LeWitt panels painted over at SFMOMA by Sam Whiting

According to the SF Chronicle...

It is a tough concept to grasp - that a painting is still a painting even at the moment it is being painted over. But there it was, Wednesday morning, a set of two-story wall drawings by Sol LeWitt being primed in white and rolled over with heavy gray.

There went the two most prominent pieces of art in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the only one viewable without the encumbrance of buying a $12.50 ticket. The paintings, "Wall Drawing #935" and "Wall Drawing #936," each measuring 29 by 32 feet, had been there on temporary display that lasted eight years. The panels, one stripes and one arcs in a repeating pattern of yellow, purple, green, orange, red and blue, fit so well on either side of the black granite staircase that LeWitt had become wallpaper.

"It brightens the whole place," said Mari Saegusa, a San Francisco printmaker who visits SFMOMA seven times a year, most recently on Tuesday, the final day for "Wall Drawings #935 and #936." "I had no idea," she said when told the wall drawings were coming down. "It goes with the building. I thought it would always be here."

The wall drawings were never meant to last this long, according to SFMOMA curator Gary Garrels. He should know, because he commissioned them in the first place, as the marquee to a LeWitt retrospective in 1999. They instantly seemed to belong in the atrium, and late benefactor Phyllis Wattis purchased them in 2000 as a going-away gift for Garrels when he decamped for five years at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, followed by three at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Garrels has come back as Elise S. Haas Senior Curator of Painting and Sculpture. He was reinstalled this month, only to find that those LeWitts still hadn't been de-installed. The timing was coincidental. Early this year, a caucus of curators at SFMOMA decided to reinvigorate the entryway.

"Some people have already expressed disappointment that they will be painted out," he said. "If people want to blame me, that's fine. But I had no part in the decision."

Garrels does not concern himself with the vagaries of market value, but Jeffrey Fraenkel of Fraenkel Gallery, which works closely with the LeWitt estate, said, "Those two wall drawings are major works that summarize several of LeWitt's ideas. Something like that would almost certainly be in the seven-figure range."

The seven figures are in a certificate of sole right to reproduce. This is what the museum owns, and it can have "Wall Drawings #935" and "#936" repainted at any time anywhere in any size, so long as it is to scale, and the artist's written instructions are followed. LeWitt's own brushwork never was part of the program. He didn't touch anything, and never insinuated that he did.

"The art part of it is LeWitt's concept, and the concept is documented" says Fraenkel, who has a LeWitt wall drawing in his home. "No LeWitt drawings have been done by him. They have always been painted by his assistants."

LeWitt, who died last year at 78, is still creating art. At the same time the two wall drawings at SFMOMA are being obliterated, 100 more are going up at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. These will take up more wall space - nearly an acre of it, covering three stories of a mill building - and last longer: 25 years. The LeWitt industry at work can be seen at www.massmoca.org.

"The system is the work of art; the visual work of art is the proof of the system" was how LeWitt put it. "The visual aspect can't be understood without understanding the system. It isn't what it looks like but what it is that is of basic importance."

What it is will be nothing until February, when the panels will be painted by Kerry James Marshall, first recipient of the SFMOMA Atrium Commission, to announce his show of representational work opening in February. Those are also temporary. "I would think not eight years," said Garrels, who won't describe them other than "they will look 180 degrees different than the LeWitts."

Garrels came by Wednesday morning in time to see one drawing already painted out and the other being sanded. He would not go so far as to describe the de-installation process as part of the artwork. "I'm just sad," said Garrels, who predicted that "Wall Drawings #935" and "#936" would be back in the same location.

"We'll do them over for my retirement." He is 57. Check back in 10 years.