Memory Work: Anne Truitt and Sculpture 9780520962972

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Memory Work

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Memory Work Anne Truitt and Sculpture Miguel de Baca

University of California Press

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data de Baca, Miguel, 1980–.   Memory work : Anne Truitt and sculpture / Miguel de Baca.   pages  cm   Anne Truitt and sculpture   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-520-28661-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-96297-2 (ebook)   1. Truitt, Anne, 1921–2004—Criticism and interpretation.  2. Sculpture, American—20th century.  I. Title.  II. Title: Anne Truitt and sculpture.   nb237.t68b33  2016   730.92—dc23 2015022487 Manufactured in the United States of America 25  24  23  22  21  20  19  18  17  16 10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Acknowledgments    vii Introduction   1 •

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1. First (1961)   13 •

2. Hardcastle (1962)   39 •

3. Valley Forge (1963)   61 •

4. Truitt in Tokyo (1964–​1967)   81 •

Notes   113 Bibliography   131 Illustration Credits   139 Index    141 •

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Plates follow pages 34 and 90

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book would not exist without the generosity of the Estate of Anne Truitt. For the last ten years, Anne Truitt’s daughter, Alexandra Truitt, has entrusted me with an abundance of never-before-seen archival materials, entertained many detailed conversations, and included me in the intellectual community that has developed around Truitt’s work. I am very grateful for her support and that of Jerry Marshall, and for their companionship throughout this project. The President’s Office and the Dean of Faculty at my home institution, Lake Forest College, provided crucial financial assistance and leave time to see this book through to completion. In addition to the archives belonging to the Estate of Anne Truitt in South Salem, New York, the research for this book was performed at Bryn Mawr College Special Collections, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Archives of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art Archives in Washington, DC, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Maryland Historical Society and the Maryland State Archives in Annapolis, Maryland, and the Talbot County Historical Society in Easton, Maryland. I started this book as a dissertation, which was lavishly supported by predoctoral fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. I owe a debt of gratitude to the archivists, librarians, and staff members who lent their expertise to navigate me through these various repositories. Many individuals have made this book worth the pursuit. I am grateful to the brilliant example of my graduate advisor at Harvard, Jennifer L. Roberts. Carrie LambertBeatty and Louis Menand provided expert advice and probing commentary. Wanda

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Corn was my undergraduate advisor at Stanford and my first teacher of art history, and I can only hope that my scholarship honors her formidable legacy. My mentor at Dumbarton Oaks, Michel Conan, encouraged me to think about Marcel Proust in relationship to contemporary sculpture and landscape architecture studies beyond Truitt’s work. Colleagues in the field far and wide have influenced and expanded my thinking at critical junctures. I am thankful to Makeda Best, Lisa Blas, Jennifer Greenhill, Jason LaFountain, Megan Luke, Jeremy Melius, and Terri Weissman for their friendly guidance, hours of nourishing conversations, and solidarity in the cause. Debra Mancoff, Andrea Pearson, and George Tully were thorough readers and provided excellent editorial direction. Former students Kim Bobier, Kaisa Cummings, and Nicole White were model research assistants. Cory Stevens aided me with the daunting task of proofing footnotes and the bibliography, and Amy Cuthbert expertly assisted with reproductions. Karla Finley was a whiz in the office and made everything run according to schedule. Additional thanks goes to Mel Bochner, Ellsworth Kelly, Lauren Olitski Poster, the Barnett Newman Foundation, the Estate of David Smith (New York), Rebecca Foster and the Society for the Preservation of American Modernists, the Castelli Gallery (New York), the Gagosian Gallery (Los Angeles), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Jewish Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, and the Warhol Museum for their enthusiastic support of this project and contributions to offset the cost of illustrating this book. The fourth chapter of this book presents ideas induced by extraordinary collaborations in Japan. My first trip to Tokyo in 2011 was funded by the Great Lakes Colleges Association Fund for the Study of Japan, which opened my eyes to the more comprehensive international context for Truitt’s work and, indeed, for American modernism as a whole. Words cannot adequately express the extent of my appreciation for my Japanese colleagues, who treated this study with seriousness and enthusiasm. First and foremost, I must acknowledge Gaku Kondo, a friend and a colleague in art history, who served as guide, translator, facilitator, and interlocutor (usually all at once) on excursions in 2011 and 2013. Gaku introduced me to a true intellectual community abroad, including Michio Hayashi, Hiroko Ikegami, Kenji Kajiya, and Mari Takamatsu. Sen Uesaki granted me vital access to the Research Center for Arts Administration archives at Keio University. Yasuko Imura provided research assistance at the Museum of Modern Art, Wakayama. Tadayasu Sakai of the Setagaya Art Museum, Yuri Mitsuda of the Shoto Museum of Art, and Shigeru Yokota of the Shigeru Yokota Gallery lent their time in interviews. Tadao Ishikawa, the Truitts’ driver in the 1960s, was a fountain of information and helped me locate crucial sites in Wakamatsu-chō and Otowa. In Kyoto, Yoshie Pickup’s advice was indispensible. Ruri Kawashima, who was James Truitt’s assistant in the 1960s, and now serves as the Tokyo liaison to the New York–​based Japan Society, facilitated many meetings and chased down contacts, some of them quite unexpected. It is incumbent upon me to express very deep gratitude to my “Mellon family”: the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, the Mellon Mays Graduate Initia-

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tives Program, the Social Science Research Council, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. These organizations provide particular assistance to cultivate the scholarly interests of underrepresented minorities in the professoriate. The rewards of these programs are many and great, and I remain humbled to be a part of their community. My mother, Carol, to whom this book is dedicated, has seen me through various life journeys, and I am thankful for her love and counsel. I am very sorry that my grandmother, Anna Jeanette “Jet” Olson, died before this book came to publication, although it strikes me now that the span of her lifetime is roughly that of Anne Truitt’s, and retrospectively I realize some interesting compatibilities. My family of friends outside academia has indulged many conversations about my peculiar scholarly passions, often rejoindering with a humorously arched eyebrow. Hopefully this book will shed some light. Lastly, I thank Hunter Hackett for buoying my confidence at every step. I promise to clean the office now.

