September 13 t0 October 26, 2013
523 West 24th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, 212 243 0200

This exhibition presents – in a finely tuned installation – sculptures, paintings, and drawings from the 1970s, many of which haven’t been exhibited since that decade. Early in her career, Washington-based Anne Truitt’s work was positioned in opposition to Donald Judd’s and Carl Andre’s Minimalism by Clement Greenberg, who had been introduced to her by Kenneth Noland. Washington was also home to Morris Louis, another painter exploring color in abstraction, and it was with the potential of color and painting rather than the principles of sculpture that Truitt was determined to find her expressive medium. The result, painted rectangular wooden objects, neither followed the cubistic vocabulary of David Smith, (a friend and supporter of Truitt’s), the found object/vernacular pop of Warhol, or the machined constructions of Judd. It was this independence from both Greenberg’s desire to see her work remain within the sculptural tradition of assemblage, and a rejection of the anti-handmade alternative that makes fitting Truitt into one category or the other impossible.

The pastoral sense of existing within a landscape (think Milton Avery) was very strong in the gallery’s three rooms, not only because of the orientation of the vertical column-like objects and horizontal floor pieces, but also because of the soft and shifting temperatures of Truitt’s color. As sightlines changed in passing through the exhibition, relationships were reconfigured between the individual works. Not only are the individual pieces an externalization of interior experience, their isolation in a shifting context – one that as a group they provide – allows an identification with our own situation in the world to be comprehensible only as flux and change.

The first work encountered on entering the gallery is the painting Februare, 1978. It recalls both Agnes Martin’s and Barnett Newman’s use of line to establish a compelling illusion of space through simple placement and color. Openly handmade, rather than hard edged, it already suggests a three dimensional equivalent that eschews neutral facture. It was on seeing Newman’s and Ad Reinhardt’s paintings in 1961 that Truitt turned to geometric form from figuration. Februare embraces in its chromatic range of cream, lime green and white, a pastoral rather than primary pallet. The green horizontal line is taken around the edge of the frontal surface stressing the objectness of the painting. It was a bold step from this acknowledgement of the edge of the support to the work that Truitt developed, exploring painted surfaces as part of free-standing colored objects that can be experienced actively, no longer images in themselves but now relating to their surroundings dynamically. The vertical columns make the floor, as it meets a wall behind them, an active changing horizon dependent on where the viewer is located.

The titles reaffirm an idea of movement or journey in the second room, three of the four works are called: Jaunt, 1977, Landfall, 1970 and Echo, 1973. Schubert’s song. Der Wanderer, composed in 1816, describes restlessness and estrangement within the context of a search for positive identification with nature, seems apposite in relation to Truitt’s externalization of emotion through colored isolated objects around which we move in order to behold.

In the final room Second Requiem 1977/1980, only reveals its color sequence of vertical slices of green and dark red bordered pink when the viewer circles the piece.  It floats, as do all the column-like works, to effectively free the color from the floor, like a suspended painting, whereas if it were not raised, it would interact as one plane of color meeting another.

Within the exhibition, each group of works establishes a strong and particular sense of place. Take, for instance, the room containing the four white paintings from the Arundel series, all 1975, one on each wall surrounding the black/blue floor-based  Remembered Sea, 1974. The white rectangles of the paintings with their subtle graphite lines are like snow or ice banks around a sliver of deep water, bleak but beautiful, like the sublime moments of Casper David Friedrich’s paintings created from multiple views that were assembled in a single work. Truitt talked of an artist’s work as being a distillation of a life, of the work out-living the artist. In this exhibition her experience of life seems generously well articulated and alive.

The post Finding a Place: Anne Truitt from the 1970s at Matthew Marks Gallery appeared first on artcritical.

May 8 to June 26, 2010
522 West 22^nd Street
New York City, 212 243 0200

Anne Truitt has not always been best served by her admirers.  A case in point is her retrospective last fall, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.  Although respectfully and lovingly undertaken, it went on too long. The opening space, with its rarely-seen early white and black sculptures, was revelatory, and the ensuing galleries, with their signature square columns, were beautiful at first.  However, given the ultra-simplicity of these columns, the large number of them made them begin to seem repetitive. The dinky miniature sculptures toward the end of the show, and the dirge-like final gallery, devoted to yet more of the artist’s work in black, did not enhance her reputation.

