Preface

Truitt, Anne; Truitt, Alexandra

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Preface

Anne Truitt, Alexandra Truitt (Editor)

Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt

The impact of Anne Truitt’s art is usually attributed to its formal qualities, particularly its bold use of geometry and color, in which she charted a new direction for sculpture in the early 1960s. But the inspiration for her art was always fundamentally personal: a lifetime of her own memories and sensations. This core creative impulse — to translate the inner workings of her mind...

Author

Anne Truitt, Alexandra Truitt (Editor)

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31891

Preface

Alexandra Truitt

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Description: Installation view by Truitt, Anne

From left: Return, 2004; Harvest Shade, 1996; First Spring, 1981; Threshold, 1997; Twining Court II, 2002.

The impact of Anne Truitt’s art is usually attributed to its formal qualities, particularly its bold use of geometry and color, in which she charted a new direction for sculpture in the early 1960s. But the inspiration for her art was always fundamentally personal: a lifetime of her own memories and sensations. This core creative impulse — to translate the inner workings of her mind into a symbolic language — predates her art. “I am always reaching toward meaning,” she wrote in the 1946 entry that opens this volume. In the years after her graduation from Bryn Mawr, where she studied literature while completing a BA in psychology, writing was the core of her creative activity. Among the earliest entries in this collection are excerpts from a journal she kept in 1948 and 1949. Though written more than a decade before her first artistic breakthrough, she was already engaged with the themes that would occupy her for the rest of her life: the creative struggle and its occasional triumphs, her encounters with the divine in the everyday, and the inevitability of death and loss.

In the decades to follow, as Truitt continued this practice of organizing her thoughts on the page, her writing became ever more entwined with her studio practice. In the same way that her art alternated between drawing, painting, and sculpture, her writing grew to encompass journal entries, book reviews, public lectures, correspondence with friends and fellow artists, and recorded conversations with art historians and curators.

In 1987, when Truitt made the first donation of her papers to Bryn Mawr, the special collections librarian Leo Dolenski asked her to write a concise commentary for each group of writings and implored her not to destroy her early poetry and prose. In her comments on these early writings, she said,

It has taken great self-control not to destroy all this writing, which seems full of emotional self-indulgence. I have read it with astonishment. I had honestly forgotten that I had ever kept a journal, so that was a big surprise, as was the immense amount of writing I seem to have churned out — to little avail. The principal virtue of retaining it is, I guess, that it conveys the atmosphere of my mind — if that should ever be of interest to anyone. Looked at objectively, it seems to me that my work in art played back into my writing when I began to write again in 1974: informed it with structure it never previously had.1Anne Truitt, untitled and undated typewritten note, box 1, folder 2, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library.

In 1973, under the guidance of Walter Hopps, I began to inventory my mother’s art and organize her records. It wasn’t until I was packing the many boxes for the initial Bryn Mawr donation that I began to appreciate the considerable scope and range of her writings. Since then, encouraged by the sheer volume and variety of material, I came to the decision that certain pieces could be compiled as a companion to the three memoirs published during her lifetime — Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996) — as well as Yield, the fourth and final volume published posthumously in 2022.

Those four books, with their clear writing and characteristic honesty, introduced Truitt to new audiences, and established a literary reputation in tandem with that of her art. Collected here for the first time is a representative selection of Truitt’s other writings. Spanning more than fifty years, it includes journal entries, letters, lectures, talks, and reviews, as well as excerpts of conversations that illuminate her working practice as an artist, author, and teacher. This wide-ranging collection confirms her reputation as a voracious reader of fiction and nonfiction alike, and her deep interest in culture, science, spirituality, and history. In addition to the nearly seventy-five boxes of papers now at Bryn Mawr, more than half of which are devoted to Truitt’s writing and correspondence, this volume also draws from privately held material. I was initially tempted to organize these writings thematically, but a chronological approach ultimately emerged as the best way to convey both the arc of her life and the evolution of her thinking. Thus, the writings in the book are organized according to the chronology of Truitt’s life. While that ordering principle largely conforms with the order in which the entries were written, there are some exceptions, specifically the 1987 commentaries that Truitt wrote at the time of the Bryn Mawr donation, which I’ve opted to place earlier in the book at the relevant points along the artist’s timeline. My hope is that this volume will serve as an important resource for scholars but equally be of interest to more general readers who may be acquainted with the published journals and want to know more about Truitt and this period of art history.

