Anne Truitt: Beyond Presence

Scale and Continuity in Anne Truitt Sculptures

Critics note Anne Truitt’s suppression of the materiality of her wooden primary structures, which typically consist of thin rectilinear boxes, to allow room for the expansion of painted color, which the artist suspends within the primary structures. I argue that the structures’ human shape, scale, and relationship to the floor play a crucial role in structuring her expression, creating tension where the structure asserts the works objecthood while painted color fields suspend it. This allows the artist to communicate both a sensation of durational presence and instantaneous happening at once, which becomes the work’s meaning.

Completed in 1970, Anne Truitt’s Landfall (Figure one), stands a little over six feet tall, a little under two feet wide, and exactly two feet deep[1]. Landfall quietly unfolds in complexity as a viewer spends more time with it. In photographs and upon first impression, the structure appears uniformly covered in the same hue of light blue, leaning toward lavender when seen in diffused lighting. After looking at the work head on, it becomes apparent that as the eye approaches the leftward side of the surface, a barely visible line seems to delineate the light blue shifting into a slightly greener shade of blue, barely different from the other hue. The separating line, nearly invisible at the top of the work’s six feet becomes more and more pronounced as the eye travels down to meet another band of blue, darker in hue, which more firmly delineates the bottom edge of the leftward strip of green-blue. The darker hued band then stretches across the bottom, quickly fading into the green-blue of the left. After our eyes have taken time to attune to different blues, barely delineated in hue or boundary from one another, a separate band, appearing slightly more yellow makes itself visible along the bottom edge. The leftward green-blue and the horizontal bands of color beneath it then wrap around the corner of the column, so that when viewed from ¾ view, we see original blue, then green blue, then original blue again. Boundaries waver due to differences in areas where the artist masked with tape while applying layers of acrylic paint. The column is lifted about an inch off of the floor by small feet, conveying a sense of aeration or hovering. The shifting of colors and the legibility of the boundaries that separate the colors guide the movement of the eye around the object and produce a sensation of depth at once shallow and atmospheric, shallow where the most firmly delineated but tonally similar colors nudge against one another at the bottom, deep as the separating line and the color contained by the line trail off.

Landfall comes out of a specific memory. In her published journal, Daybook, Truitt discusses the personal memory that prompted the works creation, which by simply existing in the world, Landfall objectifies. Truitt writes:

I was driving to the Studio at 1928 Calvert Street at about 10:00 a.m. on a cool, rainy day. I had opened the window beside me to feel the air, and the rain hit my face in gusts. I put my head out into it and on the inside, behind my eyes, I was in a long, shallow, open wooden boat, multioared and with belling, rectangular, maroon sails, and in wind-roughened waves. It was just after dawn; the sun, still tender, was behind my head. Ahead, low on the western horizon, lay a coast just discernible as beach: landfall[2].

A description citing a specific flash of experience from Truitt’s biography, defined by sensory details, outside of a linear chronology typifies Truitt’s relationship to the personal or metaphysical meanings embedded in her abstract works. Gradations of color, guided by the shape of the wood or by lines delimited on top of and around the wood suggest an abstracted landscape and create a port for the meeting of Truitt’s recalled memories with the experiences of a viewer perceiving the work. How is an onlooker to intuit the vivid sensation of facing into ocean wind from a small multioared boat from Landfall’s shifting blues?

In his catalog essay Moving Vision, for Anne Truitt: Paintings at Matthew Marks Gallery, Michael Schreyach outlines a similar problem. He asserts that Truitt is “intuitively and conceptually committed to creatively resolving dialectical tension between materials and meaning.[3]” Schreyach notes that resolving tension between physical matter and the artist’s experience involved engaging or disengaging certain pictorial conventions as a means of representing meaning through the qualities of the medium. Schreyach identifies “problems and solutions that bore upon interest in variable relationships that could be instituted between color and internal delineation; between actual shape and pictorial format; between front and side planes.[4]” Essentially, the content of a Truitt work is the objectification of her personal experience, rather than the personal experience itself. The can be understood more objectively using formal analysis.