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INTRODUCTION

Late in her life, Anne Truitt shared a budding friendship with fellow minimal artist Carl Andre. In one of their conversations, Andre remarked on Truitt’s Catawba (1962; plate 9), a sculpture grouped with of one of his artworks at the Museum of Modern Art when it reopened in 2004 after its sweeping renovation. “It has ontology,” he said, adding: “It must have cost you to make it.” She received his words as a knowing smile between artists; only another artist could truly comprehend the intellectual and emotional energy suffused in the labor of making art.1 Truitt’s pondering of the “artist’s life folded into art” runs through her remarkable career as a visual artist and author.2 At the heart of her sculptural practice is the theme of memory, which enabled her not only to express her personal experiences but also to address how perception was changing for a contemporary viewership. Truitt had a peculiarly tenacious attachment to the memory theories of Marcel Proust, an attachment that began in the 1950s when she produced a translation of secondary literature on Proust by the French scholar Germaine Brée. Truitt gravitated toward the Proustian idea that an object in one’s focus could unleash a powerful return to the past through memory, which in turn brings a fresh, even critical, attention to present experience. Whether describing experience representationally or in the abstract, Truitt’s artwork aims for an appeal to the viewer’s memory that repudiated existing critical claims about how art should be perceived. The recourse to remembered sensory information ran counter to the prevailing modernist tenet of perceptual immediacy, especially as it applied to abstract painting, which dictated that a given artwork must not yearn for the memory of past experiences to define it. But Truitt’s freestanding planks and plinths, the earliest

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of which resembled fences, tombstones, and walls, required a newly attentive sensory perception, one deeply contingent on present viewing contexts but not devoid of historical references. Social and contextual analyses of minimalism are now welcome in contemporary art history, but this was not always the case. The 2001 book Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties by James Meyer is foundational.3 Rather than obeying a single orthodoxy, Meyer explains, minimalism’s earliest practitioners embodied heterogeneous approaches to artistic forms. His book was the first to legitimate Truitt seriously as a pioneer of minimalism, and yet she still remains liminal even within the diversity of practices he describes. Despite the fact that Truitt’s work “becomes legible in relation to Minimalism,” its referential qualities distance it from the work of other, better-known artists in his survey, even though he acknowledges that literalism in minimal art is no longer as transparent as it once seemed.4 If one sees Truitt’s artwork as significant to the period primarily because it is infused with authorial intention, then it is no wonder she seems perpetually adjacent to minimalism, even though she was one of the first artists to have innovated it. This book, by contrast, contends that Truitt’s deployment of memory needs to be understood as a novel act of beholding. One of the distinguishing features of Truitt’s approach to perception is that there is no pre-social relationship to objects—​no imaginary phenomenological encounter that is, in Hal Foster’s articulation, “somehow before or outside history, language, sexuality, and power.”5 In the Proustian world that Truitt embraced, even familiar interactions with objects fluctuate depending on situational contexts. The insertion of memory into perception can be overwhelmingly vivid or frustratingly indirect; either way, it summons an experience that resists simplification. Truitt’s appeals to memory suggest such richness; the past unfolds powerfully into the present both spontaneously and irregularly, as a matter contingent upon the viewer’s frame of mind. Furthermore, because memories are not fixed mental images, either in the artist’s mind or in that of the viewer, Truitt’s artwork dismantles the notion of a singular, unified subject. This framework for memory—​symbolic systems collaborating from both within and outside the individual—​implies a public form of subjectivity that would become associated with one of minimalism’s most important cultural innovations.

On Remembering

Memory is a vast concept, linked to countless forms of artistic expression throughout history. An oft-recounted legend of the origin of memory in the Western tradition centers on Simonides of Ceos, a Greek poet who attended a lush banquet where he performed oratories to his hosts and the gods. Under divine protection, Simonides was summoned away from the gathering, and at that very moment a catastrophe struck: the roof collapsed, killing and disfiguring all gathered inside. Returning to the site of the

