Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921December 23, 2004), born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after influential solo shows at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963 and the

Jewish Museum (Manhattan) The Jewish Museum is an art museum housed at 1109 Fifth Avenue, in the Felix M. Warburg House, along the Museum Mile on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, New York City. The museum holds a collection of approximately 30,000 objects, including ...

in 1966. Unlike her contemporaries, she made her own sculptures by hand, eschewing industrial processes. Drawing from imagery from her past, her work also deals with the visual trace of memory and nostalgia. This is exemplified by a series of early sculptures resembling monumental segments of white picket fence.

Early life and education

Truitt grew up in Easton, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and spent her teenage years in

Asheville, North Carolina Asheville ( ) is a city in Buncombe County, North Carolina, United States. Located at the confluence of the French Broad River, French Broad and Swannanoa River, Swannanoa rivers, it is the county seat of Buncombe County. It is the most populou ...

.Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection, October 8, 2009 - January 3, 2010

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden is an art museum beside the National Mall in Washington, D.C., United States. The museum was initially endowed during the 1960s with the permanent art collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn. It was designed ...

, Washington, D.C. She graduated from

Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh language, Welsh: ) is a Private college, private Women's colleges in the United States, women's Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as a ...

with a degree in

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

in 1943. She declined an offer to pursue a Ph.D. in

Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...

’s psychology department and worked briefly as a nurseOral history interview with Anne Truitt, 2002 Apr.-Aug

Archives of American Art The Archives of American Art is the largest collection of primary resources documenting the history of the visual arts in the United States. More than 20 million items of original material are housed in the Archives' research centers in Washing ...

Smithsonian Institution The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums, Education center, education and Research institute, research centers, created by the Federal government of the United States, U.S. government "for the increase a ...

. in a psychiatric ward at

Massachusetts General Hospital Massachusetts General Hospital (Mass General or MGH) is a teaching hospital located in the West End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. It is the original and largest clinical education and research facility of Harvard Medical School/Harvar ...

, Boston.Anne Truitt, 83; Sculptor Chronicled Life as Artist, Wife, Mother
''

Los Angeles Times The ''Los Angeles Times'' is an American Newspaper#Daily, daily newspaper that began publishing in Los Angeles, California, in 1881. Based in the Greater Los Angeles city of El Segundo, California, El Segundo since 2018, it is the List of new ...

'', December 30, 2004. She left the field of psychology in the mid-1940s, first writing fiction and then enrolling in courses offered by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. She married the journalist James Truitt in 1947, though they divorced in 1971. It was said that James used to tease about Anne's columnar sculptures in referring to the works as "telephone booths".

Work

After leaving the field of

clinical psychology Clinical psychology is an integration of human science, behavioral science, theory, and clinical knowledge for the purpose of understanding, preventing, and relieving psychologically-based distress or dysfunction and to promote subjective well ...

in the mid-1940s, Truitt began making figurative sculptures, but turned toward reduced geometric forms after visiting the Guggenheim Museum with her friend

Mary Pinchot Meyer Mary Eno Pinchot Meyer (; October 14, 1920 – October 12, 1964) was an American painter who lived in Washington D.C. She was married to Cord Meyer from 1945 to 1958; she became involved romantically with President John F. Kennedy after her ...

to see H.H. Arnason's exhibition "American

Abstract Expressionist Abstract expressionism in the United States emerged as a distinct art movement in the aftermath of World War II and gained mainstream acceptance in the 1950s, a shift from the American social realism of the 1930s influenced by the Great Depressi ...

s and Imagists" in November 1961. Truitt remembers that she "spent all that day looking at art…I saw Ad Reinhardt's black canvases, the blacks and the blues. Then I went on down the ramp and rounded the corner and..saw the paintings of

Barnett Newman Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American painter. He has been critically regarded as one of the major figures of abstract expressionism, and one of the foremost color field painters. His paintings explore the sense ...

. I looked at them, and from that point on I was home free. I had never realized you could do it in art. Have enough space. Enough color." Truitt was especially inspired by the "universe of blue paint" and the subtle modulation and shades of color in Newman's Onement VI. The singularity of the Abstract Expressionists that she observed in work by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt struck Truitt and sparked a turning point in her work. Truitt's first wood sculpture, titled ''First'' (1961), resembles a picket fence. It consists of three white vertical boards which come to a point—the pickets—which are braced from behind by a white post and two rails. The pickets, post, and rails are all attached to and visually grounded by a white base. The forms contain memories of her past and her childhood geography, rather reflection of a "direct result of an empirical perception." First is a permeable memory of the idea of a fence, of all the fences Truitt has seen, instead of a fence modeled off of a specific image. During a period spent in Japan with her husband, who at the time was the Japan bureau chief for ''

Newsweek ''Newsweek'' is an American weekly news magazine based in New York City. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely distributed during the 20th century and has had many notable editors-in-chief. It is currently co-owned by Dev P ...

