Anne Truitt

The best kind of memoir...teaches us as much about ourselves as about its author...The writing is clear as a mountain stream."-May Sarton.

Daybook, the Journal of an Artist

Presents the diary of the well-known sculptor, which shows her determination to come to terms with the artist in herself and documents the links between her daily life and her artistic creations.

The Journal of an Artist

Daybook

Turn

The second journal of an artist by "an extraordinary woman: sensitive, intelligent, perceptive"--Doris Grumbach.

In the Tower

Sculpture 1961-1991

Anne Middleton Wagner

Thresholdis an in-depth look at a pivotal decade in the career of Anne Truitt (1921–2004): the 1970s. An authoritative essay by acclaimed art historian Anne M. Wagner delivers new insights into the artist and her work, while extensive excerpts from the artist’s writings--including some previously unpublished--open a new window on Truitt’s creative process and its preoccupation with perceptual experiences that hover along an invisible edge--a threshold, as Truitt often called it, or "the point at which the abstract nature of events becomes perceptible." In the 1970s this idea was an ongoing preoccupation, which she repeatedly attempted to define. The plates section includes generous illustrations of works from the period, including drawings, paintings and the sculptures for which she has been heralded as a key figure in postwar American art.

Threshold : Works from the 1970s

André Emmerich Gallery (New York, N.Y.)

sculpture : 1961-1991

Walter Hopps

Sculpture and Drawings, 1961-1973

Celebrating Anne Truitt's centenary, this posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in her remarkable series of journals In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921-2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to "let the artist speak." These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death. In Yield, Truitt's unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.

Yield

The final volume of Anne Truitt's trilogy reflects on life, art, and the challenges and blessings of old age. In Prospect, Truitt looks at the far end of her life's arc and feels the urgent need to reevaluate her talents as a sculptor. Meanwhile, a forced retirement from her teaching position leads her to examine her own vulnerability.

The Journey of an Artist

Prospect

This is the first book on the paintings of Anne Truitt (1921-2004). Best known for her sculptures--wood columns painted in multiple layers of vibrant acrylic--Truitt also spent more than two decades producing innovative large-format paintings on canvas. Featured here are 16 abstract works made between 1972 and 1993, all generously illustrated, including numerous full-page detail photographs. In an essay Michael Schreyach provides an incisive formal analysis of the works' compositional elements, particularly the tension between two and three dimensionality that characterizes not only Truitt's paintings but also her sculptures. It was through these pictorial and material qualities that she manifested the metaphysical meaning of her art--or, as she described it, "the sharp delight of watching what has been inside one's own most intimate self materialize into visibility."

Anne Truitt: Paintings

All three of Anne Truitt’s artist’s journals in one e-volume, the illuminating, inspiring record of a woman’s reconciliation of the call of creative work with the demands of daily life—with a new introduction by Audrey Niffenegger. Anne Truitt kept a journal throughout her adult life, from her early years as one of the rare, celebrated women artists in the early 60s, through her midlife as an established artist, and into older age when she was, for a time, the director of Yaddo, the premier artists’ retreat in Saratoga. She was always a deep, astute reader, and a woman who grappled with a range of issues—moral, intellectual, sensual, emotional, and spiritual. While working intensely on her art, she watches her own daughters journey into marriage and motherhood, meditates on criticism and solitude, and struggles to find a balance in life. “Balance not stability is the source of security,” she says. Anne Truitt re-creates a life in which domestic activities and the needs of children and friends are constantly juxtaposed against the world of color and abstract geometry to which she is drawn in her art.

Daybook, Turn, Prospect

Brenda Richardson

This retrospective of Anne Truitt's works on paper spans the four decades of her career, from the early 1960s--when Truitt first developed the totemic sculptures in painted wood for which she is best known--to the last years of her life. Many of the drawings are reproduced here for the first time, and cover the full range of her drawing techniques, from graphite, ink and pastel to acrylic on paper. Edges are variously taped, rolled or sliced; Truitt's line is sometimes bold, and at other times subtle enough to seem almost invisible. In one group of works from 1976, paint is applied in layers of subtle color (a signature of her work in all media); a 1966 series of distilled, hard-edged abstractions evoke the architecture of the artist's childhood home with its white clapboard siding and picket fence. This volume offers the first overview of Truitt's drawings to date.

Drawings

James Sampson Meyer

Kristen Hileman

Anne Truitt, an artist based in Washington, D.C. for most of her career, remains an under-recognized force in art post-1960, which has been dominated by artists like Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly who have strongly influenced the movement now known as Minimalism. Part of this lack of recognition stems from the fact that Truitt pursued a staunchly independent course in her art: not only did she take a different path from the Color Field artists often associated with Washington, D.C., but she created reduced geometric abstraction that deviated from the approaches of Minimalist artists in some significant ways. For example, her highly nuanced use of colour veered dramatically from primary hues, and the titles of many of her works evoked places and events that were important to her, suggesting a complex network of references beyond and yet somehow contained by the sculpture. This volume, and the accompanying exhibition, will form an important part of the re-evaluation of Truitt's art, due to the scope of work which it presents. A wide range of three-dimensional works will be presented to showcase Truitt's exploration of colour, scale and proportion. Examples of two-dimensional series on canvas in which the artist investigated the cusp of visibility as well as the relationships between painting and sculpture, join 24 works on paper some of which date to the year that Truitt first arrived at her radical reduction of form, and others that represent a three-year period during the 1960's from which there are almost no extant sculptures. At the heart of this volume are colour plates of the columnar sculptures that became the hallmark of Truitt's profoundly focused practice, and that made her so significant to the development of minimal abstraction. Whilst Truitt's work has featured as part of larger surveys of Minimalism, as well as in Truitt's own artist's journals - Daybook (1984), Turn (1987), and Prospect (1996) - it has never before been the subject of a complete monographic survey. For this reason alone publication of Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection in 2009 will be a major event in itself, and one that will significantly increase our understanding of post-1960's art. AUTHOR: Kristen Hileman the organizing curator of the exhibition, is associate curator, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where she recently curated The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image, Part II: Realisms (2008), and has worked with such artists as John Baldessari, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Wolfgang Tillmans; James Meyer is Winship Distinguished Associate Professor of Art History at Emory University and the author of Minimalism: Art & Polemics in the Sixties (Yale, 2001) and Themes & Movements: Minimalism (Phaidon, 2000). He organised the Anne Truitt exhibition at the Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University in 2004. He also co-authored Howard Hodgkin with Nicholas Serota (Tate Britain, 2006) 150 colour & 12 b/w illustrations *

Anne Truitt

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