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disaster, the spared Simonides remembered where guests had sat around the banquet table, and so was able to help grieving families identify remains. From this mythic act, the ancients developed an orderly method of remembering information by associating it with arrangements of objects in an imaginary room. The great orators of antiquity could remember entire passages of text by committing them to discrete visualizations of familiar places.6 Today we know memory as more than just a repository for information to be accessed in a routinized way. Instead, memory recovers complex sensations derived from lived experience. Memory is emotional; it is an instrument of self-knowledge and a fundamental way in which we relate to our surroundings. Where it concerns art, a move into this more subjective realm has been attractive to artists who find in memory an appealing relativism. This was nowhere more evident than in the rebellious 1960s, where the contingencies of memory seemed to belie the ideals of intentionality and coherence so praised in the work of the previous generation of action painters. Memory is also the product of social experience and emerges as a historical particular during periods of flux. When the master ideologies of the nineteenth century began to fray in the early twentieth, memory seemed to be the mechanism by which some were seduced back into a conservative past no longer suited to the ideals of a new generation. Hayden White devised the phrase “burden of history” to explain the open hostility to history threaded through the cultural production of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.7 At the same time, in banishing memory, the danger existed of doing away with individual subjectivity. This was also a problem because automation, assembly lines, and the crush of an incipient popular-culture industry were beginning to colonize the mental habits of the industrializing West. The future of memory was caught between the “nightmare of history” (to borrow another phrase, this time from James Joyce’s Ulysses in an echo of Karl Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire) and the persistent inevitability of individual mnemonic return. As Richard Terdiman argues of this historical tension, when the past “is no longer obviously connected to the present, memory is of diagnostic importance.”8 The production of a memory is in fact a highly unstable confluence of fungible internal images and exterior sensory contexts, further sharpened by one’s private beliefs, wishes, and fears about the mental picture as it develops. Naturally, our memories are dynamic: they change as we change. In 1932, the cognitive psychologist Sir Frederic Bartlett wrote in his groundbreaking tome Remembering, “The traces [of memory] that our evidence allows us to speak of are interest-determined, interest-carried traces. They live with our interests and with them they change.”9 Memory tends not to linger in the past, but rather accesses the past in order to focus our experience of the present. Put another way, a thing remembered will never rematerialize as the thing it actually was, and the discrepancy between these two images reveals as much or more about the present as about the past. Bartlett defended the subjective imagination as an integral intermediary between memory and expression, that is, what we remember and what

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we know. Bartlett’s belief in the superimposition of the past and present in memory was consistent with thinkers in the early twentieth century whose theories suggest that time itself is other than linear. As the contemporary critic Andreas Huyssen has argued, the work of Henri Bergson and Walter Benjamin in philosophy, Sigmund Freud in psychoanalysis, and Marcel Proust in literature explores how inward thinking—​including remembering—​permits fragmented, perhaps even incoherent, versions of the past to emerge.10 In the long shadow of war and its unparalleled loss of life, the postwar generation of the 1950s and 1960s puzzled over how to constitute what it had just witnessed historically, bringing memory once again under scrutiny. In the preface to the first edition of History and Truth (1955), Paul Ricoeur wrote of the “philosophico-theological problem of a total or ultimate significance of history.”11 Sensing an impending disintegration of the cultural monopoly of the West, Ricoeur articulated that in dissolving history, “suddenly it becomes possible that there are just others, that we ourselves are an ‘other’ among others. All meaning and every goal having disappeared, it becomes possible to wander through civilization as if through vestiges and ruins.”12 Much of the continental theory written in the generation following the war opened up such a discursive space for thinking beyond the configuring logic of objectifying narratives of history. It is in this climate that we see a flowering of writing on the subjectivity of memory work, the resurgent popularity of thinkers like Bergson and Proust, and enriching critical revisions of Freud. In all, going forward from the 1960s, the partial and conditional character of memory served to critique master ideologies, national identities, and political consensus in an effort to better characterize a more diverse and highly mediated society. Memory work also took on a different salience in the 1960s due to changes in thinking about structures of temporality, specifically the sense that access to images and information approached near instantaneity. The art historian Pamela Lee coined the useful term chronophobia to describe the agonistic relationship with time characterizing the art and art criticism of the period. To Lee, technological advancement is a major influencing factor, contributing to the culturally shared sense that time was passing with unprecedented speed. Thus memory work in the 1960s was not a simple revisitation of the antihistorical attitudes of modernism, but rather needs to be understood within the contemporary evolving conceptions of time that became “a figuration of uncertainty about the mechanics of historical change itself.”13 Here, the phenomenon of memory—​a collaboration of present and past sensations—​encourages contemplation that disturbs such temporal acceleration. In his study of postwar France, Pierre Nora points to the absence of implicit meanings in contemporary culture, resulting in the social need to establish sites of memory (lieux de mémoire), such as monuments and memorials, to create some semblance of social cohesion in a heterogeneous and fast-paced world.14 Accordingly, one of the larger questions I pursue in this book is that of Truitt’s keeping memory alive in a period obsessed with newness as a cultural condition. It is fascinating to me how the negation

