“Ideas cannot be owned,” Sol Le-Witt once said. “They belong to whomever understands them.” When LeWitt passed away last spring, at the age of 78, the art world lost one of its most generous contributors. LeWitt may have venerated the concetto, the idea for a piece of art, over its physical execution, but he was, throughout his lifetime, a prodigious producer of art objects, both temporary and permanent. Since the 1960s, his works on paper, structures (a more apt description for his three-dimensional work, LeWitt felt, than the term sculpture), and wall drawings have been displayed in major museums throughout the world. Additionally, there have been numerous retrospectives dedicated to his oeuvre.

But before the larger institutions weigh in on LeWitt’s legacy, two galleries with which LeWitt enjoyed a long and fruitful partnership, PaceWildenstein and Paula Cooper, are each offering a more intimate experience of LeWitt. On display are works that are among the artist’s final projects, conceived in the year preceding his death and created posthumously. Together, they demonstrate the artist’s commitment to line, to process, and to the egalitarian potential of art-making.

Seven plane figures and one dramatic X, all drawn with HB pencils typically found in grade-school classrooms, line the walls of the PaceWildenstein’s Midtown venue. LeWitt, who rejected the notion that artwork must be autographed in order to be relevant, began delegating the actual production of much of his art to others long before his death, and this exhibition, titled “Sol LeWitt: Scribble Wall Drawings,” is no exception. Over a period of 20 days last August, LeWitt’s team of draftsmen and draftswomen looped and circled the demarcated areas with pencil, using LeWitt’s written instructions and rough sketches to determine how densely to apply the scribblings. The drawings almost reach the ceiling and the wall itself is the supporting material, as it has been for

much of LeWitt’s work since 1968. Despite the application of six layers of paint to smooth the surface, the undulating graphite lines highlight the wall’s subtle imperfections. As per LeWitt’s intentions, the drawings, depending on the concentration of drawing effort, create zones of shadow and light. The luminosity of the white wall breaks through the spiral loops of graphite, which, when most lightly drawn, resemble a Spirograph drawing that can’t seem to maintain its mathematical parameters. Gradually ,though, through the constant movement of the pencil, the drawing transitions to produce lines that resemble delicate cobweb lace. Ultimately, the graphite builds into an enamel-like layer of matte gray. The artists worked for six hours a day, moving the hand up, down, and around, a process one of the draftsmen described as both exhilarating and draining. In these areas, the graphite is so thick that the artists were able to penetrate the soft carbon and leave scratch marks.

The visual impact is one of infiniteness that almost devolves into obsessive inwardness. And yet, the drawings fairly pulsate due to the animate nature of the line. It is impossible to find its beginning or end. Its path is randomly determined, but clearly articulated. Although LeWitt wanted the line to reflect each artist’s contribution, its individuality, there were proscribed limitations: foremost, no straight lines. Further, the loops are rather evenly sized, so though the line dips and glides steadily, its expressive range is limited. Once the exhibit closes in November, the drawings will be painted over. To LeWitt, the preservation of the object was not important. What will remain, though, are his recorded ideas, which will be available for future artists to interpret, extending LeWitt’s generosity to future generations.

Downtown, at the Paula Cooper Gallery, “A Cube with scribble bands in four directions,” one direction on each face, unifies Le-Witt’s latest efforts with one of his earliest and most resonant motifs: the geometric square. In the front room of the gallery, there are six works on paper, representing the breadth of LeWitt’s experimentation with line and permutation. The cube itself sits in the back of the gallery space, reaching up almost two stories high and, as its title indicates, is covered with alternating stripes of light and dark scribbling, applied using the same methodology as the drawings in the PaceWildenstein. Here, though, the randomness of the scribbling is submitted to the unifying control of seriality, and the experience of some of the concentrated efforts of the scribblings is lost. While visitors can approach the cube and examine the drawing as closely as they like, the uniformity of the overall pattern and the monumental scale tend to override the more delicate effects of the graphite dance.

The cube’s monumentality, however, does contribute to the elegiac feeling of the exhibition. LeWitt typically eschewed metaphoric or subjective interpretations of his art. But in examining the work, connections to important stages in LeWitt’s artistic development emerge. The cube and serial composition were crucial to LeWitt from the earliest stages of his artistic career, as was the drawn line. The chiaroscuro created by the scribbled lines speaks to his transformative year in Italy and his passion for quattrocento art. And despite its monumentality, ‘Cube’ is a temporary installation. When the work is dismantled, it will be missed.

‘Sol LeWitt: Scribble Wall Drawings’ until November 3 (32 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-421-3292);

‘A cube with scribble bands in four directions’ until October 10 (534 W. 21st St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-255-1105).