Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection

Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.

Through Jan. 3, 2010

Anne Truitt was not your typical 1960s housewife, said Mark Berman in The Washington Post. Sure, she shopped, cooked, and arranged carpools—in addition to hosting dinner parties and social gatherings with her journalist husband, the Post’s James Truitt, who was “high on the cultural food chain.” But all the while, she also stole moments to work on her sculpture. By the end of the decade, critics such as Clement Greenberg were recognizing her stately, parti-colored boxes and posts as important forerunners of minimalist art. Still, in a world where “the majority of art critics have been male, not unlike the artists who attracted their attention,” Truitt’s art has for too long been underrated. Studying the retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum, it’s hard not to see “a parallel between the art and the artist.” Like Truitt herself, her sculptures seem prim and straightforward but eventually reveal unexpected depths.

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Truitt’s work differs from minimalism in one important way, said Deborah K. Dietsch in The Washington Times. Unlike the relatively simple conceptual schemes of, say, Donald Judd and Ellsworth Kelly, “the logic of Truitt’s sculpture can’t be understood at a glance.” The apparently monochromatic Landfall, for instance, “on closer inspection reveals barely discernible variations in matte and glossy blue and green.” Many of the artist’s “tall columns of colors, meant to be seen in the round,” resemble crucifixes, buildings, or miniature monuments. Yet at the same time, with their pearlescent painted surfaces, they resemble the work of “color-field” painters such as her contemporary Helen Frankenthaler. More than one Truitt sculpture looks like nothing so much as an abstract painting, “leaping off the canvas to be liberated as an object in space.”