Sol LeWitt interviewed by Paul Cummings on July 15, 1974, as part of the California Oral History Project for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution:
Mr. Cummings: When did you start doing the torn paper and the folded paper drawings?
Mr. LeWitt: Well, the first folded paper I did was in '66, '65. Lucy has one. I just sent them out to some friends instead of Christmas cards. Then there was a show I had with Smithson and Leo Valadore at the Park Place Gallery and the announcement was folded like a grid and then the names are just written in the center. I just kept doing them.
Mr. Cummings: You're talking about the folded one, right?
Mr. LeWitt: These are the folded ones. Then the ripped ones I started doing about 1969, or 1970.
Mr. Cummings: I didn't know the folded drawings had such a long history. Obscured, but
Mr. LeWitt: Well, I never really made very much of them. I used to just give them away to friends. I never really wanted to do them as a major kind of work. I wanted them to be another kind of drawing. They do make lines and rips also. But for instance Dorothea Rockburne makes a major statement out of that, and I think they are very good. But what I do, I want to keep this a private kind of thing; that's why I want them to be sold as cheaply as possible.
