“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.”
A nne Truitt’s Prescience from 1978 is a work that foregrounds the three-dimensional liberation of color which has defined the artist’s celebrated career. In Prescience, color is injected into the three-dimensional realm as the soft pastel shades emanate from the large scale pillar. As Truitt 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 was one of the leading figures of American minimalist art that presented boldly colored geometric constructions, often scaled according to the viewer’s body and placed directly on the floor or walls of the gallery, putting the audience in intimate conversation with form, space, and color. Not only was she prescient in many ways when it comes to Minimalism, Truitt also developed a unique perspective and approach to it. Her practice moves beyond abstraction as a tool to convey materiality and explores its possibilities as a vessel for private memories, emotions, and histories.
IMAGE © 2023 WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK
ART © 2023 THE BARNETT NEWMAN FOUNDATION/ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK
The artist often pointed to her encounters with paintings by Barnett Newman during her t.mes as a student at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1961 as a pivotal moment in the development of her signature painted wood sculptures. Her investigation into Newman’s works were an enlightening reconceptualization of color, evident in how she recounts her experiences: “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."
By incorporating a slightly recessed base into certain sculptures such as Prescience, Truitt creates work that appears to be hovering just above the floor, enriching it with a lofty quality that resists the weight of gravity. This loftiness of the sculpture conveys the abstract concept of color by assuming a physical presence that the artist materialized through methodical techniques that result in a pristine finish. Prescience is a rare historic exemplar of Truitt’s practice, one that left an imprint on the history of conceptual and Minimal art by liberating color from the limits of form into space.
“I have nearly abandoned form: form doesn’t interest.mes now. What I want is colour in three dimensions, colour set free, to a point where, theoretically, the support should dissolve into pure colour.”
IMAGE © 2023 MATTHEW MARKS, NEW YORK
ART © 2023 ESTATE OF ANNE TRUITT/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
Anne Truitt began her career in art by studying sculpture and other courses offered at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington D.C., where she befriended color field painter Kenneth Noland. After fostering her mature style of wood and aluminum sculptures in the 1960s, Truitt’s career flourished, receiving the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship in 1970 and the National Endowment for the Arts in 1971 and 1977. In 1973, she had her first museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has been continuously admired since then, evidenced by the major posthumous retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2009 and a survey exhibition at the Museo Reina Sofia scheduled for 2024.
