'In the Tower: Anne Truitt' Review: Totemic Titan of Color

Born in Baltimore, educated at Bryn Mawr, and having lived in Boston, Dallas and San Francisco, Truitt by 1960 had settled in Washington. As she relates so eloquently in a film (shown in the gallery), Truitt went though years of welding figurative works. But by the early 1960s she realized that she was no longer interested in narrative art, settling on her métier of exploring the “relationship between shape and color.” The resulting three-dimensional, carefully finished wooden rectangular forms, most often columns of varying sizes, were painstakingly constructed, serving as the ground for layers of nuanced tones. As Truitt describes it, she worked with her “hand held lightly to spread thin paint in yet another transparent coat, feeling the color deepen under the brush.”

Unlike many of her contemporaries, Truitt didn’t practice her color explorations with paint on canvas, so her work is easy to mischaracterize. Her inclusion in the influential 1966 “Primary Structures” exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum suggested that she belonged within the canons of Minimalist art that emerged in reaction to free-wheeling painterly modes of Abstract Expressionism.

Similarly, Truitt’s work feels peripheral to, yet also somehow a part of, the Washington Color School, whose most celebrated members were

Kenneth Noland,

with whom she exchanged creative ideas, and

Morris Louis.

Lastly there’s also the temptation to view Truitt in terms of the deft and elegant color forms of

Ellsworth Kelly

or the “finish-fetish” free-standing painted slabs of

John McCracken.

But all those connections miss her deeply held conviction in the inherent power of her own intensely nuanced feelings about color, and in the viewer’s ability to sense that. Presumably constrained by space, the NGA’s curator,

James Meyer,

has assembled a spare overview that nevertheless touches on most, if not all, of Truitt’s disciplined mastery. The exhibition brochure includes excerpts from Meyer’s extensive interviews with the artist that, along with the gallery film and Truitt’s three published journals (cited in the wall texts), reveal a creative sensibility of uncommon personal insight and intellect.

There’s little in this concise exhibition that helps us understand the artist working toward what eventually became her comfort zone. In a powerful black acrylic drawing, “26 December 1962, No. 5” (1962)—echoing Russian constructivists, and perhaps prefiguring

Richard Serra’s

later paint stick drawings—we can sense a tension between the pictorial and simple abstract three-dimensional form.

Truitt’s “Insurrection” of that same year reflects another of her early balancing acts in the tension between sculptural form and color. Here she struggles with the structural means to carry her color interests: the uneasy parity between a bright red and a brick red (there’s risk in naming Truitt’s colors!) in two slices, on their own awkward base, and the addition of wedge-shaped supporting struts on the back, suggesting that the work might fall forward.

The delicately beautiful “Parva XII” (1977)—which sits on a shelf—is the only horizontal object here, suggesting that Truitt was less comfortable with this orientation or needed to express color’s assertiveness on a grander scale. “Summer Remembered” (1981), a subtly tapered, tall yellow column, has a fine, jagged

Barnett Newman

“zip” implying a platform. Here Truitt pays homage to an artist whose work had been a revelation to her: “My whole self lifted into it,” she writes of seeing Newman’s work at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1961. That whimsical dark mauve scribble, almost at the bottom of the work, also suggests how Truitt kept experimenting with what would make her colors feel both comfortable and independent in the spaces they inhabit. Some of the works, such as the late “Twining Court” (2002), rise directly from the floor, while others are slightly raised by a barely visible recessed pedestal to suggest a kind of levitation—another attempt at liberating the color.

In the glow of these incandescent works, the viewer participates in Truitt’s struggle to emancipate herself from an ironic inner conflict. On the one hand, she asserts in the gallery’s film, “I’m not a sculptor, really…[I’m] trying to lift the color up and set it free…[and] trying to get color in three dimensions.” Yet Truitt can’t help but refer to her works as sculptures. In part this stems from the material she so painstakingly fabricated, forming the support for her variegated palette. “It is wood I love,” she writes in her journals, explaining that it “will disintegrate in time at something comparable to the rate at which we human beings disintegrate.” While successfully reviewing the variety of the artist’s formal concerns, the exhibition leaves us wanting more of the challenging and subtle range of colors that Anne Truitt successfully labored to liberate.

In the Tower: Anne Truitt

National Gallery of Art, through April 1

—Mr. Freudenheim served as the assistant secretary for museums at the Smithsonian.