Anne Truitt @ hirshhorn — Washington DC

“Perception and Reflection” ended Jan 3

I’m irked and not all that surprised that I was not familiar with the work of Anne Truitt, an artist who created minimalist, colour field paintings in three-dimensional form at the same time as her more famous peers Kenneth Noland and Barnett Newman.  Such is the way of art history.  

Truitt summed up her historical fate well in a video of her working in her studio that accompanied the exhibition.  Shot when the artist was in her eighties, Truitt says something like:  ”I toiled away at work for ages that nobody was really interested in.”  She herself was genuinely interested in it, five decades of work attest to her passion, and it seems the “art world” is interested too, albeit posthumously. 

To truly understand and appreciate these works, patience is required. Deceptively simple in structure and minimalist in form, Truitt paints, for the most part, on rectangular towers.  She stuck to the same format through most of her career.  These towers range in size, but are generally similar — just tall enough so you can’t see the top, about life-size as if  Truitt meant them to engage us in conversation. 

The colours she paints on these towers vary.  There are as many similarities in hue and tone as there are differences, but the colour combinations and juxtapositions seem like new discoveries in each work.  There is a genuine love of colour and Truitt has invested in its exploration.   Her work was about combining colours of different characters to create different effects.  Truitt understood the character of colour.  She says herself some colours are meant to lie down and others float and soar.   

Ironically, she claims that she never bothered to study the science of colour.  But it’s clear that she understood it intuitively. After seeing the depth and breadth of  Truitt’s oeuvre, I have a new found appreciation for colour.