Anne Truitt, Arundel XIII, 1974

Anne Truitt (1921–2004) was a pioneering American sculptor whose work bridges color field painting and minimalism while remaining distinct from both. For Truitt, abstraction provided a syntax for her impressions — of people, places, ideas, and events. Unlike the literalness of minimalism, her work is rooted in memories and sensations, imbuing her abstract sculptures with emotional depth.

Her artistic sensibility was shaped by influences such as her friendship with Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland, her admiration for Marcel Proust, and her three years in Japan during her husband’s diplomatic posting. Truitt exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and was honored with a retrospective, Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961–1973, at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1973–1974). In recent years, her work has been shown at the Matthew Marks Gallery, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Dia Beacon.

Recognized alongside Agnes Martin as a trailblazer in abstract art, Truitt’s legacy is preserved in her written reflections, including Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt (2023, edited by Alexandra Truitt) and four volumes of journals. Her work continues to resonate as a unique synthesis of intellectual rigor and emotional resonance in 20th-century art.

Truitt began a series of white paintings in 1973, which she titled Arundel after the county in Maryland, near where she grew up. Each painting consists of a rectangular canvas covered with a uniformly painted white ground on which the artist sparingly applied a few crisp graphite lines and occasionally some additional strokes of pure titanium white. The variations in the composition and different proportions of the canvases fascinated Truitt, who despite, or perhaps because of, the vastly reduced vocabulary, continued working on the Arundel series on and off for more than 25 years.

In 1975, the Baltimore Museum of Art organized the exhibition Anne Truitt: White Paintings, which sparked controversy and led to a scandal. A local critic wrote a series of articles denouncing Truitt’s work and even called for the museum’s public funding to be revoked. In Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, Truitt reflected on her intentions for the works and the emotional depth they embodied:

“In these paintings, I set forth, to see for myself how they appear, what might be called the tips of my conceptual icebergs in that I put down so little of all that they refer to. I try in them to show forth the forces I feel to be a reality behind, and more interesting than, phenomena. I keep trying to catch the laws I can feel illustrated in phenomena: in meetings and just-not-meetings; in forces abutting, thrusting one against another, illuminating one another. A force is only visible in its effect, and it is the split second in which this effect becomes just barely visible that haunts me.”

Commanding its own space, Arundel XIII (1974) embodies Truitt’s pursuit of the “just visible,” where mystery and meaning unfold into space through subtle nuances. In this restrained yet profound composition, her vision achieves a delicate balance between presence and possibility, creating openings for contemplation and emotional resonance.

Light As Space: Marina Adams, Joanne Greenbaum, & Anne Truitt

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Anne Truitt

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