Anne truitt

The finest teaching touches in a student a spring neither teacher nor student could possibly have preconceived.

I never decided at all to be an artist; being an artist seems to have happened to me.

The end of parenthood is implicit in its beginning: separation.

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.

the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.

A mystery confounds the problem of industry in art. In the last analysis, to work is simply not enough. But we have to act as if it were, leaving reward aside.

I worked in between carpools and buying food and cooking and whatever else I had to do. I lived an outside life, but really I was living an inside life.

When I speak now, my experience in art wells up so articulately that I am surprised even while I am talking. I move around a podium as easily as if it were my living room and although I am keyed up I am not anxious. I feel as if I were doing what I should be doing - the feeling I have when intent in my studio.

It is ultimately character that underwrites art.

artists often lie behind on the field long after the art combine, the broad-bladed harvester of informed criticism, has mowed, bailed, and stored the crop.

Artists have no choice but to express their lives. They have only, and that not always, a choice of process. This process does not change the essential content of their work in art, which can only be their life.

Love ... is the honoring of others in a way that grants them the grace of their own autonomy and allows mutual discovery.

I come to the point of using steel, and simply cannot. It's like the marriage proposal of a perfectly eligible man who just isn't loveable. It is wood I love.

There is an appalling amount of mechanical work in the artist's life ... Talent is mysterious, but the qualities that guard, foster, and direct it are not unlike those of a good quartermaster.

Humility is the daughter of truth.

In the range of my character at any given moment, I have acted in the only way it seemed to me I could have acted. This in no way means that I have done what was right; only what was possible for me. Sometimes I have done what I knew was wrong, and have rationalized. But rationalization is a form of desperation. It takes kindness to forgive oneself for one's life.

I have slowly come to realize that a family is composed of people who are teaching one another.

There's a small still center into which conception can arrive. And when it arrives, you make it welcome with your experience.

Art comes into the highest part of the mind, that with which we can know the presence of God.

Our society is monstrously disjunctive, at once so efficient in war and so inefficient in caring for the welfare of its members. It is frightening to see people rooting in garbage pails on streets, living in cardboard crates under bridges, while their government wages war. Even when there is an emergency in a household, decent parents do not forget to feed the children.

I have no home but me.

the capacity to work feeds on itself and has its own course of development. This is what artists have going for them.

I have been flooded with color on the inside, drab on the outside.

I had forgotten what sleep is like - a kingdom all its own.

The art of being officially old seems to lie in cooperative submission.

The shape of my work's development becomes a little clearer every time I am forced to articulate it.

the knowledge of personal failure ... is the invaluable predicate of all honest compassion.

The most demanding part of living a lifetime as an artist is the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one's own intimate sensitivity.

The difference between men and women is inalienable. It is not a political fact, subject to cultural definition and redefinition, but a physical verity. We do truthfully experience our lives differently because our bodies are different. It is in what we do with our experience that we are the same. We feel, absorb and examine with the same intensity, and intense experience honestly examined informs the art of both sexes equally. ... The power of imagination illuminates all human lives in common.

January is my favorite month, when the light is plainest, least colored. And I like the feeling of beginnings.

Artists have no choice but to express their lives.

I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.

No one questions the fact that verbal language has to be learned, but the commonplaceness of visual experience betrays art; people tend to assume that, because they can see, they can see art.

Their [artists'] essential effort is to catapult themselves wholly, without holding back one bit, into a course of action without having any idea where they will end up. They are like riders who gallop into the night, eagerly leaning on their horse's neck, peering into a blinding rain. And they have to do it over and over again.

Author details

Anne Truitt: Biography and Life Work

Anne Truitt was a notable American sculptor. The story of Anne Truitt began on March 16, 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland. The legacy of Anne Truitt continues today, following their passing on December 23, 2004 in Washington, D.C., U.S..

Anne Truitt was an American sculptor. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after her influential solo show at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963 and a group show at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1966.

Legacy and Personal Influence

Historically, their work is best remembered for Sculpture.

Major Contributions

  • Sculpture
  • color field painting

Philosophical Views and Reflections

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. 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.

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 in New York. Her work has since been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art , New York (1973); the Corcoran Gallery of Art , Washington, D.C. (1974); and the Baltimore Museum of Art (1974, 1992). In 2009, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden , 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 from Nov. 19, 2017 to April 1, 2018.

Anne Truitt
Anne truitt

Anne Truitt: Biography and Life Work

Anne Truitt was a notable American sculptor. The story of Anne Truitt began on March 16, 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland. The legacy of Anne Truitt continues today, following their passing on December 23, 2004 in Washington, D.C., U.S..

Anne Truitt was an American sculptor. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after her influential solo show at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963 and a group show at the Jewish Museum (Manhattan) in 1966.

Legacy and Personal Influence

Historically, their work is best remembered for Sculpture.

Major Contributions

  • Sculpture
  • color field painting

Philosophical Views and Reflections

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. 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.

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 in New York. Her work has since been the subject of one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art , New York (1973); the Corcoran Gallery of Art , Washington, D.C. (1974); and the Baltimore Museum of Art (1974, 1992). In 2009, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden , 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 from Nov. 19, 2017 to April 1, 2018.

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