Curator Pieranna Cavalchini of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum introduced LeWitt to Robison in the late 1980s. She has masterminded ''Variations on a Theme by Sol LeWitt and Paula Robison," in the museum's contemporary gallery.
The artist and the composer each use particular building blocks -- in Mozart's case, melody, harmony, and rhythm, and in LeWitt's, color, line, grid, and environment. Like architects, they erect structures with their blocks, each with a rare sense of nuance and a master's versatility. And each conveys instructions for how the work is to be executed. Mozart left scores. LeWitt gives oral and often written outlines to assistants, who produce the material art. This is one of LeWitt's hallmarks as a conceptual artist -- that the art is purely in the idea rather than in the mark of the artist's hand.
Step into the contemporary gallery, and it's clear LeWitt (with master drawer Takeshi Arita and local assisting artists April Gymiski and Reese Inman) has created a space that welcomes Mozart. Eight ropes of color snake and whip brightly over the gallery's walls. They tangle loosely in their rise and fall; they drop off the picture plane at floor and ceiling, then swoop back in. They'reclassic LeWitt, with the flat tones and clean lines of high modernism, but without the arch intellectualism some associate with modernism and conceptual art. Instead, there's roller-coaster-ride fun.
Robison and her quartet play once a day, at random hours that can be discovered ahead of time by checking the Gardner's website. She and LeWitt have chosen four Mozart flute quartets for ''Variations on a Theme." When I was there, the group played Mozart's Quartet in A major (K. 298).
Velvety tones filled the gallery. Particular lines of music seemed to coast along LeWitt's vivid lines of color -- the impassioned viola resonated, somehow, with the purple, the round tones of the flute with the blue. Themes overlapped and repeated themselves, just as the gestures on the wall twined and arched. A more representational work would have competed with the music's own narrative. LeWitt's exultant geometric abstraction is the perfect complement.