'', she created aluminum sculptures from 1964 to 1967. Before her first retrospective in New York she decided she did not like the works and destroyed them.Ken Johnson (December 10, 2009)
Where Ancient and Future Intersect
''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

''. The sculptures that made her significant to the development of Minimalism were aggressively plain and painted structures, often large. Fabricated from wood and painted with monochromatic layers of acrylic, they often resemble sleek, rectangular columns or pillars.Anne Truitt: Works From The Estate, 10 October - 19 November 2011
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Truitt produces in scale drawings of her structures that are then produced by a cabinetmaker. The structures are weighed to the ground and are often hollow, allowing the wood to breathe in changing temperatures. She applies gesso to prime the wood and then up to 40 coats of acrylic paint, alternating brushstrokes between horizontal and vertical directions and sanding between layers. The artist sought to remove any trace of her brush, sanding down each layer of paint between applications and creating perfectly finished planes of colour. The layers of paint build up a surface with tangible depth. Additionally, the palpable surface of paint conveys Truitt's ever-present sense of geography in the alternating vertical and horizontal paint strokes, which mirror the latitude and longitude of an environment. Her process combined "the immediacy of intuition, the remove of prefabrication, and the intimacy of laborious handwork." The recessed platforms under her sculptures raised them just enough off the ground to appear 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. The ''Arundel'' series of paintings, begun in 1973, features barely visible graphite lines and accumulations of white paint on white surfaces. In the custard-color ''Ice Blink'' (1989), a tiny sliver of red at the bottom of the painting is enough to set up perspectival depth, as is a single bar of purple at the bottom of the otherwise sky-blue ''Memory'' (1981). Begun around 2001, the ''Piths'', canvases with deliberately frayed edges and covered in thick black strokes of paint, indicate Truitt's interest in forms that blur the lines between two and three dimensions. At her first show at André Emmerich's gallery, Truitt exhibited six works of hand-painted poplar structures, including Ship-Lap, Catawba, Tribute, Platte, and Hardcastle. André Emmerich would go on to be her longtime dealer. Truitt was introduced to Emmerich through

Kenneth Noland Kenneth Noland (April 10, 1924 – January 5, 2010) was an American painter. He was one of the best-known American color field painters, although in the 1950s he was thought of as an abstract expressionist and in the early 1960s as a minimal ...

, who Emmerich also represented. In accounts of her first solo show, one can see the chauvinistic undertones that were present in the 1960s New York art world. Greenberg, Rubin, and Noland chose Truitt's work to exhibit and organized the placement of the show without any input from Truitt herself. They often referred to her as the “gentle wife of James Truitt” and Emmerich encouraged Truitt to drop her first name to conceal her gender, in the hopes that this would help the exhibition's reception. After her first solo show, Greenberg declared in his essay "Recentness of Sculpture" (1967) that Truitt's work "anticipated" minimalist art. Greenberg's statement is sensationalist as Judd, Robert Morris, and

Dan Flavin Dan Flavin (April 1, 1933 – November 29, 1996) was an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Early life and career Daniel Nicholas Flavi ...

had shown their work prior to hers. Truitt's drawings are not often remembered when considering her body of work. For much of the 1950s, Truitt worked in pencil, acrylic, and ink to create not only studies for later sculptures, but drawings that existed independently as works of art. Truitt is also known for three books she wrote, ''Daybook'', ''Turn'', and ''Prospect'', all journals. In ''Prospect'', her third volume of reflections, Truitt set out to reconsider her "whole experience as an artist"—and also as a daughter, mother, grandmother, teacher and lifelong seeker. For many years she was associated with the

University of Maryland, College Park The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD i ...

, where she was a professor, and the artists' colony

Yaddo Yaddo is an artists' community located on a estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March ...

, where she served as interim president. Truitt died on December 23, 2004, at

Sibley Memorial Hospital Sibley Memorial Hospital is a non-profit hospital located in The Palisades neighborhood of Washington, D.C. It is fully accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, and is licensed by the District of Columbia D ...

in Washington, D.C., of complications following

abdominal surgery The term abdominal surgery broadly covers surgical procedures that involve opening the abdomen (laparotomy). Surgery of each abdominal organ is dealt with separately in connection with the description of that organ (see stomach, kidney, liver, e ...

