Between 1964 to 1967, Anne Truitt lived in Tokyo, significantly influencing her artistic and intellectual development. Despite this period often being overlooked, it was essential in shaping her approach to sculpture. During her mid-career retrospective preparations in the early 1970s, Truitt destroyed all her Japan-made sculptures, many of which were never exhibited and crafted from painted aluminum—a material she eventually deemed unsuitable.

However, her exploration of aluminum and other studio innovations during her time in Japan, particularly her drawings, played a pivotal role in her lifelong practice. Truitt's works on paper, ranging from hard-edge polygons to veil-like color fields, were primarily created with acrylic paint but referred to as drawings. She used brushes, rollers, and pans of diluted acrylic, incorporating materials like sumi ink and rice paper, which she discovered in Japan and continued to use in her art-making for decades.

Anne Truitt (1921-2004) was an American sculptor whose work bridges color field and minimalism, while belonging to neither. Truitt’s sensibility drew from disparate sources: her friendship with Clement Greenberg and Kenneth Noland, her love of Marcel Proust, and three years in Japan (where her husband served with the U.S. Department of State). She exhibited at the Andre Emmerich Gallery and was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961—1973 (December 19, 1973—January 27, 1974). In recent years her work has been exhibited at the Matthew Marks Gallery in New York and Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., and Dia Beacon. Today she is recognized, along with Agnes Martin, as a pioneering and independent spirit in abstract art in the twentieth century. Truitt’s penetrating intellect is documented in Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt, edited by Alexandra Truitt (2023: Yale University Press), and four volumes of journals and daybooks.