The Soul and Wit of Sol LeWitt

I got a rather pleasant visual jolt today while transferring subway lines at the 59th Street-Columbus Circle station. On a wall facing a double-wide stairway and landing at 60th Street that leads from the mezzanine to the A, B, C, D and 1 trains, is a brand new, giant, tiled wall of jewel-toned loops and curves. The colors are pretty eye-popping and the sucker is monumental in size so you can be forgiven for falling down the stairs if you’re not careful. The mural is nothing if not bold.

It looked kind of familiar but I didn’t get the connection until I read the accompanying information. It is one of the last commissions by the “Conceptual” artist Sol LeWitt and its title is “Whirls and Twirls (MTA)” which rang a bell with me. It took some plain and fancy research to make the right connection but, with the right kick in the shins from Google, I remembered seeing a show of LeWitt’s on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art four or five years ago. At that time the most intriguing works were sort-of eruptions of material; painted resin in mountainous shapes and in extravagant colors. But along one side was a very large mural, in acrylics, also named Whirls and Twirls.

This “MTA” version looks to me to be almost a replica, with one important difference. The mural at the Met was a painting; the mural in the MTA is an incredible amalgam of porcelain tiles in deeply saturated tones of blue, green, yellow, orange, red and purple and it is 53 feet wide and 11 feet high. It is a most impressive, monumental work of art and the largest art project ever sponsored by the MTA. It’s almost too bad it’s underground because I can imagine how those colors would pop in natural sunlight.

It was another nice, and sudden, surprise from a city full of them. Sometimes it pays to just wander around with no particular goal. Ya never know; ya know?