Anne Truitt

Anne Truitt was an influential figure in American art in the 20th century. Her bold exploration of geometry and colour, while abstract and minimalist in form, deal with themes perception, memory and emotion.

Born in 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland, Truitt was raised in Easton, Maryland, and spent most of her adult life in Washington, D.C. Truitt initially pursued psychology at Bryn Mawr College before shifting her focus to art. Her early exposure to literature and philosophy influenced her deeply introspective approach to artmaking.

Truitt’s work is often associated with the Minimalist movement, although her sculptures are distinguished by their personal and expressive qualities. Her signature style emerged in the early 1960s with vertical, column-like wooden sculptures painted in smooth hand-painted and sanded layers of vibrant colours, which can amount to as many as 30 and 40 layers.

Unlike many of her minimalist contemporaries, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris, Truitt’s art was not purely objective. Her use of colour was infused with her personal experiences and memories, giving her sculptures — and paintings such as her Arundel series — a unique emotional depth. ‘I slowly came to realise that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set colour free in three dimensions for its own sake,’ she wrote in Daybook: The Journal of an Artist. ‘This was analogous to my feeling for the freedom of my own body and my own being, as if in some mysterious way I felt myself to be colour.’

Published in 1982, Daybook offers insights into Truitt’s creative process, philosophical musings and the challenges of balancing life as an artist, mother and woman. The book, along with her other writings such as Turn (1986), Prospect (1996) and Yield (published posthumously in 2022), is celebrated for its candid and eloquent reflections on the life of an artist.

Throughout her career, Truitt's work was exhibited in major galleries and museums, including her first retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973 and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2009 — the first posthumous retrospective of her work following her death in 2004.