Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt's work in sculpture, painting, and drawing created a new language of abstraction.

Biography of Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1921. She 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. 

Truitt served as a Red Cross nurse's aide at Massachusetts General Hospital until the end of World War II. She worked in the hospital wards at night, following her daytime role as a research assistant in the hospital's psychiatric laboratory. She married journalist James Truitt in 1947.

In 1949, Truitt pursued sculpture studies for one academic year at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Washington, DC, and later spent three months at the Dallas Museum of Fine Art. After this formal training, she began experimenting with a variety of media and techniques, such as clay, cast cement and plaster, and steel welding.

In 1961, she started to develop the distinctive style for which she would become renowned: painting multiple delicate layers of color, marked by subtle variations, onto wooden constructions that were meticulously fabricated based on scale drawings. The structural components of these sculptures served as frameworks that supported and interacted with the layers of color.

Truitt was a prominent figure in American art for over four decades. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1963 at the André Emmerich Gallery, where her work remained prominently represented for the next thirty years. She was also featured in significant group exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum in 1964 and the Jewish Museum in 1966. Truitt's work has been showcased in solo exhibitions at prestigious venues including the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1975, and the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1992.

In addition to her career as an artist, Truitt authored four books that distilled her years of journal entries into a vivid account of her life in art. Her significant contributions to both scholarship and art earned her numerous honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and five honorary doctorates. In 2003, she was awarded the Cather Medal for her achievements.

Anne Truitt passed away in 2004.

Anne Truitt's Art Style 

Clement Greenberg hailed Anne Truitt as the first Minimalist, a label she contested. Truitt's exploration in sculpture, painting, and drawing forged a distinctive language of abstraction. Renowned for her minimalist, brightly colored totemic sculptures, Truitt also created significant paintings that resonated closely with her sculptural pieces in both form and color.

In her 1970s works, Anne Truitt's palette, characterized by colors traditionally associated with femininity, can be viewed as a deliberate departure from the austerity of Minimalism. Her intuitive approach to color and composition distinguishes her from artists such as Robert Morris and Donald Judd, who are frequently juxtaposed with her.

For Anne Truitt, abstraction served as a language to express her impressions of people, places, ideas, and events. She used color and form as metaphors for thoughts, crafting a visual grammar that stands as uniquely her own in the art history.