TRUITT, Anne

Born 16 March 1921, Baltimore, Maryland

Married James Truitt (divorced 1971); children: Alexandra, Mary, Sam

"I will be going along, doing one thing on the surface—while underneath something else is brooding and preparing itself—the thing I'm going to do next," Anne Truitt said in an interview with Eleanor Munro. On the surface, Truitt is an astonishing artist of sculptures, paintings, and drawings. Since her first exhibit, a one-artist show with dealer Andre Emmerich in New York City in 1963, Truitt has proven herself to be one of the most profound artists of this century. She has won several awards, like the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1971 and the National Endowment of Arts Fellowship in 1972 and 1977.

Truitt earned her B.A. in psychology at Bryn Mawr College in 1943. Afterward, she decided to turn down a scholarship from Yale and took a night class in sculpture in Cambridge. She went on to formally educate herself in art at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, D.C. (1949-50). During the time of her education and private work, Truitt destroyed the art she created from 1950 to 1961, saying, "My eye was off then." As she realized herself as an artist, Truitt became a writer. Merely accounting her own life, she wrote three insightful journals: Daybook: The Journal of An Artist (1982, reprinted 1987, and with an excerpt published in The Norton Book of Women's Lives, 1993), Turn: The Journal of An Artist (1986, 1987), and Prospect: The Journal of An Artist (1996).

Committing herself to introspection through writing, Truitt began Daybook on 6 June 1974, the day she visited a friend in Arizona. The visit was an attempt for rest after she had just accomplished two retrospective exhibits: one at the Whitney Museum of American Art in December 1973 and the other at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in April 1974. The journal was inspired after the exhibits were displayed and she experienced a disturbing realization that her life had gone by without attention to her feelings. She concealed them with her art. Her writing articulates her thoughts of growing old and how it had been artistically recorded. She is aware that she had not given much thought to the time in between young and old when she wrote of her modeling of human bodies: "Classical beauty held no interest to me. I pursued the marks of experience…" She then added, "When I modeled one marked, used female body after another, I was recording adumbrations of what I have now, at the age of fifty-three, become."

While writing Daybook, Truitt continued her daily routine: gardening, taking care of her three children and home, and working in the studio. She wrote this diary for seven years and, at the end of those years, brought "the artist of the present together with the artist of the past." The private writing of the journal was not unlike Truitt. Seeing her sculptures with clear vision, she always worked on them in seclusion, insomuch as to put her work in storage for no public eye. That was until Ken Noland, the owner of the studio she rented, asked to see the sculptures. After a progression of talks by Noland to friends in the art circle, Emmerich took her work, displayed them appropriately, and her identity as an artist became public.

In Turn, Truitt's consideration of her age and death is pursued further for two-and-one-half years of writing. She begins in July 1982, after her ex-husband, James Truitt, killed himself in November 1981. She struggles with the pain of the loss, noting they had been divorced 10 years prior to his death, while contemplating her own death.

Her writing is moving and bounces the reader through all emotions with grace and ease. Turn brings both laughter and tears as Truitt shares her happiness in the publication of Daybook and her sadness of James' death. Despite her melancholy feeling toward his suicide throughout the diary, Truitt's writing in Turn is lighter, even happier, than that of Daybook because she is no longer concerned with finding herself as an artist. She has already done so in Daybook. Truitt has a change in attitude, a "turn," in her second disclosure. She revels in her joys of being a grandmother, takes in daily life as a teacher and gardener, and enjoys the company of family and friends. Turn is the emergence of a defined artist and woman of wisdom.

Spring 1991 through spring 1992 Truitt finds herself "as a person who is preparing to reach the end of a long life." She considers this closeness to death in Prospect, a journal she begins to write as a last attempt to bring her life together as a whole. Burdened by the fears of death, illness, decreased finances, and worry for her children and grandchildren, Truitt's writing forces her to face harsh reality. The diary becomes a remembrance of her life as she prepares for a retrospective exhibition, an attempt to increase her financial worth once more, with Emmerich's gallery—this time showing 30 years of her art. As she goes through piece by piece of her sculptures, paintings, and drawings from 1961 to 1991, she recollects her life with literary eloquence. "The work demanded to be answered to," she wrote, giving her art the honor it deserves. She successfully brings a sense of completeness as she fully understands the meaning of her past and courageously accepts her fated future.

Aside from her work as an artist and writer, Truitt spent much of her time as a professor at the University of Maryland beginning in 1975. She also served one year as acting Director of Yaddo, a retreat for artists.

Other Works:

Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961-1973 (exhibition catalogue, 1974). Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Painting: 17 October-19 November 1976, University of Virginia Art Museum (exhibition catalogue with E. Carmean, 1976). Originals: American Women Artists (1979).

Bibliography:

Berger, M., Beyond Formalism: Three Sculptors of the 1960s: Tony Smith, George Sugarman, Anne Truitt : 18September-24 October 1986, Hunter College Art Gallery, New York City (exhibition catalogue, 1986). Harrop, J. F., "Anne Truitt and the Minimalist Movement" (thesis, 1983).

Reference works:

Newsmakers (1993).

Other references:

Anne Truitt: The Influence of Willa Cather on Her Art (videocassette, 1985). NYTBR (April 1996). Studies in Art Education (Winter 1991). The Future of the Object in Art (audiocassette, 1979).

—KIMBALLY A. MEDEIROS