. She was survived by three children and eight grandchildren, among them writer

Charles Finch Charles Finch (born 1980) is an American author and literary critic. He has written a series of mystery novels set in Victorian era England, as well as literary fiction and numerous essays and book reviews. Life and career Finch was born in New ...

. Her daughter Mary Truitt Hill was married to the art critic Charlie Finch (1953/1954-2022) and they are in turn the parents of the aforementioned Charles.

Legacy

Fielding, H. (2011
Multiple Moving Perceptions of the Real: Arendt, Merleau-Ponty, and Truitt
(pages 518–534) This paper explores the ethical insights provided by Anne Truitt's minimalist sculptures, as viewed through the phenomenological lenses of Hannah Arendt's investigations into the co-constitution of reality and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's investigations into perception. Artworks in their material presence can lay out new ways of relating and perceiving. Truitt's works accomplish this task by revealing the interactive motion of our embodied relations and how material objects can actually help to ground our reality and hence human potentiality. Merleau-Ponty shows how our prereflective bodies allow incompossible perceptions to coexist. Yet this same capacity of bodies to gather multiple perceptions together also lends itself to the illusion that we see from only one perspective. If an ethical perspective becomes reified into one position, it then becomes detached from reality, and the ethical potential is actually lost. At the same time, phenomenologically understood, the real world does not exist in terms of static matter, but is instead a web of contextual relations and meanings. An ethics that does not take embodied relations into account—that allows for only one perspective—ultimately loses its capacity for flexibility, and for being part of a common and shared reality.

Exhibitions

Truitt's first one-person exhibition was at the André Emmerich Gallery, New York, in February 1963, and in many senses her work also hews to what was emerging there. Her work was included in the 1964 exhibition, "Black, White, and Gray," at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Ct, arguably the first exhibition of Minimal work. She was one of only three women included in the influential 1966 exhibition, '' Primary Structures'' at the

Jewish Museum A Jewish museum is a museum which focuses upon Jews and may refer seek to explore and share the Jewish experience in a given area. Notable Jewish museums include: Albania * Solomon Museum, Berat Australia * Jewish Museum of Australia, Melbourn ...

in New York. Her work has since been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the

Whitney Museum of American Art The Whitney Museum of American Art, known informally as "The Whitney", is a Modern art, modern and Contemporary art, contemporary American art museum located in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, Meatpacking District and West Village neighbor ...

, New York (1973); the

Corcoran Gallery of Art The Corcoran Gallery of Art is a former art museum in Washington, D.C., that is now the location of the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, a part of the George Washington University. Founded in 1869 by philanthropist William Wilson Corco ...

, Washington, D.C. (1974); and the

Baltimore Museum of Art The Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) in Baltimore, Maryland, is an art museum that was founded in 1914. The BMA's collection of 95,000 objects encompasses more than 1,000 works by Henri Matisse anchored by the Cone Collection of modern art, ...

(1974, 1992). In 2009, the

, Washington, D.C., organized an acclaimed retrospective of her work, including 49 sculptures and 35 paintings and drawings. "In the Tower: Anne Truitt" was on view at the

National Gallery of Art The National Gallery of Art is an art museum in Washington, D.C., United States, located on the National Mall, between 3rd and 9th Streets, at Constitution Avenue NW. Open to the public and free of charge, the museum was privately established in ...

from Nov. 19, 2017 to April 1, 2018.

Works in collections

Arizona *''Summer Treat'', 1968, University of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson District of Columbia *''Keep'', 1962,

Smithsonian American Art Museum The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM; formerly the National Museum of American Art) is a museum in Washington, D.C., part of the Smithsonian Institution. Together with its branch museum, the Renwick Gallery, SAAM holds one of the world's lar ...

, Washington *''Insurrection'', 1962, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired in 2014 by the National Gallery of Art *''Flower'', 1969, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired in 2015 by the National Gallery of Art *''Arundel XI'', 1971, National Gallery of Art, Washington *''Summer Dryad'', 1971,

National Museum of Women in the Arts The National Museum of Women in the Arts (NMWA), located in Washington, D.C., is "the first museum in the world solely dedicated" to championing women through the arts. NMWA was incorporated in 1981 by Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay. Since openi ...

