do?” Sol and Carol moved to Spoleto in 1980 and married in 1982. “I think he was looking for an Italian girl with a driver’s license. He liked being taken care of,” Carol told me with a laugh.

My wife and I first visited them in Spoleto, site of the well-known annual festival of music, theater and art. The house there is a small, many-windowed tower on a hillside. Sol worked in his studio while Carol started a wine bar and shop in the town below, selling to the locals and the festival’s many visitors. She also embarked on a business exporting to America the traditional richly ornamented ceramic ware of that region. The LeWitts’ connections to Italy deepened.

Spoleto became Sol’s base for frequent expeditions to museums, churches, convents and other sites of artistic significance. He saw Filippo Lippi’s Life of the Virgin frescoes in Spoleto’s cathedral; in Florence, Masaccio’s Old and New Testament scenes in the Brancacci chapel, Fra Angelico’s Annunciationin the convent of San Marco and Benozzo Gozzoli’s Procession of the Magi in the Medici palace. In Assisi, he saw Giotto’s St. Francis cycle and in Padua’s Scrovegni Chapel his fresco cycles. He saw Piero della Francesca’s incomparable Legend of the True Cross in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo. Along the Amalfi coast, not far from Praiano, are the ruins of Pompeii, where wall paintings decorated the vacation houses of the Roman elite. Though damaged during the eruption of Vesuvius, some of the paintings survive in situ, while others are preserved in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples.

Even the most illusionistic of the wall paintings LeWitt encountered in his Italian travels are strongly formal in composition and execution: they acknowledge the flatness of the wall, a quality that Sol greatly admired. That long tradition of flatness found an echo in his art. He spent little time studying those masterworks but seemed to mentally photograph them, according to Carol. Whether looking at a painting, a sculpture or a facade, he appeared to speed by without analyzing it, but he would later discuss in considerable detail a fresco or architectural element they had seen. He was, she said, an “impatient tourist,” but one who remembered everything. A country forever revisiting its history, Italy has always afforded artists opportunities to absorb that past. One way, Sol’s way, was to make new use of the walls of old buildings, of which there was no shortage.

Carol’s grandmother had inherited the Praiano house from her grandmother in the 1920s. As Carol explains it, southern Italy is a matriarchal culture, not only with respect to how families are run but also in matters of property. After Letizia’s death, the house stood empty, in need of serious repair. The property encompasses two buildings. One now belongs to Carol, the other to a cousin, whose holdings also include considerable farmland nearby.