Anne Truitt
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Anne Truitt (1921-2004) was a major American artist of the mid-20th century; she is associated with both minimalism and Color Field artists like Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in psychology in 1943. She was married to James Truitt in 1948 (they divorced in 1969), and she became a full-time artist in the 1950's. She made what is considered her most important work in the early 1960s anticipating in many respects the work of minimalists like Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly. She was unlike minimalists is some significant ways. She named, for instance, many of her works after places and events that were important to her- a practice suggesting a narrative beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture.
The sculpture that made her significant to the development of Minimalism were aggressively plain and painted structures, often large. The recessional platform under her sculpture raised them just enough off the ground that they appeared to float on a thin line of shadow. The boundary between sculpture and ground, between gravity and verticality, was made illusory. This formal ambivalence is mirrored by her insistence that color itself, for instance, contained a psychological vibration which when purified, as it is on a work of art, isolates the event it refers to as a thing rather than a feeling. The event becomes a work of art, a visual sensation delivered by color. Her first solo exhibition was in 1963 at the Andre Emmerich gallery, and in many senses her work also hews to what was emerging there. In Washington her work was represented by Pyramid Gallery which later became the Osuna Gallery.
She is also known for three books she wrote, Daybook, Turn, and Prospect, all journals. For many years she was associated with the University of Maryland, College Park, where she was a professor, and the artists' colony Yaddo, where she served as interim president.
Her work is represented in every major American museum and many overseas, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art and the Whitney Museum, where she was the first female artist to receive a full retrospective. In 2005, the Museum of Modern Art installed Truitt's 1962 sculpture Catawba in the new exhibition spaces. The Hirshhorn Museum is planning a retrospective of Truitt's work for the fall of 2008, which will then travel to other sites.
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[edit] Quotations
From a 2002 interview with James Meyer comes the following exchange:
JM: How did Clement Greenberg come to see your work? Was it through Kenneth Noland?
AT: Yes. First it was Ken, who told David Smith. David was the biggest, strongest supporter anybody could ever have.
JM: So they were the first two people to see your work?
AT: Yes; and then Clem. Clem said, "Now there will be three in Washington."
JM: You, Noland, and Morris Louis, presumably. In his essay on Minimalism, "Recentness of Sculpture" (1967), Greenberg talks about how difficult your work was for him initially, how he had to go back again until he finally "saw" it. Yet you've said he was impressed right away.
AT: Right away. There was no question about it.
JM: He was particularly impressed by Hardcastle.
AT: He backed away from it and said, "Scares the shit out of me." That's the only time I ever heard Clem swear. I remember being startled.
JM: That essay and the one he wrote about you the next year, "Changer: Anne Truitt," marked you as "Greenberg's Minimalist." He characterizes your work as a welcome antidote to that of Judd, Morris, and Andre. He praises the handmade quality of your sculpture and its intuitive color and attacks the industrial look of "orthodox" Minimalism. But you've also said that you later felt Greenberg was disappointed in you.
From Daybook, her first journal:
There is a sort of shame in naked pain. I used to see it in my patients when I was working in psychology and nursing. They found it more seemly, more expedient to pull over themselves thin coverlets of talk. There is wisdom in this, an unselfish honor in bearing one's burdens silently. But Rembrandt found a higher good worth the risk and painted himself as he knew himself, human beyond reprieve. He looks out from this position, without self-pity and without flourish, and lends me strength.
I sat for a long while in one of the rectangular courtyards, listening to the fountain. Feeling the artists all around me, I slowly took an unassuming place (for two of my own sculptures were somewhere in the museum) among the people whose lives, as all lives do, had been distilled into objects that outlasted them. Quilts, pin cushions, chairs, tables, houses, sculptures, paintings, tilled and retilled fields, gardens, poems -- all of validity and integrity. Like earthworms, whose lives are spent making more earth, we human beings also spend ourselves into the physical. A few of us leave behind objects judged, at least temporarily, worthy of preservation by the culture into which we were born. The process is, however, the same for us all. Ordered into the physical, in time we leave the physical, and leave behind us what we have made in the physical.
[edit] References
- Anne Truitt, Acknowledgements by Roy Slade & Walter Hopps, Copyright 1974 The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: printed by Garamond/Pridemark Press, Baltimore, MD LCCC#75-78522
[edit] Bibliography
- Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982) ISBN 0-14-006963-1
- Turn: The Journal of an Artist (1986)
- Prospect: The Journal of an Artist (1996)