, Washington *''Mid-Day'', 1972, National Gallery of Art, Washington *''Spume'', 1972, National Gallery of Art, Washington *''13 October 1973'', 1973, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington *''Sand Morning'', 1973, National Gallery of Art, Washington *''17th Summer'', 1974, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington *''Night Naiad'', 1977, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington *''Parva XII'', 1977, National Gallery of Art, Washington *Summer Remembered, 1981, National Gallery of Art *''Twining Court II'', 2002, National Gallery of Art Maryland *''Ship-Lap'', 1962,

, Baltimore *''Watauga'', 1962, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Whale's Eye'', 1969, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Three'', 1962, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''A Wall for Apricots'', 1968, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Meadow Child'', 1969, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Odeskalki'', 1963/82, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Parva IV'', 1974, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Lea'', 1962, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Carson'', 1963, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore *''Moon Lily'', 1988, Academy Art Museum, Easton *''Summer '88 No. 25'', 1988, Academy Art Museum, Easton *''Hesperides'', 1989, Academy Art Museum, Easton *''Summer '96 No. 26''. 1996, Academy Art Museum, Easton Michigan *''2 Feb '78'', 1978,

University of Michigan Museum of Art The University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is one of the largest university art museums in the United States, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with . Built as a war memorial in 1909 for the university's fallen alumni from the Civil War, Alu ...

, Ann Arbor *''Sandcastle'', 1984, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor Minnesota *''Australian Spring'', 1972,

Walker Art Center The Walker Art Center is a multidisciplinary contemporary art center in the Lowry Hill, Minneapolis, Lowry Hill neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States. The Walker is one of the most-visited modern and contemporary art museums in ...

, Minneapolis Missouri *''Morning Choice'', 1968, St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis *''Prima'', 1978, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, St. Louis Nebraska *''Still'', 1999, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln New York *''Sentinel'', 1978,

Albright-Knox Art Gallery The Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, is an art museum located adjacent to Delaware Park, Buffalo, New York, United States. The museum shows modern art and contemporary art. It is directly opposite Buff ...

, Buffalo *''Carolina Noon'', Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, New York *''Catawba'', 1962,

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

, New York *''Twining Court I'', 2001, Museum of Modern Art, New York *''Untitled'', 1962, Museum of Modern Art, New York *''Desert Reach'', 1971,

, New York North Carolina *''Night Wing'', 1972–78,

Mint Museum The Mint Museum, also referred to as The Mint Museums, is a cultural institution comprising two museums, located in Charlotte, North Carolina. The Mint Museum Randolph and Mint Museum Uptown, together these two locations have hundreds of collecti ...

, Charlotte *''Stone South No. 36'', 1975, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh Virginia *''Signal'', 1978,

Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond The Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond is the headquarters of the Fifth District of the Federal Reserve located in Richmond, Virginia. It covers the District of Columbia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and most of West Virgini ...

, Richmond Wisconsin *''Summer Sentinel'', 1963–72,

Milwaukee Art Museum The Milwaukee Art Museum (also referred to as MAM) is an art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Its collection of over 34,000 works of art and gallery spaces totaling 150,000 sq. ft. (13,900 m²) make it the largest art museum in the state of Wis ...

, Milwaukee

Bibliography

* * * * Truitt, Anne (2024-03-26). Au Fil des jours, Le Journal d'une artiste, French translation by Catherine Vasseur of DayBook : The Journal of an Artist. Paris : ER Publishing ISBN 978-2-493808-07-3

References

Sources

*''Anne Truitt,'' Acknowledgements by Roy Slade &

Walter Hopps Walter "Chico" Hopps (May 3, 1932 – March 20, 2005) was an American museum director, gallerist, and curator of contemporary art. Hopps helped bring Los Angeles post-war artists to prominence during the 1960s, and later went on to redefine pract ...

, Copyright 1974 The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.: printed by Garamond/Pridemark Press, Baltimore, MD LCCC#75-78522 * Hopps, Walter. ''Anne Truitt, Retrospective: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961-1973''. Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1974. * Livingston, Jane. ''Anne Truitt: Sculpture 1961 – 1991''. New York: André Emmerich Gallery, 1991. * Meyer, James. ''Anne Truitt: Early Drawings and Sculpture, 1958-1963''. Atlanta: Michael C. Carlos Museum, 2003.

External links

Anne Truitt website Artforum James Meyer interview
{{DEFAULTSORT:Truitt, Anne 1921 births 2004 deaths Bryn Mawr College alumni Minimalist artists University of Maryland, College Park faculty American contemporary artists 20th-century American sculptors 20th-century American women sculptors Artists from Baltimore Sculptors from Maryland American women diarists 20th-century American diarists Artists from Washington, D.C. 21st-century American women