Getting the Most in the Simplest Form - Anne Truitt at Matthew Marks

A rare exhibition of paintings by Anne Truitt is currently on view at Matthew Marks Gallery in New York. Truitt (1921 – 2004) is mostly known for her sculptures, or structures as they are most often called. This is the first major American exhibition of her paintings since the 1970s—only two of the 11 works on view have been shown publicly before. It is a tremendous opportunity for contemporary viewers to re-examine Truitt—her structures, her drawings, and her paintings alike. The subtle hand-painted lines in these two-dimensional works evoke contrasting feelings of both loneliness and hope. The imprecise, painterly forms, just ever so slightly off balance, feel oddly human: flawed yet confident, so different than if she had made them pure hard edge geometric shapes. The color relationships in these paintings seem to take on fresh importance, nudging me to go back and look again at the color relationships of her structures. Meanwhile, the shapes of the surfaces—some tall and vertical, others horizontal and long, others perfectly square—endow the compositions with a rich variety of character. Full of personality and emotion, these paintings remind me that too often Truitt and her oeuvre have been misunderstood. In the 1960s, she was dubbed a proto-Minimalist by the New York art world boys club, epitomized by Clement Greenberg and Donald Judd. But Truitt did not see her work that way. She saw it as a path towards expressionism. She said, “I’ve struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form.” After seeing works by Ad Reinhardt and Barnett Newman at the Guggenheim in 1961, she had an epiphany that she could pack enough color and space into a work of art that she might finally perhaps express the vastness and depth of her innermost feelings. After translating that revelation into physical form, she described “the sharp delight of watching what has been inside one’s own most intimate self materialize into visibility.”

The History of Misunderstanding

The history of how Truitt has been misunderstood by critics dates back to her first solo exhibition, which was in February of 1963 at André Emmerich Gallery in New York. It featured six hand-painted, rectangular poplar structures. Each structure was designed by Truitt then built out of raw wood by a cabinet maker. Truitt then applied the paint, creating abstract patterns on the forms and being sure to leave visible brush strokes. To Truitt, the relationships between the forms, the colors, and the material qualities were intended to evoke emotion and instigate a search for meaning. But the placement of the works in the exhibition disrupted those intentions. The placement was evidently not done by Truitt, but by Kenneth Noland, who was also represented by the gallery, and Clement Greenberg. They allegedly did not ask Truitt for her input while planning the show, and even suggested she remove her first name from the marketing so people would not know her gender.

Anne Truitt - Prodigal, 1986. Acrylic on canvas. 96 x 8 1/2 inches. 244 x 22 cm. © Anne Truitt. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

In photographs, the structures look imposing and crowded, packed together in a low-ceiling room, in some cases placed against a wall. They come off more like pieces of a mouse maze than unique works of art. Including fewer works, or spreading the works out in a larger space, would have allowed each structure to fully express its concerns. Instead, the works were interpreted as a meaningless and anonymous outbursts of Minimalism. That is exactly how the boys club wanted it. Judd had exhibited his first minimal structures just months earlier in a group exhibition in the same gallery. And it was in his essay about the Truitt exhibition that Clement Greenberg first erroneously claimed that her work “anticipated Minimalism.” As with almost everything these men did and said, it was not about Truitt, but was about themselves. They forced Truitt into a false critical box so they could position themselves as the key interpreters of the linear unfolding of art history, as dominated by white men. Every since, viewers have been confused about Truitt and the intentions of her work.

Anne Truitt - Druid, 1992. Acrylic on canvas. 20 x 120 inches. 51 x 305 cm. © Anne Truitt. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

Discover the Real Truitt

Sadly, many art critics are no better today. This show of Truitt paintings at Matthew Marks Gallery comes right on the heels of another major exhibition called In The Tower: Anne Truitt, which closed in April 2018 at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. That show focused on a selection of Truitt works recently acquired by the museum. Among the pieces on view were the haunting yellow and white vertical structure “Mary’s Light” (1962), and the otherworldly, horizontal, duo-toned-blue “Parva XII” (1977). These works in particular hum with nuance and visual poetry. The paint mimics the voices of the forms; the color relationships conspire both with and against gravity. An attentive observer could easily be brought to tears by their emotional power—it starts in the eye, but travels quickly to the mind and the heart.

Anne Truitt - Envoi, 1989. Acrylic on canvas. 48 1/4 x 48 1/8 inches. 123 x 122 cm. © Anne Truitt. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York

But as in the days of Greenberg and Judd, the most influential writer to cover that show—Philip Kennicott of the Washington Post, a Pulitzer Prize winner—diminished Truitt rather than giving her work its due. Kennicott focused mostly on the private life Truitt led. He made petty commentaries on the social circles in which she existed and the gossip that swirled around them. He barely mentioned the art, and when he did it was not critically: take for example his outrageous and patently offensive remark that a selection of Truitt sculptures “stand apart from one another with a certain WASP-ish reserve.” What does that even mean? Regardless, it says more about the writer than the art. Anne Truitt: Paintings at Matthew Marks is a chance to start over with the important oeuvre this underappreciated artist created. It offers an inroad into the nuances and intricacies that informed all of the other work she did. If you have the chance to see it, only take this advice: ignore the critics and let the work speak for itself. Anne Truitt Paintings is on view at Matthew Marks Gallery New York through 27 October 2018.

Featured image: Anne Truitt - Brunt, 1974. Acrylic on canvas. 19 x 92 inches. 48 x 234 cm. © Anne Truitt. Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery, New York
By Phillip Barcio