“I have nearly abandoned form: form doesn’t interest.mes now. What I want is color in three dimensions, color set free, to a point where, theoretically, the support should dissolve into pure color.”
Pristinely constructed in delicately painted layers of crisp white, White: Five is an impressive early paragon of Anne Truitt’s iconic vertical sculptures, a body of work which radically defined American Minimalism. Executed in 1962, just one year before her significant solo show at André Emmerich Gallery in New York, White: Five is a vision of elegance, intentionality, and apparent effortlessness in artistry. Consisting of five parallel, vertically-oriented wooden planks, White: Five’s confident spatial presence maintains a bold authenticity inherent to Truitt’s conceptual framework. For Truitt, abstraction provided a syntax for her impressions: evoking people, places, ideas, and events, the artist wielded color and form as metaphors for thought, developing a visual grammar that remains distinctively her own in the history of art. White: Five is further exalted by its residence in the inimitable personal collects ion of Donna and Howard Stone, unparalleled collects ors of Minimalist and Conceptual art who transformed the Chicago arts scene. With prominent exhibition history, including Truitt’s first solo museum retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974-1975, the vitality of the present work is test.mes nt to the importance of the artist’s vertical sculpture series and pioneering formal sensibilities.
Truitt’s oeuvre is marked by memory, moving beyond abstraction as a tool to convey materiality, private emotions, and nostalgia. Upon studying sculpture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Washington D.C., Truitt encountered a painting by Barnett Newmann for the first t.mes : “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 almost sacred encounter would set the course Truitt would follow in her own practice. As are Newman’s zips, White: Five is both weighty and weightless, denying and delighting the void, physically dense yet subtly occupying, even seeping into the surrounding space.
Renowned critic Clement Greenberg placed Truitt at the forefront of Minimalism, stating, “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.” (Quoted in “Truitt: Changer,” Vogue Magazine, May 1968, p. 254) However, unlike many artists in the Minimalist movement whose sole focus was conveying materiality, Truitt explored abstraction as it refracted perception, allowing traces of memory to influence formal choices. In fact, Truitt rejected the term ‘Minimalist,’ stating, “I have never allowed myself, in my own hearing, to be called a minimalist. Because minimal art is characterized by nonreferentiality. And that’s not what I am characterized by. [My work] is totally referential. I’ve struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form” (The artist quoted in “Anne Truitt and the Color of Truth,” The Washington Post, 14 March 1987, p. G1). Despite this preference, Truitt’s work has become synonymous with Minimalism, her sculptures both armatures for form and landscapes for interpretation. Indeed, White: Five exemplifies Truitt on her path to the utmost abstract, an indication of the pivotal contributions to Minimalist sculpture that she would make throughout her trailblazing career.
“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.”
White: Five calls upon Truitt’s first reductivist sculpture, made in 1961, appropriately titled First. Within a year, Truitt began a series of works which wholly abandoned the notion of figuration, each work consisting of different sized planks in white or dark green. White: Five is a considerably thoughtful example, containing incised lines, modulating its face into five separate segments, all equal in size and width. Truitt painstakingly applied multiple layers of enamel paint to the wood surface of this totemic sculpture in order to achieve her particular surface. This hand-painted approach differentiates her work from that of artists like Donald Judd, who eliminated any personal surface marks in favor of outsourced, machine-made, and industrially produced forms.
Frankly describings her own work, Truitt stated: “I have nearly abandoned form: form doesn’t interest.mes now. What I want is color in three dimensions, color set free, to a point where, theoretically, the support should dissolve into pure color.” (The artist quoted in Jane Livingston’s “Introduction,” Exh. Cat., New York, André Emmerich Gallery, Anne Truitt Sculpture 1961-1991, May - June 1991, n.p.) Eloquently embodied in White: Five, Truitt’s marriage of painting and sculpture results in an overwhelmingly sublime oeuvre that eludes categorization, captivating the mind and engulfing the senses.
