Foreword

de Baca, Miguel

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Foreword

Miguel de Baca

Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt

I first saw Anne Truitt’s sculptures in person at the exhibition “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2004. I remember, as I walked through the galleries, that I was completely felled by Hardcastle (1962), a tall, rectangular black plinth on a short black base,...

Author

Miguel de Baca

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-31892

Foreword

Miguel de Baca

I first saw Anne Truitt’s sculptures in person at the exhibition “A Minimal Future? Art as Object 1958–1968” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2004. I remember, as I walked through the galleries, that I was completely felled by Hardcastle (1962), a tall, rectangular black plinth on a short black base, apparently (but not actually) supported by red sloping struts on its reverse. I felt a sense of urgency behind the meaning of it but did not know what exactly that was. My heartbeat sped up; this was minimalism as I hadn’t come to expect. I had been taught that the minimal art of the 1960s, such as that of Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Carl Andre, was meant to inspire little in the way of emotion.

In that moment, Truitt’s art revealed to me that the act of viewing even radically simplified forms is inseparable from the nuances of broader human sensation. Naturally, when we see things out in the world, we attach memories and emotions to them, consciously or subconsciously. When I learned that Truitt had made Hardcastle to evoke a fatal car crash she remembered from her childhood in rural Maryland, it made sense to me, because the sculpture stirred in me similarly grave feelings. Truitt’s memory is not mine, of course, but I found it remarkable that Hardcastle reveals just enough visual information to translate the memory’s emotional force to the viewer. In my dissertation on this pioneering artist, and the monograph that followed, I had the privilege of studying how her work engages a dialogue between minimalism and ideas within and beyond the history and theory of art.

In researching Truitt, I was pleased to encounter a wide range of references in her books and unpublished manuscripts and letters. I came to know and admire an artist of great erudition, one devoted to the formal qualities of her sculptures, paintings, and works on paper and dedicated to practicing her own authorship throughout her lifetime. Truitt began drafting dozens of short stories and poems in the 1940s. In the 1950s, she translated secondary literature on the French author Marcel Proust and, in the process, became a devotee of his works that are famously about the sensory provocations of memory. Truitt’s reflections on Proust can provide pointed insight into her sculptures as well, especially the early works, such as Hardcastle, as I have studied at length in my book. In the last half of her life, Truitt wrote the well-known and highly regarded artist journals Daybook, Turn, and Prospect, and she kept assiduous notes for a fourth volume, Yield, published posthumously in 2022. To add to this, throughout her life she was an avid letter writer, waking up before dawn to pen correspondence. We must understand that Truitt the visual artist is also Truitt the author: they are one and the same.

Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt will supply generations of scholars, artists, and art enthusiasts with access to Truitt in her own words. The chronological organization of this book gives readers a sense of her evolution as an author and an artist. Journal entries reveal the artist’s relationship to herself: her inner monologue about life, work, and her place in the world. By contrast, her letters afford us a sense of her community with others. While it is true that Truitt had privileged access to some of the twentieth century’s most highly regarded critics, such as Clement Greenberg, and artists, such as Kenneth Noland and David Smith, it is perhaps even more fascinating how she identified with lesser-known figures, especially women who also forged new paths in the sixties and beyond. For instance, not enough is yet studied about Truitt’s profound friendship with Louisa Jenkins, a mosaicist and Catholic mystic in Big Sur, California, revealed in letters that are for the first time given public emphasis in this collection. As the artist’s career progressed, we also encounter the public-facing Truitt: the Truitt of interviews, lectures, and addresses, in which she places herself within the greater context of art history. Readers may be surprised to see Truitt’s published reviews of biographies of Isamu Noguchi, Berthe Morisot, and Joseph Cornell. These are artists with whom Truitt, as a mature artist, could recognize a certain kinship. She concludes her commentary on the Cornell book with words that could just as well have been written about her: “It is a meticulously researched and deeply considered examination of how Joseph Cornell’s daily life contributed to his imaginative life — the only real life he knew.”

Among the entries is an excerpt from the remarkable “Title Tapes,” transcribed interviews between the artist and her daughter, Alexandra, from late 1997 to 1998. Truitt commonly titled her sculptures after places and people from her memory, and these interviews provide rich source material and a rare window into the artist’s thought process, from concept to execution. For some, the ability to tie the artist’s abstract visual work to reality might be comforting. But knowing Truitt the author, the titles are so much more than indexes to a fixed autobiography; they are invitations to contemplate further, like Hardcastle, to see an art deeply connected to life as we experience it — to yours, to mine, to what we see and feel, and to that which connects us to others across time and place.

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