In June 1974, Anne Truitt, who was “in need of comfort” after an anxious winter and spring at home in Washington, D.C., visited a friend in Tucson, Arizona. There she spent her mornings sitting up in bed and writing in a brown notebook she’d brought with her for just this purpose. She’d had an idea before leaving D.C. that “I could simply record my life for one year and see what happened.” Her only ambition: “To let the artist speak.”
Anne Truitt, an artist then best known for her rectilinear, deeply hued standing sculptures – work that was, and often is, widely described with middling accuracy as Minimalist – was age 54 and a divorced single mother of three teenagers. She was just coming off the first retrospective exhibitions of her work, at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., and felt rattled by the experience of seeing so much of her art standing shoulder to shoulder. Created over decades utilizing a painstaking painterly (though never gestural) technique, they were now experienced all at once, and in public. Time expanded and collapsed. Amid all of it, Truitt felt herself disconcertingly on display.
“It slowly dawned on me,” she wrote, “that the more visible my work became, the less visible I grew to myself.” She realized that she had used her art “to contain my intensities,” so following the retrospectives Truitt took up writing to understand just what those intensities were made of. By the culmination of the notebook she began in 1974 – which she would publish in 1982 as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist – she could assert that writing had “apparently effortlessly revealed to me the secret logic of my life. And in that logic a faith to illuminate my days.”
Not just her own days. Daybook, along with two other volumes based on Truitt’s journals that were published in her lifetime – Turn in 1986 and Prospect in 1996 – have long been cherished texts for visual artists and writers who, like Truitt, must navigate art-making alongside child-rearing, bill-paying, housekeeping, grant-getting and everything else. The books might be considered guides on how to be both present and productive. In short, how to live as an artist – maybe especially as a mother and an artist.
Now, eighteen years after Truitt’s death, the final volume of her notebooks, Yield, has just appeared. It includes a preface by her daughter Alexandra, who edited the book, and a forward by Rachel Kushner. Yield holds all the potential pathfinding of Truitt’s previous journals, with the added power of documenting two years near the end of the artist’s life. As Kushner writes, “I wanted to know, at my age – right now, fifty-two – how to live, by drawing on the wisdom and determination of a woman at age eighty. I was looking for hygiene, perhaps, of a particular kind: in thought and habits, in temperament and mood. I wanted instructions, silly as that might sound, for parsing the world with care, and honoring my own life.”
We often read biographies for just such insights, seeking maps of how to live. How much more potent, then, to read the words of the subject herself, who begins in January 2001 with an evocation of the aging artist reminiscent of Rembrandt’s clear-eyed self-portraits of himself in old age: “In two months and one day I will have lived on the earth for eighty years. The body that piled pillows prop up in bed on this misty still-dark morning is wicker. An animated arrangement of twigs, kept orderly and useful by respect and care. Orderly and useful and obedient to a conviction that I have not finished specific tasks that I seem to myself to have undertaken when I got born. Four sculptures are in the making in my studio. I intend to complete their undercoating in a week.”
Like Rembrandt, Truitt kept making art until the end. Although as far as Dutch masters go, she seems to have been more drawn to Vermeer, whose View of Delft she mentions in Yield several times. As with her sculptures, where the same form is repeated with subtle, or not so subtle, variations, Truitt’s writing often circles back to familiar figures – Proust, Greek philosophers, Vermeer – and revisits similar themes, places, and significant memories. Unsurprisingly, Truitt’s art and writing feel of a piece. Yield’s preoccupations with polarities mirror the artist’s standing sculptures, notable for having no plinth but standing grounded on the floor while extending upward. Again and again Truitt writes about her aging body and coming death, as well as the deaths of friends, neighbors, and her own parents years ago, alongside tender passages on her three children, her grandchildren, neighborhood children and herself as a child. Old age and childhood are, of course, connected across time, eras that oddly reflect each other. More than once in Yield, Truitt writes about the hermetic principle of “as above so below.” She believes in a discernable structure to all life, a belief expressed by her sculpture and in her journals. As she writes in Yield: “Art refers to the laws behind appearance.”
Although Truitt’s life writing has inspired many women writers and artists since she began publishing it, she seems to have had little interest in women artists as a class. Regarding the establishment of the National Museum of Women in the Arts by Wilhelmina Cole Holladay in 1987, Truitt writes, “I disagreed with her establishment of a ghetto for women.” Later she describes seeing work by photographer Alfred Steiglitz exhibited alongside that of his wife Georgia O’Keeffe where his work “blows away” hers. And on seeing some of Lee Krasner’s work made on her husband Jackson Pollock’s discarded ink drawings, Truitt writes with heat: “Imagine the sheer impertinence of Krasner’s recycling certain of his works.” Her umbrage could even extend to artists with no romantic connection: “It is ironic that no museum is dedicated to Clyfford Still’s work, while Georgia O’Keeffe has one all her own.” (Still now does have a museum dedicated to him, in Denver.)
If she was no flyer of the feminist or even female flag, Truitt’s colorful sculptures could of course still sometimes be dismissed as feminine, with any attendant baggage that implies. Although her work was included in groundbreaking Minimalist shows like the 1966 Primary Structures exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York, Minimalist artist and theorist Donald Judd wrote in a review of Truitt’s work for Arts Magazine in 1963 that “the work looks serious without being so.” And while in 1968 powerful critic Clement Greenberg wrote that no one had predicted the Minimalist aesthetic earlier than Truitt, who if she’d eschewed her complex colors for monochrome might have founded Minimalist art, Judd declared such a notion “in the category of ‘if the queen had balls she would be king.’”
If such dismissive commentary affected Truitt, it’s not evident in Yield. As a long look at one woman’s life in art, it is singularly without rage or even much regret. In her final entry, dated March 30, 2002, when she is eighty-two, Truitt writes about her plans for new sculptures: “Will work on a very large new Pith, #28, piling up out of my own energy … Will order two more eighty-one-by-eighty-by-eight-inch armatures … Will then cut my life to suit the warm cloth I have left in my body.” Art-making until the end, Truitt is as ever a pathfinder worth following.
[Publishedf by Yale University Press on June 21, 2022, 202 pages, $26.00 hardcover]