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of “monumentality” is enshrined in the history of minimalism. Note that the sculptor Tony Smith’s assessment of his own work in 1966—​“I was not making a monument”—​has come to theorize minimalism as a whole, without further consideration of memory as a core dimension of human experience.15 Robert Smithson’s antagonism to monumentality is similarly well known and studied. But this standard posture against monumentality and the collective memory it augurs should also be seen in the light of the period’s countercultural leanings; in this sense, memory (both individual and social) can be understood as an important part of contestation in the public sphere, where voices from the center and periphery struggle for recognition. And in this, it is my belief that the more we know about Truitt’s comprehension of memory and what she was trying to do with it through sculpture, the more early minimalism will engage diverse and abundant critical structures beyond the ones already known. By now, the reader should be getting the sense that despite proliferating interests in memory and temporality throughout the 1960s, memory is curiously absent from our present art historical understanding and interpretation of minimal art. In fact, an emphatic experience of the “real” versus the seduction of the imaginary and mnemonic is a vital concern in the genealogy of minimalism’s posture within and against modernism. Part of this is attributable to the phenomenological theories of Maurice MerleauPonty, which held particular sway during the late 1960s and in the decades following, as minimalism began to coalesce historically. James Meyer has notably established the French philosopher’s role in some of minimalism’s seminal texts authored by artists and critics alike.16 Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated into English in 1962, contends directly with the weaknesses of imaginary projection—​one could say, remembered images—​in comparison with the vividness of direct perception. Another of Merleau-Ponty’s books, The Visible and the Invisible (published posthumously in 1964 and in its English translation in 1968), treated the inseparability of the visual, bodily, and phenomenal parts of perception in characterizing a viewer’s subjectivity.17 His writings endure as a theoretical lens through which historians continue to understand minimalism, and it is not wrong to retrospectively connect certain effects of Truitt’s sculptures to those described in his examples. For instance, Merleau-Ponty’s compelling description of the feeling of being grounded in one’s own body as prior to perception is, I think, vital, and offers in theory what minimal art does so appealingly well in example. With this book I am looking for a more nuanced consideration of Truitt’s phenomenology—​a phenomenology based on recollection—​which can be seen as intellectually kindred to Merleau-Ponty (and, for that matter, Bergson, Benjamin, Freud, and others), but which begins by applying Marcel Proust. I want to be clear that no work of art can be reduced to a single access point of interpretation, so this book is not a “Proustian reading” of Truitt’s sculptures. That being said, Proust is a vital influence for us to consider because the artist said that her contact with the French author was transformative. She called it a “turning point” and the “spine along which my thought has developed ever

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since” she translated Brée’s book.18 It was from Proust that Truitt learned how to fashion time into aesthetic experience. Proust is an ideal gateway through which to begin to understand site- and sight-based memories, the contingency of sensory information, the often strange and inexplicable ways that different memories swap representational content in the recesses of the mind, the creative expression of memory, and in all of these, the attitudes toward psychology and memory that impacted Truitt’s reception of these ideas in the middle of the twentieth century, and how she applied them to her understanding of modernism. To start: Proust is best known for his masterwork, À la recherche du temps perdu, a novel in seven volumes originally published between 1913 and 1927. Much of the author’s contribution to a theory of memory concerns episodes of memoire involontaire—​ “involuntary memory”—​t hat the narrator experiences throughout the novels. Proust’s vignette of involuntary memory unleashed by the madeleine is the classic example. Upon tasting the madeleine, Proust’s narrator is powerfully reminded of his aunt’s house in Combray and the ritual performed therein of drinking tea and eating cookies before mass. Later he discovered that the Combray church had been destroyed in war, which came as an upsetting shock. Thus we see how an object—​t he madeleine—​motivates the narrator’s reassessment of an entire and unpredictable range of memories and histories as he tries to integrate the past into his present life and circumstances. No doubt one of the reasons Truitt was attracted to Proust was that the autobiographical narrator in Recherche is on a journey to realize his poetic vision—​simply put, to become an artist. This information reached Truitt at crucial time in her career. Indeed, one of the principal contributions of Brée’s 1950 assessment of Proust (the one translated by Truitt for Rutgers University Press in 1955) was its argument for the novel’s contiguity as an artistic creation, a remarkable distillation of the narrator’s sustained peregrination through the sensory effluvia of memory.19 Such distillation is evident in the linguistic architecture of the Proustian sentence, which is so often an amalgamation of metaphors supplying dense, vivid sensory information. As a writer, Proust used language to cultivate intense imaginary experiences. Of his language, Julia Kristeva has observed that “sensation is always already a memory and a word,” and the reader feels especially immersed in the narration of his remembered reality. Proust’s style revises the ancient art of memory: an entire spectrum of sensations is relived through precious objects and relationships infused into a surprisingly vast array of familiar locations in the narrator’s memory bank. Kristeva continues: “Readers can find their own path to this sensory resurrection by discovering other enigmas and worlds that had been inaccessible to their limited powers of perception.”20 Thus the Proustian memory is twofold: both the meaning that it had for the author and the meaning that it has for the reader, whose own imagination is sparked by his vivid descriptions. It may be strange to will this literary argument about the reader’s/beholder’s experience into the realm of sculpture, but it is a central concern of Truitt’s work. Is it not

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the renowned vividness of the Proustian literary experience that rests in the author’s ability to merge the real and the imaginary, the present and the past? Kristeva locates the alluring quality of reading Proust in the “conjunction between subject and object,” in which the “I” of the autobiographical novel stretches to include the reader’s sensory apparatus, quickening perceptual acuity through the act of reading.21 Similarly, I would like to suggest that Truitt’s sculptures reflect attention to the act of perception, and that this attention begins with the references included in the works (and their titles, which I will discuss later) and radiates outward to appeal to the viewers’ own vast stores of knowledge. As we know, one of the enduring claims that minimalism made in the 1960s was that the ambiguity of the individual artwork allowed for renewed attention to the viewer’s embodied experience of perception. In Truitt’s case, the impetus to create sculpture existed as a clearly articulated wish to establish an immersive experience for the viewer in the present. Her desire becomes all the more penetrating when we realize that for most of her young career she was linked to the modernist critic Clement Greenberg, who prescribed a curiously disembodied perception of painting. Truitt was also grouped with the painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, even though her work actually repudiated many of the critical claims made about their enhancements to the special status of painterly experience. Her entwining with and difference from color field painting is a subject of great importance in the chapters that follow. To recap: this book is about how Truitt’s art engages in the remarkable condensation of present and past experience achieved through memory. This is true for the ancient art of memory as much as for everyday, quick assessments of unfamiliar situations: our psychology subconsciously matches up new phenomena with schemata that already exist in memory, the so-called mind’s eye. Likewise, viewers enjoy the jolt of memory that comes when familiar visuals are brought forth by the sensory content of Truitt’s work: a fence, a tombstone, a certain color or juxtaposition of colors. Naturally, given the unpredictable connections between an image and a memory, seeing one of Truitt’s sculptures may coagulate into a memory for some viewers and not for others. But there is a deeper exploration of the phenomenon of memory at work, which we might call spatiotemporal or physical. In Truitt’s words: “Apprehension of the sculpture takes place in time, in a cumulative fashion as the viewer walks around it.”22 The word cumulative implies a sequenced sensory experience in the actual time and space of encounter. An immediate sensation is not always and regularly the singular focus of experience, but rather its convergence with impressions recorded over time. Truitt’s sculptures incite, by virtue of their requirement of such time, an added reflection on the space of experience—​“as the viewer walks around it.” Spaces are strongly suggestive of social and cultural associations, and this, too, is Proustian. A place is never phenomenologically neutral, but rather already enmeshed in the discourses introduced to it by any number of viewers’ presences. The oscillation between past and present forestalls a single interpretation; instead of recognition as an isolated outcome of seeing one of Truitt’s