Schreyach asserts the artist’s works become credible when “Truitt intuits what form best makes expressive intent believable--rendering it, for us, simply true[5]”. So in an abstract work that attempts to convey personal meaning, we can look to form and engagement with the conventions of the medium for some gauge of credibility of expression. In my analysis, I want to give specific attention to the proportions of the wooden primary structures on which Truitt paints, to investigate the role they play in structuring the work’s meaning by creating a push-pull tension between the support’s quasi-anthropomorphic objecthood and the artists’ suspension of the support with rich and layered coloring.

Historically, critics have downplayed the role of Truitt’s primary structures in the meaning-making process. In National Gallery curator James Meyer’s book, Minimalism: Art and Polemics, Meyer quotes Clement Greenberg’s review of her show at Andre Emmerich Gallery where Greenberg praises the show: “Truitt developed a primary structure that relieved the object of its objectness[6]”. Greenberg liked that Truitt’s intuitive combination of painting and sculpture rendered the object “less literal” than works by contemporaries like Robert Morris, and more like a painting, more “optical.” Meyer partially supports this claim, offering that Truitt’s second Emmerich show in 1965 sees lighter aluminum structures (which she later destroyed), then claiming that by the late 60’s, Truitt’s “bulky, opaque, somber structures give way to progressively thinner columns raised above the floor and painted brighter”[7]. Meyer: “The alternative to Judd’s specific object grows stronger--a blurring of painting and sculpture that is less and less an object[8]”. To Meyer and Greenberg, the intensity and apparent depth of Truitt’s coloring, and the subtle relationships she establishes between her colors, pulls attention away from the wooden support, making it seem not there, or at least less material and more virtual. Certainly by layering coats of paint over the boxes, sanding the wood with each layer, aspects of the wooden medium are suppressed in the hybridization process, but the size and scale provided by these wooden supports make it impossible to suspend the support’s presence definitively. If we believe Meyer when he asserts Truitt uses “reduced geometry and personal touch as a more credible way to access feelings,[9]” I think it's relevant to account for how the size and shape of Truitt’s work in relation to works by other artists in the minimal tradition, and then how the scale of Truitt’s supports contend with her internal, painted relationships.

In Michael Fried’s 1967 acclaimed and controversial essay “Art and Objecthood,” he asserts that literal or minimal art of the 60s, like Donald Judd or Robert Morris, suffers from a kind of theatricality, where minimalist artworks’ persistent solicitation for a response reduces the act of apprehending art to the viewer’s experience of the space the work hangs, as the experience of space is affected by the work[10]. Fried uses the term “theatricality” specifically to juxtapose Berthold Brecht’s idea of theater with conventional theater. In Brecht’s view, conventional theater employs empathy to guide or manipulate the emotions of the viewer. Brecht’s style of playwriting aims instead to refuse empathy for his characters, trying to describe and display a problem and then let the audience decide how they feel[11]. In Fried’s view, the repetitiveness, seeming endlessness, strangeness, and monumental scale of literal art stubbornly solicits a response from the audience in the same way conventional theater demands an emotional response when a sympathetic character faces plight[12][13]. At the same time, many literal artists like Judd commit themselves to removing internal relationships from their works, preventing any objective description of a problem, to continue the Brecht comparison[14].

Although Truitt’s work doesn’t engage in monumental scale or repetition, Fried identifies one more attribute of minimal art that he thinks contributes to its theatricality which also lies at the core of Truitt’s body of work. I plan to explain how Truitt avoids Fried’s charge of theatricality. Fried claims that a latent naturalism or a hidden anthropomorphism in minimal art is incurably theatrical[15]. He elaborates on what he means by the term when explaining why the experience of encountering literalist objects unexpectedly can feel like being in the silent presence of another human. Fried:

There are three main reasons why this is so. First, the size of much literalist work, as Morris's remarks imply, compares fairly closely with that of the human body. [...] Second, the entities or beings encountered in everyday experience in terms that must closely approach the literalist ideals of the nonrelational, the unitary and the wholistic are other persons. Similarly, the literalist predilection for symmetry, and in general for a kind of order that “is simply order... one thing after another,” is rooted, not, as Judd seems to believe, in new philosophical and scientific principles, whatever he takes these to be, but in nature. And third, the apparent hollowness of most literalist work the quality of having an inside - is almost blatantly anthropomorphic. [...][16]

