New Acquisitions

A sculpture by Sol LeWitt and an oil painting by William D. Washington, a 19th century Washington, DC raised artist famed throughout the South for his "Burial of Latane" Civil War painting, have been acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

VMFA is a state museum with private endowments for art purchase. I think that this is perhaps the ideal public/private partnership, because art is purchased with private funds and then becomes the responsibly of the state for its ongoing care.

Throughout their history, they have benefited from many generous donors, including Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, Rita Gans, Lillian Thomas Pratt, and Sydney and Frances Lewis, among many others.

The LeWitt was a partial gift of the Sol LeWitt estate and Pace Wildenstein in honor of Frances Lewis and in memory of Sydney Lewis, in addition to some funds from the Sydney and Frances Lewis endowment.

VMFA's new Sol LeWitt sculpture is titled "Splotch #22" and was created in acrylic on fiberglass this year. It stands just more than 12 feet tall.

"Much of today's art practice would be unthinkable without LeWitt's pioneering work in Conceptual Art in the 1960s and 1970s," says John Ravenal, VMFA's Sydney and Frances Lewis Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.

"Our new sculpture is the largest and most complex of LeWitt's series of non-geometric sculptures. It is also LeWitt's last work."

Ravenal says that the artist made two drawings for "Splotch #22" on which he indicated colors and height. A fabricator then translated the drawings into 3-D using a computer. The result is a sculpture made of layers of industrial-grade foam that were laminated, carved and sanded before being coated with epoxy resin, fiberglass, and multiple layers of paint and varnish.

I am curious as to the technical aspect of this... once the "fabricator" has created a 3-D digital file, is it then fed to a machine which then "builds" the sculpture, or creates a mold for it? And who carves and sands the industrial-grade foam? Who coats it with resin and fiberglass and then applies the paint and varnish?

Possibly not LeWitt, and that's OK...

But is this the same general idea as a watercolorist creating a watercolor and then handing it over to a lab which then scans it into a hi resolution image and prints it into a canvas, and then another machine replicates the artist's original brush strokes in a finishing clear medium and recreates another work which is not the original piece.

We call those reproductions.

But then say that the artist's watercolor is scanned into a 3-D translation and made into a sculpture?

Makes my head hurt.