Anne Truitt
| Anne Truitt | |
|---|---|
A Wall for Apricots, 1968
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| Born |
March 16, 1921 Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
| Died | December 23, 2004 (aged 83) Washington, DC, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Known for | Sculpture, Color Field |
| Movement | Minimalism |
Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921 – December 23, 2004), born Anne Dean, was a major American artist of the mid-20th century.
She married James Truitt in 1948 (they divorced in 1969), and she became a full-time artist in the 1950s. A protégée of art critic Clement Greenberg early in her career, she worked within an extremely limited set of variables throughout her five-decades as an artist. She made what is considered her most important work in the early 1960s anticipating in many respects the work of minimalists like Donald Judd. She was unlike the minimalists in some significant ways.
Truitt grew up in Easton, on Maryland's Eastern Shore, and spent her teenage years in Asheville, North Carolina. She graduated from Bryn Mawr College with a degree in psychology in 1943. She declined an offer to pursue a Ph.D. in Yale University’s psychology department and worked briefly as a nurse in a psychiatric ward at Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. 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.
After leaving the field of clinical psychology 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 to see H.H. Arnason's exhibition "American Abstract Expressionists 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. 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.
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