Singular vision

Anne Truitt broke from Minimalist pack

Minimalism tends to conjure up names like Donald Judd, Robert Morris or Carl Andre. Powerful, gravitas-laden artists making powerful, gravitas-laden work. Sculptures forged from stainless steel, aluminum and concrete. Forceful, authoritarian. In a word: male.

Women are not usually associated with that definitive ’60s movement. But Anne Truitt had the distinction of being one of only a few female Minimalists and, according to Emory art history professor James Meyer, the only one to receive props from Clement Greenberg, the prickly Minimalism-bashing critic.

The artist is the subject of the concise, compelling exhibition Anne Truitt: Early Drawings and Sculpture, 1959-1963 at Emory’s Michael C. Carlos Museum, co-curated by Meyer and Carlos Museum curator Margaret Shufeldt.

Instead of the sculpture Truitt is best known for (when she’s known at all), the exhibition emphasizes her drawings that came before them. They served as a kind of test run for the ideas she would use in her sculptural works.

Truitt was a multipronged artist who bucked the Minimalist party line, says Meyer, the art world’s definitive Minimalism scholar. For one thing, she rejected the sleek look of Minimalist sculptures executed in machine-perfect metal. Instead, she paid attention to things like composition through her frequent use of asymmetrical fields of paint applied to wood forms. And while classic Minimalists attempted to erase all evidence of human hand in their work, Truitt’s sculptures were sanded and then painted in layer upon layer of paint to show clear evidence of the artist’s touch. There were other peculiarities as well. Truitt was a mother taking care of children when she began her art-making career, and she lived not in the art hub of New York City but in dowdy Washington, D.C., where she claimed the light was better.

While most Minimalists strived to eliminate representation in favor of celebrating the material (“What you see is what you see,” as artist Frank Stella famously remarked of the Minimalist imperative), Truitt believed her work could refer to the world around her. In a work of particular relevance for local audiences, the Carlos show includes the sculpture “Southern Elegy.” Shaped like a tombstone and broken into segments of black and dark green paint, the work is clear evidence of Truitt’s distance from the nonrepresentational Minimalist agenda. “Southern Elegy” was made in response to the stories of lynching that Truitt heard as a child growing up in Asheville, N.C. Like Truitt’s other sculptures, “Southern Elegy” has a haunting, solid, sentinel-like presence that shows Minimalism’s ability to unfurl intense responses through often-covert means.

Not that Truitt couldn’t also be about the material. Her drawings exploit the physical properties of pen and pencil. The ink seeps into the paper, uncoiling in variations of color, clotting into black masses and then weeping into diffuse gray patches. And her simple, delicate pencil marks on paper are ghostly by comparison, resembling the most evanescent building blueprint imaginable.

Truitt’s works are inexplicably moving. Quiet, abstracted tombstones and picket fences suggest an iconography of America boiled down to its essence. The progression of work from early drawings to later sculpture in Early Drawings allows for an intimacy with Truitt’s creative process that brings an interesting, human element to the work. Truitt’s legacy is no clearer than in this small sample of her output, which resounds with an authoritative, solemn intensity and demonstrates why Truitt was an essential part of Minimalism’s history.

Felicia.feaster@creativeloafing.com