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works, the added dimension of time lends the beholder new purchase on the spatial and situational contexts through which different memories and meanings come into our understanding.

On Gender

Gender matters here, too. Truitt’s adaptation of memory tropes strategically decentered the idealized subject of high modernist painting and threatened the masculine identity inscribed therein. The most extensive scholarship on Truitt’s sex is Meyer’s analysis of the matter as it played out in criticism, becoming central to Clement Greenberg’s 1968 assertion in Vogue that Truitt was a “good” minimalist pitted against the aggressively “far-out” look of other, male minimalists such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris.23 Taking a step back, one would expect that Truitt was aware of the masculine prerogatives of the art world and its aesthetic discourses from a much earlier point in time. Not only was she completely fluent in the gendered oppositions that dominated post-painterly abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s, but she also already knew that Greenberg idealized her male Washington colleagues, the painters Louis and Noland, for having captured his prized “instantaneous” look. Greenberg located aesthetic experience chiefly in the eye, discounting all embodied aspects of form that threaten to contaminate an object’s instantaneous optical apprehension.24 I argue along with the art historian Marcia Brennan, among others, that Greenberg’s view presumed an interpretive process that had been invested with the social authority of men.25 Instead, Truitt’s work proposed very close and sometimes fluctuating transactions between past sensory knowledge and present perception, thereby interrupting “instantaneous” vision. From this point of view, Truitt’s plural dimensions of memory essentially rebuffed Greenberg. She thus unsettled the previously held assumption of the viewer’s universal subjectivity and the practice of abstract painting it enshrined, proposing instead an active spectatorship positioning the beholder as a fully embodied subject. Perhaps sensing the transgressive nature of her work, Truitt’s art dealer, André Emmerich—​who also represented Louis and Noland—​deleted the gendering determination of her first name from the title of her debut solo show at his gallery in 1963. It would be misleading to suggest that there is something inherently feminine, or feminist, about Truitt’s thematizing of memory in her artwork. And yet, memory is called upon frequently in second-wave feminism as a tactic for raising women’s consciousness. I will briefly relate two examples to situate this effort in the 1960s. The first is Betty Friedan’s pathbreaking book The Feminine Mystique (1963), which characterized the crisis of her female subjects’ malaise as a fundamental loss of memory. Friedan asserted that women are deprived of purpose when they are “tied to the immediate situation in which they [find] themselves,” to the extent that they lose the ability to integrate past and future personal projections.26 In Friedan’s study, a renewed comprehension of temporality is key to envisioning an alternative in the future. The second example

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is Monique Wittig’s invocation of memory in her landmark novel Les Guérillères (1969; translated 1971). Wittig, like Friedan, understood memory as a potent resource for women to assert the wisdom gained from past experience, looking forward to a more self-possessed future.27 Truitt makes no mention of these or other feminists in her published or unpublished journals, but it is clear that she was intensely focused on the idea that the past intervenes in one’s experience of the present—​sometimes in mundane circumstances, and sometimes in circumstances that require active response—​as a social critique. By studying Truitt with this new emphasis, I advocate for a deeply embedded resistance to established male authority in her practice that is not currently a part of scholarly studies of her art. It is interesting to consider whether Truitt’s example asks us to think in different ways about the social construction of gender and whether she expressed her own gender as a range of bodily and psychic experiences. The beginning of an answer might be found in an especially revealing passage in the first of her three published artist-journals, Daybook, in which Truitt wrote candidly about her relationship to gender, feeling “the cave of womanhood” at her back as a hollow into which she could repair, finding in it her role as a mother and, when she was married, a wife.28 I have always been alarmed by this phrase, finding in it an endangering Freudianism that might tempt us to invoke biological interpretations of Truitt’s art. But then Truitt writes about her emergence from the cave and aspiration to succeed in an art world whose patriarchy was pointed and brutal. Truitt knew the costs of pursuing her labor honestly and aggressively. At times she seemed too feminine, at others not feminine enough—​but what’s clear is that she endured episodes of sexism right from the start. “I should not like to be in a position in which I could not breathe for fear of going against what I feel is right,” she concludes. “But, were I a man, I would not have had laboriously to pick my way through such an obvious train of thought to such an obvious conclusion.”29 Such a response may not have the sound of radicalism, but it persuades me of Truitt’s awareness that her professional goals did not align with sociologically defined roles, something that would have been especially true in the early 1960s when she began to strike out on her own.

