Geometric Figures & Color

New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1979. A near-fine copy in a like jacket, pale stain to cloth on upper panel, the jacket with minute wear. Square 4to (8 x 8 inches; 203 x 203 mm). [48] pages. Full-page color offset prints. Original cloth; dust jacket. FIRST EDITION, inscribed by Lewitt on the front free endpaper in pencil to "Ann." Uncommon in the cloth-bound issue, and especially so when signed. Lewitt conceptually explores: "Circle, Square, Triangle, Rectangle, Trapezoid and Parallelogram in Red, Yellow and Blue on Red, Yellow and Blue." The book is divided into three sections, each of which differ by background color. Barbara M. Reise wrote that "LeWitt's colours, like his lines and squares, are like 'facts': they are inert, pre-established, accepted and un-emotional man-made constructs which can 'come to life' within a present context but do not necessarily do so. Red, yellow, blue, and black (and the white of wall or paper) are standard "absolute primaries basic to all pigment colour - that is according to the colour system accepted by an art academic from early 19th-century theorists like Chevreul. Unlike the Newtonian rainbow-spectrum based on light-waves, this theoretical structure is more conceptually mathematical and tautological than referential to some exterior and inhuman Nature... LeWitt's use of these colours is as flatly complete, physical, and self-reflective as the theory itself. Unlike Seurat, whose use of the same colour theories was subordinated and interrelated to other interests in proportion theories and (seen) scene subject-matter, LeWitt uses colour as both the subject and the object of his art" (in: 'Sol Lewitt Critical Texts,' ed. Adachiara Zevi, Rome, 1994, p. 188).