Revisiting Anne Truitt

As I walked through the Corcoran's new permanent collection installation, I bumped into an old friend. Up on the second floor I found Anne Truitt, twice. One was magnificent: 1962's Insurrection, a vertical plank, painted red on one vertical half and pink on the other.

Like all the best Truitts its beauty was a product of its subtlety. When Truitt entered her mature period in the 1960s, such subtlety was out and had been for a while. Abstract expressionism? (Glug glug.) Pop art? (Bam!)

That's part of the genius of Truitt. She is the slow food of art; you have to stand in front of her painted sculptures, for a minute, maybe two, to feel what there is to see. At the Corcoran I noticed that the Truitt was just taller than a person. And just wider too. I was thicker than each painted half, but barely. And to see the whole sculpture I had to walk around it, making me all the more aware of my own body and presence in front of Truitt's work.

Before pursuing art Truitt was a psychologist, working as a kind of diagnostician at Massachusetts General Hospital. I thought of that as I stood at the Corc. Truitt's sculpture was as much about my experience in front of it as it was about the object itself. Truitt's psychology background influenced her art.

The day after I took in Truitt at the Corcoran, I left Washington for a weekend on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Truitt grew up in Easton, Maryland, and she visited it regularly later in life. I took with me Truitt's great artist's chronicle Daybook and re-read it from a bayside hammock. I learned two things about Anne Truitt while I was there, from Daybook and from the land.

Throughout, Truitt frequently describes her surroundings in terms of color and not much else. (Japan, as viewed from a plane, is "wrinkled-prune land, purple in an apricot-violet mist of evening light.") Truitt was a great colorist because she saw color so intensely. "Color occasionally just takes charge," she wrote. "The more I work with it, the less I seem to know about it and the more I trust it." 

(Famously, Donald Judd hated Truitt's colors: "[They] are dark reds, browns and grays, very much like Ad Reinhardt's color," Judd famously wrote in 1963. "The work looks serious without being so. The partitioning of the colors on the boxes is merely that, and the arrangement of the boxes is as thoughtless as the tombstones which they resemble." Just as with Picasso when he discussed Bonnard, Judd was jealous. When Judd wrote those words he was struggling mightily to figure out color himself -- especially how to make two colors work well together. Truitt had that nailed by 1963, while Judd wouldn't master it for years more, until late in that decade.)

I also learned something about Truitt by going to where she was from. I've lived in Washington since 1997, but this was my first trip to the Eastern Shore. Much of eastern Maryland is flat, low-lying farmland, riven with rivers like the Nanticoke and the Choptank. All of the land seems to be within sight of the Chesapeake Bay. One of the middle counties, Talbot, is a fingery mass of a dozen or more peninsulas. Just south of Talbot, Dorchester County features abundant marshes and islands. 

I stayed on Hoopers' Island, a long, narrow island  that never makes it more than about five feet above sea level. The island's color, in the summer at least, was 15 shades of green: pine, bay grasses, corn stalks, marsh reeds. The bay's color was just as variable. One afternoon the Chesapeake started blue, then turned pewter, ashen as a thunderstorm arrived, smoky, and finally a cloudy night turned it black. I realized that it was on the Eastern Shore that Truitt learned the richness and the variation in color.

Truitt learned something else about subtlety here too. As I sat in a hammock with Daybook, I looked out about 15 miles across the Chesapeake, toward where Washington and its suburbs are. I could see St. Mary's County on the other side of the bay -- but just barely. St. Mary's seemed to rise no more from the bay than it had to to stay dry. Anyone living on Maryland's Eastern Shore cut off from the region's two dominant cities, say Anne Truitt, would notice how Washington and Baltimore were on a land mass that was barely perceptible.

Back on Hoopers' Island, I noticed how tiny detail was important here, too. Earlier in the day I had driven by the highest point on the island, a faint rise only a foot or two above the surrounding land. At some point during the several hundred years that people have lived on the island, locals had identified its highest point and, logically enough,  had put their cemetery there. In St. Mary's County and on Hoopers' Island the difference between being in the water and being above it was subtle, but worth noticing. Just like Truitts.

Related: Walter Hopps, who curated Truitt's Corcoran/Whitney mid-career survey, wrote about the relationship between Truitt, her work, and the Eastern Shore but it's not online. Curator Jane Livingston has noted the Judd-Truitt 'relationship' too, and it's not online either. (Livingston's musing was in a catalogue for a 1991 Andre Emmerich show.) Quality Truitt images on the web are few and far between -- I nominate Truitt as an excellent candidate for the first online catalogue raisonne. Poppin'-fresh photograph from Hoopers' Island (above) by my girlfriend and Hoopers' Island tour guide, Kathleen Shafer.