By  Roberta Smith  Published: April 21, 2007           The New Yort Times

BEACON, N.Y. — If the greatness of Sol LeWitt, the Minimal-Conceptual artist who died this month at 78, has so far escaped you, make haste to this quiet Hudson River town and its main cultural attraction, the massive art space called Dia:Beacon. Here, among the often hulking displays of Minimal Art, you’ll find an exhilarating show of 14 of LeWitt’s mind-teasing, eye-filling wall drawings. All were made by people other than the artist, following his written instructions — a habit that has always given LeWitt’s detractors fits. If this show doesn’t persuade you of his accomplishment, it is your loss.

Although LeWitt has plenty of white, geometric Minimalist sculpture to his name, the wall drawings he began making in 1968 pose the most interesting questions about art and have had the greatest influence. He rediscovered the wall, an artistic working surface since the time of cave paintings, the way the Earth artists of his generation rediscovered the desert, home of the pyramids. In other words, something that was there all along, but greatly underutilized by contemporary artists.

LeWitt gave modern drawing the scale of painting and the immateriality of pure thought, and made it a partner of architecture and real space. Legions of younger artists followed suit, starting with Mel Bochner and Dorothea Rockburne around 1970 and continuing into the present with Jessica Diamond, Lily van der Stokker, Katharina Grosse and Robin Rhode.

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