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Description: A Page from Anne Truitt's Notebook by Truitt, Anne

A page from Anne Truitt’s notebook, June 26, 1989.

Although sometimes judiciously abridged, the selections presented here are wholly characteristic and revelatory of Truitt’s authentic voice in each genre. For example, the “Letters to Louisa Jenkins, 1966–67” entry represents just a small portion of their entire correspondence but still manages to convey the remarkable breadth of subject matter the two artists discussed. Similarly, “Artist Talk, Yale University, 1976,” was selected over many other illustrated talks Truitt gave from the 1970s onward, as it is distinctively comprehensive both in the range of work covered and the key themes discussed.

Keeping a journal was integral to Truitt’s understanding of her work, her studio practice, and her motivations. Among the journals included in this collection, the “Canada Journal, 1989,” entry reaffirms Truitt’s practice of situating herself along geographic coordinates — a still under-explored aspect of her sculpture that her working drawings reveal.

Truitt believed in equality, and she wanted to be judged alongside her male and female peers as both an artist and writer. She wrote honestly about her direct experiences of inequality in a male-dominated world, and about the specific actions she took in response. Examples covered here include bringing a salary-discrimination lawsuit against the University of Maryland in 1983 (a suit unsupported by her colleagues and only dropped on appeal when it became too costly and protracted to proceed); her decision in 1976 to refuse an honorarium for a talk at Yale University after she was introduced by the head of the art department as a “woman artist”; her 1976 letter to E. A. Carmean, in which she unabashedly sets the National Gallery curator straight about a number of issues related to her work; and her ultimate rejection of Clement Greenberg’s highly prescriptive tutelage.

This collection provides close insight into Truitt’s development as an artist and intellectual, as well as her reflections on other artists and writers, including James Lee Byars, David Smith, Anthony Caro, Isamu Noguchi, Édouard Manet, Marcel Proust, Zelda Fitzgerald, Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Taken as a whole, this survey of five decades of Truitt’s writing confirms her candor, resilience, and firm faith in artistic vision. As she would write toward the end of her life in the journal Yield, “Like all attentive lives, the life of an artist is worth living.”2Anne Truitt, Yield: The Journal of an Artist, ed. Alexandra Truitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 134.

Compiling a volume of this scope would not have been possible without the professionalism, patience, and friendship of numerous people.

Anne Truitt’s papers are held in the Special Collections, Canaday Library, Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. I would especially like to acknowledge the invaluable assistance so kindly provided by Eric Pumroy, the Seymour Adelman Director of Special Collections, and Marianne H. Hansen, the Curator/Academic Liaison for Rare Books and Manuscripts.

I’m grateful to Katherine Boller, Heidi Downey, and the rest of the editorial team at Yale University Press, New Haven, for their diligence and care with this material, and for their unwavering commitment to Truitt’s writings.

At Matthew Marks Gallery, New York: Matthew Marks; Jacqueline Tran, Senior Director; Cory Nomura, Director; and Sean Logue, Head of Archives & Photography.

Miguel de Baca for his perspicacious foreword, and his generosity and fellowship, particularly during long research visits to Bryn Mawr and Japan.

At Joseph Logan Design, New York: Joseph Logan and Katy Nelson for a design that perfectly complements Truitt’s work.

Friends and family: Kristin Baker, Elise Chang, Jem Cohen, John Dolan, Craig Garrett, Susan Heffner, Mark Hussey, Alastair Kusack, Sam Kusack, Megan LeBoutillier, Jerry Marshall, James Meyer, Thomas Nash, Patsy Orlofsky, Neil Printz, Mary Truitt, and Sam Truitt.

And I would particularly like to thank Charles Gute, whose careful and insightful editorial assistance firmly brought these writings together.

1 Anne Truitt, untitled and undated typewritten note, box 1, folder 2, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. »

2 Anne Truitt, Yield: The Journal of an Artist, ed. Alexandra Truitt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 134. »

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