It’s easy enough to miss a good party, but I can’t go without writing about the extraordinary party I missed at Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (known as Mass MoCA) earlier this month.

The event on July 12 was an informal gathering to toast and tour the progress on an installation of 100 of Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings in a former factory on the MASS MoCA campus in North Adams. The artist himself planned it before his death in April 2007.

“It was one of the greatest experiences I’ve had in the art world,” the president of Pace Prints, Richard Solomon, said yesterday. “The nicest thing about it was the lack of pretension; it wasn’t East Hampton; it was really a North Adams party.”

That, of course, was how LeWitt would have wanted it. He was known for his lack of pretension. One example: He suppressed the prices of his wall drawings so they would remain available to a wider audience.

And so perhaps it is fitting that the most ambitious exhibition of his wall drawings is taking place in one of the remotest locations, in the northwest corner of Massachusetts.

“There are so many lies in the art world, but I won’t lie to you: That was my first time up there,” the president of PaceWildenstein, Marc Glimcher, said.

The group assembled included patrons of MASS MoCA, Williams College Museum of Art, and Yale University, the three institutions collaborating on the project, as well as artists Chuck Close, Tara Donovan, and James Siena, and Sol LeWitt’s widow, Carol LeWitt.

“It was the kind of group that reminds you why it is such a pleasure to be a part of the art world,” Mr. Glimcher said Monday en route to Beijing, where he is opening an outpost on August 3. “I don’t want to romanticize the whole thing, but it was the nicest group of people.”

The party took place at a satisfying juncture; several of the wall drawings are complete, many others are near completion, and about a dozen blank walls remain. The exhibit will open in November for a term of at least 25 years (the institutions will have the option to extend).

“It was staggering to see such a monumental project. I was extremely moved,” the director of Paula Cooper Gallery, Steve Henry, said Tuesday. LeWitt did his first wall drawing at the Paula Cooper Gallery, in 1968; famously, Ms. Cooper refused to follow the artist’s instructions to paint over it when the exhibition was complete. Instead, she has recounted, she asked the artist to come in and do it himself. The gallery also exhibited LeWitt’s final work, a cube with scribble drawing, which he did for Ms. Cooper.

Mr. Glimcher noted how well-sited the installation is: “I was totally struck by how intimate it is. It doesn’t overpower you, doesn’t create this huge dramatic void. All the threads and connections are there,” he said.

Because many of the guests had known LeWitt for decades, his absence was felt. There was a feeling of sadness; people cried. On the other hand, the facts that so many institutions and collectors have lent their work, the building has been renovated to LeWitt’s specifications, and the artwork itself is bright and joyful, also made the experience uplifting.

A patron of the arts, and graduate of Yale, Frederick Beinecke, was excited to have the installers themselves demonstrate their work; he also noted how unusual it is to be invited to a celebration of an exhibition mid-installation.

Long after a Latin barbeque and mojitos had been served, and the leading visionary of the project, Jock Reynolds, the director of the Yale University Art Gallery, had saved a guest from choking, guests were still wandering through the soon-to-be LeWitt galleries in Building 7.

“We brought our 31/2-year-old and she wouldn’t leave. You just wanted to soak them up and stay until they locked the door,” Mr. Glimcher said.

He had been studying the model for the exhibition for a long time, but visiting the installation gave him a new appreciation for the work.

“It looks basically like this guy spoke this language of basic form, he spoke it really, really well, and he had no problem going through the possible language,” Mr. Glimcher said. “The permutations didn’t look like permutations, he just slides back and forth through the spectrum of possibilities.”

LeWitt is credited with founding Conceptual art; he famously wrote, “The idea becomes the machine that makes the art.” He has had an influence on generations of artists, regardless of whether their work resembles his. This exhibition will introduce him to new generations.

“I’ll be able to bring my children here to see this,” one of the LeWitt assistants, Nick Kozak, told me when I visited the installation a few days after the party.

As to the impact the exhibition may have on the market value of LeWitt’s work, Mr. Glimcher said many factors will create a “recipe for prices to increase dramatically.” But as LeWitt insisted upon limits in his lifetime, his family may also carefully monitor the escalation of prices. Wall drawings at the time of the artist’s death were $150,000 to $200,000, Mr. Glimcher said.

The party gave a sense of the glorious experience in store for all those who will make the pilgrimage to North Adams over the next 25 years.

“Nobody could have as great a monument to his life and his career,” Mr. Solomon said.

agordon@nysun.com