To Fried, latently naturalistic works are a similar size to humans, approach an ideal of unity or wholeness, and appear to have an inside and an outside. A Truitt work like Landfall meets all of these qualifications. I completely agree that they suggest a human presence. Truitt dodges Fried’s charge of theatricality by using the “hidden anthropomorphism” of her primary boxes to counterbalance her radiant coloring and slow-to-appear painted relationships. An example of one of these relationships can be seen in Landfall, where after extended viewing, one notices that the line separating two shades of blue trails off. Because they require more effort to perceive, these relationships are less immediate than the structure’s anthropomorphic effect. Instead of using only continuous presence to solicit a response, like a Morris box, Truitt’s work switches back and forth between the concrete presence of an object, seemingly more real by its physical relationship to human bodies, and a carefully felt atmospheric space inside of the object. Instead of soliciting, Landfall wavers, passing on theatricality, while still employing anthropomorphism to assert its own objecthood as paint suspends it.

Truitt has her own comments on how her structures stand. In the July 31st entry for Daybook, she writes “The works stand as I stand; they keep me company.[17]” Here Truitt acknowledges the human scale of her works, and hints at a relationship of companionship as a result of their shape. Truitt’s scaling of structures asserts a relationship between Truitt and the object and then between the object and the viewer. This comparison of the structures to human bodies can be clarified with one more passage from daybook from January 13. The entry reads:

“The east west north south coordinates latitude and longitude of my sculptures exactly reflect my concern with my position in space, my location. This concern, an obsession since earliest childhood must have been at the root of my 1961 decision--taken unconsciously in a wave of conviction so total as to have been unchallenged by logic--to place my sculptures on their own feet as I am on mine. This is a straight clear line between my life and work.[18]

Here again the artist speaks candidly about the relationship between her life and work, establishing a connection more literal than the imbuing of memory and experience into the forms, which is hard to grasp without biographical information on the artist’s life. The sculptures stand on their own, around the size of humans, on feet that ground them while separating them from the floor. This conveys a sense of hovering and puts the implied mass of the structures in tension with the sensation of weightlessness caused by their lift off of the ground. In this way, the columns’ relationship to the floor also wavers, between immaterial floating and its material wooden blockiness. The decision to use wood as a material, however obscured by paint, renders the work biologically akin to humans. From Daybook again: “Wood will not pretend to stand above a human life span but it is not quite as short lived.[19]” The artist is thinking about how the materials of the support connect back to human life. The support is approachable to humans but not entirely our equal, not entirely available to us.

When I talked about Landfall earlier, I mentioned that it unfolds in complexity. Landfall unfolds in complexity because of its wavering effect. Because Landfall goes back and forth between being an object of human height facing a human, and a thin atmospheric window to look into, it is at once present and in the process of appearing. The structure is firm, human, and present. But the interior of the object, the paint the structure draws tension against, traffics in subtlety, establishing relationships that require close looking to notice. The immediacy of the support and the slowness of its painted content allow Truitt to stay between already present and in the act of appearing, just as memory simultaneously exists continuously and recreates itself in each moment.

Figure One

[1] Dia Art Foundation. “Dia Art Foundation.” Dia Art Foundation. Dia Art Foundation. Accessed November 21, 2019. https://www.diaart.org/collection/collection/truitt-anne-landfall-1970-2016-017.

[2] Truitt, Anne. Daybook. London: Simon & Schuster, 2013. 92.

[3] Michael Schreyach. (2018). "Moving Vision," in Anne Truitt: Paintings 1972-1991, ed. C. Garrett (New York: Matthew Marks, 2018), 4-20

[4] ibid

[5] ibid

[6] Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. 225

[7] ibid

[8] Meyer, James. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. 226

[9] ibid

[10] Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 1-9

[11] Barnett, David. “The Meaning of 'Brechtian'.” Brecht In Practice - Free Online Resource Access, 2017. http://brechtinpractice.org/theory/the-meaning-of-brechtian/.

[12] ibid

[13] Professor Charles Palermo, Discussion of Brecht, Fried, and presence, College of William & Mary, 11/7/2019

Note: many if not most, of my ideas in the analysis of Fried and Brecht were aided by this discussion, including the notions of presence and appearance, adequate description, and solicitation.

[14] ibid

[15] Fried, Michael. Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews. Chicago, Ill: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. 5

[16] ibid

[17] Ibid 37

[18] Ibid, 122

[19] Ibid, 47