I n W or d s

This study leans on close readings of Truitt’s words in order to connect her experiences to her sculptures. Naturally, any artist’s writing is informative, but Truitt’s writing about her career as an artist is absolutely crucial because it offers another interpretation of her work outside the narrow confines of postwar art criticism. She was a lifelong prolific writer, and her massively successful autobiographical journals are intense projections of her memory. Daybook was a project undertaken in the wake of consecutive career retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973 and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1974. Daybook described her awakened desire to “discover how to see myself from a perspective that would render myself whole in my own eyes,” interpreting

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her life as episodes—​memories of both happiness and disillusionment—​accumulating toward her fully realized identity as an artist.30 Because she so valued the act of writing as a true intellectual labor, I borrow extensively from the memories narrated in Truitt’s exquisite, densely woven prose to substantiate my claims. Using Truitt’s writings as evidence is of special importance to me because it resists the other ways in which the artist has been spoken for historically. I proceed with caution, however, because biographical criticism has too often seduced art history into the formation of an uneven canon, lionizing some artists and deprecating others. Minimalism in particular equated its own intellectual seriousness with an abstention from biographical information on the premise that knowing a given artist’s expressive intent negates the character of what was advertised as essentially expressionless art. Anna Chave’s revelatory article “Minimalism and Biography” (2000) argues that, rather than a lack of biography outright, certain biographical admissions and occlusions benefited select artists’ and critics’ careers in the 1960s and 1970s. Arguably, women artists had the most at stake because of preexisting biases against women’s work as inherently expressive or biologically determined rather than rational or progressive.31 These deployments present me with an incommensurable situation: memory as a concept that guides my analysis of these artworks’ effects, and memories that are fundamental to the understanding of individual sculptures’ personal origins and yet cannot serve as the ground for their eventual interpretation. In truth, this apparent contradiction is what attracted me to Truitt in the first place, because here we have a visual artist whose reputation is inextricably bound up with her ability to write movingly about her experiences. Manifestos and explicative statements are not unknown to modern art by a long shot, but Truitt is a special case. Her books are narratives, and her overall writing indicates an instructive incongruity in the structures of memory—​her own memory, no less—​that lends texture and equivocation to her recollections. What I want to say about this is that we cannot always take the artist at her word—​and that this quality is part of the brilliance and capaciousness of Truitt’s prose. For instance, at various points in Daybook alone, memory appears as “instantly accessible,” “reluctant,” the “distance” from which to measure present experience, and “radiant”; sometimes it is liberating, and at other points it seems ominous.32 The most direct way of comprehending Truitt’s biography, then, is to first subject her voluminous writing to close reading, bearing in mind that the description or evocation of a certain memory is but one highly motivated stage in its articulation and that it may evolve over time. In this book, understanding that the autobiographical subject is a confluent projection of personal and social identities, I also look beyond Truitt’s words to learn more about the local and specific culture in which she lived. This endeavor was especially gripping given the myriad ways in which the artist differed from other minimalists who would be her colleagues. I approach the artist’s archives with the same attitude of heterogeneity. Her unpublished letters and interviews are personal offerings; if anything, they situate her as a historical, but no less partial and no less expressive, subject.

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The titles Truitt gave to her sculptures, too, are important source texts. Unlike other artists who pay little attention to titling, or who try to deny personal subjectivity by titling their artworks with seemingly random language, Truitt was deliberate; she titled and retitled her sculptures, sometimes many years after their completion. Here, I am certain that Truitt’s titles are significant in the semiotic sense; these words suggest the fundamental gesture of making meaning, even though their precise contexts may be indecipherable. The Truitt title is not a name continuous with a subject, but rather a way of coaxing a lost image into being.33 Although Truitt’s titles provide this study with entry points into valuable vignettes that guided formal changes in her practice, my goal is not to achieve transparency between memory and form. One of the principles at work in Truitt’s comprehension of memory is the practical impossibility of total recall. Like Truitt, I wish to maintain the sense of something fugitive in her works. The structure of this book is chronological and maps a trajectory from Truitt’s semirepresentational sculptures in the early 1960s to the nonobjective look she achieved by 1968, considered her mature practice. This chronology is important because it leads out with Truitt’s initial repudiation of modernist ideas and it marks evolutions in her thinking about the correlation of reference and perception. To that end, each chapter in this book is organized around a sculpture or group of sculptures denoting a specific stage in Truitt’s early career. The opening chapter chronicles the inauguration of her starkly geometrical yet allusive style with an analysis of First (1961), a sculpture based on the iconic American white picket fence. First, I argue, is a response to the strong sense of social division Truitt experienced both as a child and in her adult milieu. In 1961, a Washington colleague introduced Truitt to the paintings of Barnett Newman, to which she formed an immediate attachment. Truitt’s fascination with Newman’s zip-style paintings accounts for the geometric quality of this and other of her early works. It is my argument that the allusive First is a three-dimensional, sited response to Newman. Truitt boldly repudiated the paradigm of modernist flatness through her stylistic attraction to architecture, which she evoked through sculpture. In the years following First, the influence of architecture led to an increased association in Truitt’s work between the space of perception and bodily response, which I address in the second chapter. The change in her practice was also related to the fallibility of memory, that is, its inability to recall images, which Truitt analogized to abstraction. Hardcastle (1962) is a large, black rectangular plinth based on the artist’s tenuous memory of a fatal car accident she heard about as a child. Here Truitt began to explore nonobjective design as a way of rupturing the denotative function of her earlier architectural forms, appealing to the beholder in deliberately incomplete references. Through a protracted consideration of Hardcastle alongside contemporary pop artworks dealing with the motif of car crashes, I discover a deep mutuality between Truitt’s problematized memory and the resistance to narrative in a broader cultural discourse. Truitt’s sculptures from 1963 onward possess a much wider public interface; at the same time, they solicit an intimate relationship with the viewer, as her successively lay-

