Sol LeWitt, 78; expanded perception of art through concepts, geometry

Sol LeWitt, a founder of the Conceptualist and Minimalist movements in American art and one of the most influential artists of the past half-century, died of complications from cancer in New York on Sunday.

The artist, a resident of Chester, Conn., was 78.

Over the course of his long, much-acclaimed career, Mr. LeWitt developed his dry, cerebral methods into a means for creating works of sumptuous beauty.

While living and working in New York City in the 1960s, when many other ambitious artists were rejecting the emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, Mr. LeWitt conceived of art as the product of fixed sets of instructions. "The idea becomes a machine that makes the art," Mr. LeWitt wrote in a famous series of statements called "Paragraphs on Conceptual Art."

His sculptural works from the '60s typically consisted of all-white, rectilinear grids and cubes organized according to mathematical permutations. They were associated with the Minimalist works of artists such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd because of their geometric simplicity.

But unlike Minimalist art, which focuses attention mainly on perceptual and sensory aspects, Mr. LeWitt's work relies in part on the viewer's understanding of the rules that underlay their complex, modular patterns.

In the late '60s, Mr. LeWitt began to devise instructions for wall drawings involving elaborate patterns of different kinds of lines -- straight, wavy, and curved -- that would be executed by teams of assistants in galleries and museums. Later, he began to add color in the form of ink washes, and, as a result, sensuously beautiful color, texture, and pattern began to compete for attention with the systematic conceptual dimension.

Mr. LeWitt became increasingly open to new ideas about shape, structures, and materials. He designed large pyramids to be constructed from concrete blocks, and more recently he created brightly striped, organically shaped sculptures and wall paintings based on fluid, irregular patterns. Despite starting out reductively and impersonally, Mr. LeWitt's art became an expression of creative fertility and individual sensibility.

Born in Hartford on Sept. 9, 1928, Mr. LeWitt took art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art as a boy. He received a bachelor's of fine arts degree from Syracuse University in 1949 and served in the Army during the Korean War, making posters for Special Services.

After moving to New York in 1953, Mr. LeWitt studied at the School of Visual Arts, worked in the production department of Seventeen magazine, and did graphic design in the architectural office of I.M. Pei.

In the early 60s, he took a job as a night receptionist at the Museum of Modern Art, where his fellow employees included Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin, and Robert Mangold, artists who would also become renowned for their Minimalist styles.

An extremely prolific artist, Mr. LeWitt had hundreds of solo exhibitions in the United States and Europe, and he created more than 1,200 site-specific wall drawings. The Museum of Modern Art presented a LeWitt retrospective in 1978-79, and in 2000, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a retrospective that traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

Because he made ideas more important than execution, Mr. LeWitt's conceptualism has been extremely influential on generations of artists who followed him, even those whose works are not obviously systematic.

"He was able to articulate methodologies that were applicable to every field of creative endeavor," said Nicholas Baume, chief curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston

Mr. LeWitt leaves his wife, Carol, and his daughters, Sofia and Eva.

Funeral services are private.