'Anne Truitt' at the Hirshhorn

Only rarely does an historical exhibition unveil a familiar artist as an unexpectedly major figure, as someone who was somehow overlooked. "Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection," on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, is one of those shows.

The exhibition, curated by Kristen Hileman, reveals the full scope of Truitt's multi-disciplinary career and the remarkable, frankly surprising 40-year consistency of her oeuvre. It is a presentation that will leave even the most knowledgable critics, curators and historians wondering how they missed her. [Image: Installation of Return (2004), Elixir (1997) and Evensong (2004) at the Hirshhorn.]

Maybe Truitt has been skipped over because she is an artist who didn't (and still doesn't) fit into a post-ab-ex nomenclature that has confined artists to certain critical, curatorial or commercial boxes. Instead: Like Donald Judd, Truitt was a minimalist. Like David Smith, a sculptor. Like Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, a painter. Like Dan Flavin, a colorist. Like Lee Bontecou or Agnes Martin, a woman who dabbled in New York but who mostly stayed away (and who paid for it). Like David Hammons, an artist whose lack of market savvy and engagement has prevented her from being broadly embraced. Like Robert Irwin or Doug Wheeler, an artist who valued physical experience and perception.

But maybe the best explanation of how we've all missed the breadth of Truitt's achievement is that she was uninterested in the commercial side of the art world. Truitt was never proactive in presenting herself to dealers and collectors She was more interested in her artistic practice than she was in participating in the market-guided establishment. As a result, Truitts are in few museum collections and as a result are not oft on public view. This has had the effect of encumbering new consideration of her work and has sealed her reputation in Greenbergian amber. The Hirshhorn's exhibition should be a shot across the bow of the Chelsea-dominated establishment: When institutions and collectors rely on the trading floor to guide them to accomplishment, that they are effectively confining their worldview to sales brochures.

As a result of all this, the standard view of Truitt was that she was not on the cutting-edge of anything. No more. The Hirshhorn exhibition of 49 sculptures, 26 works on paper and 12 paintings presents Truitt as an artist in the vanguard of multi-media practice. Truitt sculptures are paintings and vice versa. This is not latter-day curatorial or critical myth-making; Truitt herself identified her approach as a progressive conceptual strategy and was was hesitant to refer to her painted plinths as mere sculptures: "It is difficult to convey the idea that these structures are intrinsically paintings, as delicate of surface," she wrote in her famed artist's journal Daybook, the 'work' for which she is probably best-known. 

Before Truitt, artists certainly made both painting and sculpture. Witness Barnett Newman, who made paintings that were one of Truitt's two principle motivating influences. Newman's sculpture practice was distinctly different from his painting practice. The two never overlapped. A Newman painting was a painting and a Newman sculpture was a heroic thing in bronze.

Enter Truitt, who from the very beginning of her practice knew she was doing something different. "[E]arly in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights," she wrote in Daybook. "I was actually trying to... take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake." Fast-forward to now, when Franz Ackermann-style three-dimensional painting and practice-blending is so common that an artist would no more think to separate her painting and sculptural practices than she would confine herself to just one.

Truitt was ahead of her time. The Hirshhorn exhibition reveals that Truitt's practice-blending was not a one-off idea that worked for a while, it was a fundamental principle that drove her for over 40 years, from her first major work, 1961's First [above, left], through the honestly, fatalistically-titled Evensong of 2004, the year in which she died.

Each sculptural plinth is really eight three-dimensional paintings in one. To see Truitt's sculptures fully, a viewer has to look at all four sides, each of which may feature different colors and compositions. Then, to finish seeing each work, a viewer has to stand at each of the four corners, from which the viewer can see two sides of the plinth at the same time. Over a period of time and as you walk slowly around each object, it presents itself as a series of paintings. [Image: Elixir (detail), 1997.]

The exhibition is as perfect as a Truitt show is likely to be. I have only minor quibbles: The sculptures are slightly elevated on risers, which takes away from how they relate to the viewer's body. It's maddeningly impossible to walk 360 degrees around many of them. Even though the exhibition fills nearly an entire floor of the Hirshhorn, it turns out that the color that emanates from each sculpture demands so much space that the show feels crowded. Curators of future Truitt shows will struggle with these same issues; the Hirshhorn handled them as well as they could have been handled.

The only preventable error is the show's catalogue, the first major monograph on Truitt. It includes only two essays, one by Hileman and the other by the minimalism and Truitt scholar James Meyer. Hileman's essay reads like it was assembled by conflict-avoiding team of lawyers rather than by a scholar who was allowed to present and contextualize the artist. The catalogue makes little effort to extend the consideration of Truitt's work among scholars or to bring new context to her achievements. It is a missed opportunity.

Truitt probably wouldn't have minded. She knew that her work had to be experienced, not just seen. The Hirshhorn show closes Jan. 3, 2010. It will not travel.

MAN will feature several more posts examining "Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection." Upcoming posts will examine Truitt as a colorist and as a 'slow artist.'