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ered, sanded-back colors become visible only through prolonged looking. These formal innovations stemmed from the artist’s preoccupation with the contingency of personal memory as opposed to codified public history. Chapter three focuses on Valley Forge (1963), one of a suite of works Truitt completed to figure out this opposition. The title itself borrows from the geography of Truitt’s beloved college years at Bryn Mawr while also making a surprising reference to a well-known chapter in the American Revolutionary War. By holding structure constant, Truitt radically decontextualizes the viewer’s experience of color. Such a tactic strongly protests against historically painterly attempts to localize color, as well as other artists’ period-specific attempts to standardize it. The fourth and final chapter considers the years that Truitt lived in Tokyo, from 1964 to 1967. The work from this period has not been addressed at length anywhere, and to interpret it I discuss Truitt’s formal experimentation with color and her attempts to force a sense of perceived space out of patterns differing in value and hue. Truitt worked with Japanese fabricators to execute sculptures in aluminum, which she then painted by hand with industrial marine paint. In Japan, she also used space age materials that were unheard of in the United States, including a newly invented fluxless solder, to create precise edges for her metallic sculptures. After an unsuccessful exhibition of these artworks in 1965, Truitt reset her working practice. She became ever more convinced to pursue sculptural forms that would be perceived as pure, suspended color. This led her to produce hundreds of works on paper to flesh out the organization of sensuous, colorful shapes in implied space. When she returned to the United States in 1967, her first fabrication was an upright column to which she applied many highly wrought layers of thinned magenta pigment, enough to achieve a jewel-like, recrudescent surface quality. Titled Return, this work signaled new contact with a point of origin, a return to the course that Truitt had set upon by building First. As in Proust, a “return” signifies aesthetic language devised anew to describe an understanding of old objects. This concept that the beholder’s bodily encounters are mediated not only by the context of one’s surroundings, but also frequently and profoundly by what we know of the past, distinguishes Truitt from those who would be her peers. The primary goal is not recuperation, but rather imaginative dispersion, seeing the present as newly focused by the unpredictable stirrings of memory. This basic formula remained the cornerstone of Truitt’s practice for the remaining four decades of her life.

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1 FIRST (1961)

In 1961, Anne Truitt made a sculpture, about fifty-four inches tall, called First (plate 1). Truitt’s title signaled a critical shift in which the artist broke away from the highly wrought sculptural experimentation characteristic of her style in the late 1950s and began to concentrate on formal simplicity. These concerns are articulated clearly in First, which is pared down to basics: three vertical, white, painted wooden planks cut to resemble the pickets of an iconic American picket fence. The simplicity of design and construction suggest that Truitt was forging connections to minimalism. Yet if we are to properly historicize First as a work of sculpture, we must consider it—​perhaps ­unexpectedly—​as a response not to sculpture itself, but to painting, specifically to the formal and conceptual concerns of modernist painting. We must also consider the sculpture’s allusion to a white picket fence and what that might have meant in the early 1960s, both popularly in American culture and more narrowly within emerging styles of contemporary art usually antithetical to such narrative references. It is tempting to assume that the fence is a nostalgic citation, perhaps reflecting the optimism of President Kennedy’s New Frontier politics, which celebrated American exceptionalism as embodied in the folkloric aspects of the landscape. But this chapter will make something of the opposite case, arguing that Truitt’s First, itself a stubbornly vernacular symbolic object and an autonomous, abstract sculpture, represents a significant revisionist discourse. First also preempts the tendency of minimalist orthodoxy (quite formless in 1961 but evolving over the decade) that emptied space of historical architectural referents, preferring instead to see landscape

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as relentlessly and radically new. Truitt was increasingly occupied by the paradox of inclusive versus exclusive spaces, compactly signified by the iconic fence. This chapter traces Truitt’s recoding of the contemporary experience of division by means of an earlier system of chronological and architectural divisions sited in the landscape of her memory. Truitt’s perspective was calibrated by a lifelong sense of outsider status rooted in her gender; she felt this division deeply and intimately, even as she occupied a privileged social position.

