A nne Truitt’s Oak superbly exemplifies the ceaseless exploration of form, space, and color which has distinguished Truitt's celebrated oeuvre. Born in 1921, Truitt was a major figure in American minimalist art, known for her bold use of color and geometry, taking art into a new direction. Clement Greenberg, renown art critic, placed Truitt at the forefront of Minimalism, stating in his writings in 1968, “If any one artist started or anticipated Minimal Art, it was she, in the fence-like and then box-like objects of wood or aluminum she began making, the former in 1961 and the latter in 1962.” Unlike many artist’s in the Minimalist movement whose work conveyed nothing beyond their own materiality, Truitt was interested in abstraction as it refracted perception, allowing life experiences to group out of which art grows alluding to a private language and sense of memories drawn from the subconscious.

The present work is part of her large scale painted wood sculptures, where she developed her mature style of the vertical rectangular, wood sculptures coated with layers of saturated color, which blur the line between two and three dimensions. Set on slightly recessed bases, the sculptures appear to hover just above the floor as if defying gravity. Works from this series were first exhibited at André Emmerich Gallery in 1963. The process for creating her sculptures are painstaking as she creates the sculpture to seem as if they were carved pigment, involving the application of as many as forty layers of acrylic paint, each sanded down to eliminate her brustrokes. As she explains, “I slowly came to realize that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake.”

Truitt grew up in Easton, Maryland, later to settle in Washington D.C. She began to study sculpture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts where she befriended color field painter Kenneth Noland. In 1961, she saw her first painting by Barnett Newman, recalling, “My whole self lifted into it,... ‘Enough’ was my radiant feeling—for once in my life enough space, enough color. It seemed to me that I had never before been free.” Inspired by his signature zip forms, this nearly religious encounter would set the course she would follow in her own practice going forward.

In 1973, curator Walter Hopps organized Truitt's first museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington mounted the first posthumous retrospective of her work in 2009, and a survey exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid is scheduled for 2022. She has received various awards in her lifet.mes including a Guggenheim Fellowship and five honorary doctorates. She is also known for her three books, Daybook, Turn and Prospect, where she publishes journal entries giving vivid descriptions of her life as an artist. Like with many women in her generation, such as Agnes Martin, who made a mark on conceptual art, the past few years has seen a rediscovery of her work by contemporary art critics, curators and collects ors.

Artist

Anne Truitt