The current exhibition is a very different story. Since the artist’s death in 2004 (at the age of eighty-three), Matthew Marks has been chosen to represent the Truitt Estate. This is their first exhibition from it, and they have wisely chosen to keep it simple.  Only thirteen sculptures are displayed (all painted wood, the artist’s chosen medium for sculpture). Three from the 1960s, large and magisterial, occupy one alcove each at the three corners of the gallery (the fourth corner being given over to the reception area and entry from the street). In the center, a spacious, high-ceilinged & elegantly lit square space, are arranged ten somewhat smaller, classic columns, dating from 1971 to 2004, and rising between 60” and 81” in the air.  They create a magical miniature forest through which gallery-goers stroll, looking at each column from every side, and comparing all with their neighbors.  No two columns are exactly alike.  They vary in dimensions and in coloration, but maintain their high quality, and their cumulative effect far surpasses the sum of the individual works. The whole works as an installation, and more than one visitor seems to have wished to take the ensemble home en bloc.

After a childhood on the isolated Eastern Shore of Maryland, Truitt graduated from Bryn Mawr with a BA in psychology. She spent most of her adult life in Washington, DC, where her husband was a journalist, and where they raised their three children.  Anticipating the entrance of the women’s liberation movement into the art world by nearly a decade, she had to struggle to overcome the perception that she was merely “a housewife who made art.”  Later on, she was instead known not only as a gifted artist, but as a stimulating teacher (at the University of Maryland), and the successful author of Daybook, Turn, and Prospect, all based on journals she kept that chronicled the intimate relationship between her life and her art. Despite decades of exhibitions, reviews and sales, her art has always been difficult to categorize. An early supporter was Clement Greenberg, who, in a 1967 catalogue essay for the Los Angeles County Museum, described how moved he’d been by the “box-like” pieces in her first New York exhibition, at André Emmerich, in 1963.  Still, given her resolute reductivism, she never fitted in with the more complex modernist sculpture of Anthony Caro or Willard Boepple. Still less could she be classed with minimalists of the 1960s such as Robert Morris, Donald Judd, or Sol LeWitt. Aligning themselves with pop by reveling in the machine-made origins of their work, these artists had an edge or bite to them that constituted an opposite pole from Truitt’s serenity. Her intention was evidently to make art that looked handmade and was beautiful, even seductive, to contemplate.  Her nearest aesthetic kin are the first-generation abstract expressionist painters from whom she drew her initial inspiration, especially Barnett Newman.  She was also close to Kenneth Noland, while he still lived  in Washington.

All the work in this show is beautiful, especially the columns in the central space.  The colors range from the off-white of Threshold (1997) to the yellow of Sun Flower (1971) and the delicate lavender of Prescience (1978), with its little bands of blue and mauve around the bottom.  But the real muscle is in those three corner alcoves, beginning with White-Four (1962), a narrow, towering white slat on a small white pedestal, and continuing on to Gloucester (1963), composed of two sturdy rectangular slabs, one black, the other deep purple. Third of this triumvirate is Pith (1969), a massive olive-green column that floats slightly off the ground.  Although some columns in the central area were included in the retrospective, the three mighty sculptures in those corner alcoves were not, nor have they been seen in New York in many years.

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Anne Truitt is better known as a sculptor, if not indeed as the author of “inspirational”, somewhat earnest artist-journals with titles like “Daybook” and “Prospect”.  Danese are in fact presenting the octogenerian abstract artist’s her first solo painting show in New York, mostly pieces from the 1980s and 1990s, but with a group of works on paper from the 1960s-1980s in the back gallery.  The paintings are minimal, but unfettered it seems to me by the rhetoric of Minimalism with a capital “M”.  Tellingly, her associations are with post-painterly abstraction- Noland and Greenberg were both acknowledged influences, and the most expressive of the canvases recalls Newman, Frankenthaler and Olitski in the incrementality of the dramatized, isolated line.  A more typical work, like Envoi 1989, places a hard-edged geometrically irregular, approximately rectangular shape in a bright purple against a canvas of related but darker hue.  Some of the later canvases are stretched on rounded frames, creating three-dimensional interest at the point where the shapes negotiate this dip.  (I was unconvinced by the gallery assistant who explained this in terms of economic expediency.)  Aesthetically, all is in the placement of this shape.  The works are exquisitely refined and restrained without the slightest hint of feyness. Indeed, they are at once understated and emphatic.  My favorite of this group had me thinking of a Joseph Albers repainted by Paul Klee.

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