White Picket Fence

It is First’s departure from representational likeness that moves us away from a straightforward iconographical reading of the sculpture toward an understanding of the codes of division critical for Truitt at this point in her practice. To begin, unlike most fences one could expect to find in a landscape, First builds in irregularity and asymmetry, as evidenced in the pickets. The central picket is the broadest and tallest, and its vertex corresponds to an imaginary line of bilateral, vertical symmetry: this picket seems the most conventional of the three. The picket left of center is less broad than the first and its vertex tends to the right; the picket right of center is even narrower, with a vertex that likewise tends to the right, if barely perceptibly. Moreover, the space between the first and second pickets is about one-half inch less than the space between the second and third. Asymmetry is built into the frame, too, for instead of joining flush with the margins of the outside pickets, the rails project beyond to different degrees: the top rail protrudes an inch from the right side of the sculpture, and the bottom rail protrudes an inch from the left. Seen from the front, the pickets appear to be set forward on the base; the rear view further reveals a post that is otherwise concealed by the central picket (plate 2).1 The seemingly fragmentary composition of First invites the viewer to occupy not only both sides but also both ends of the work. By avoiding schematic or predictable geometry, Truitt ensures that the viewer encounters First as a fencelike sculpture, not as a fence. Indeed, our movement around it registers sculpturally—​as we occupy one side, the other, and both ends, with each successive view differing from the next—​even as we strive to understand the referent.2 First’s pickets bear further consideration, for their arrangement reveals much about Truitt’s approach to both represented and real spaces at this juncture in her practice. Separate and distinct, the pickets, together with the rails, create a grid that frames the real space beyond. Among all of her works dating from 1961 and shortly thereafter, Truitt employed this mode only for First: sculptures such as One (plate 3), Mignon, and Muir (all 1962) are also white-painted plank constructions, but in these cases the vertical pales are joined together without intervening spaces. In contrast to these later works, in which surfaces act as containers for paint, First forthrightly articulates the acute difference between a visible, painted surface and an equally visible space beyond it. That is to say, the armature frames and therefore declares a space on the other side.

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FIGURE 1 Barnett Newman, Onement VI, 1953, oil on canvas, 102 × 120 in.

Tr u i t t, N e w m a n , P ro u s t

The picket fence entered Truitt’s mind’s eye as a result of an encounter with modernist painting, which in turn prompted a string of memories of personal and historical landscapes that she became determined to translate into sculpture. In 1961 Truitt visited the Guggenheim Museum in New York with her close friend Mary Pinchot Meyer during the exhibition American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists, curated by H. H. Arnason. There, Truitt admired the subtle gradations of hue in Ad Reinhardt’s paintings and the “home feeling” of the pressed wooden boards arranged by Nassos Daphnis into assemblage.3 What struck her most deeply, however, was Barnett Newman’s painting Onement VI (1953; fig. 1), an eight-by-nine-foot entirely blue canvas bisected by a vertical white stripe. She writes: “And when we rounded into the lowest semi-circular gallery [of the Guggenheim] . . . I saw my first Barnett Newman, a universe of blue paint by which I was immediately ravished. My whole self lifted into it. ‘Enough’ was my radiant feeling—​for once in my life enough space, enough color. It seemed to me that I had never before been free.”4 This was Truitt’s breakthrough moment, a point emphasized by the

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art historian James Meyer: “Truitt was inspired by Barnett Newman’s use of simple divisions and great expanses of saturated color, as well as his allusions to the sublime.”5 Yet importantly, First, as much as it owes to Newman, is not a demonstration of the sublime but rather a disruption of it. First is a sculpture, after all, not a painting, and its referent is a decidedly untranscendent, stubbornly mundane object. The way in which Truitt adapted Newman’s painting and his use of the sublime is worth considering at greater length if we are to fully understand the effect he had on her. Scholars have long noted the feeling of existential sublimity that characterizes Newman’s Onement paintings. The very titles of works in his oeuvre from the 1950s and 1960s clarify the allusion to spiritual experience. Works such as Genesis—​T he Break, Cathedra, Genetic Moments, the series titled “Stations of the Cross,” and the series titled after Dante’s Inferno invite the viewer to impart spiritual meaning into these partitioned fields of color. More specifically, the subject matter (if we can call it that) of Newman’s characteristic stripe paintings has customarily been interpreted as the pure and sublime act of division: the division of spirit from the ordinariness of matter. Thomas Hess, while careful to acknowledge that Newman himself never said as much, interprets Newman’s ascetic vertical-stripe paintings as chasing after the primordial act of division, summoning the entire myth of creation from Genesis.6 In Hess’s widely supported interpretation, Newman’s “Onement” is a state of genesis, a condition of total, unified, and embodied selfhood in the floodlike presence of God. Indeed, Truitt remembers feeling profoundly immersed in Newman’s painting. An insightful term for Truitt’s experience is co-presence, which Yve-Alain Bois first used to describe the viewer’s identification with Newman’s vertical stripe (frequently called a “zip”).7 It is, it seems, this co-presence that affected Truitt so greatly (“my whole self lifted into it”) when she encountered Newman’s work in 1961. She immediately changed her artistic course, abandoning the small clay sculptures resembling Mesoamerican architecture that had occupied her in the late 1950s (plate 4) and beginning to make sleek, vertically partitioned sculptures. Yet Truitt’s personal identification with Newman’s august work has an important temporal twist—​and this is crucial to understanding the abrupt change in her practice going forward from First. Truitt had been deeply impacted by the experience of translating the scholar Germaine Brée’s book Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time from French into English, an edition published by Rutgers University Press in 1955 (fig. 2). Brée’s work is a critical study of Proust’s prominent seven-volume novel about time and memory, À la recherche du temps perdu. In 1953, a friend of Truitt’s from her alma mater, Bryn Mawr, invited her to work on the translation. At the time, Truitt was an aspiring writer, and so this literary project interested her greatly. She had also not yet read Proust’s work, which made her an ideally objective translator of critical literature on the novel. Writing retrospectively in the notes that accompany her archived working translation, Truitt characterized her introduction to Proust as nothing short of a sea change: “I had, obviously, thought a great deal about art but Proust’s formulation of how art came into being, out of an artist’s life, set a kind of spine along which my thought

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FIGURE 2 Title page of Germaine Brée, Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, translated by C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt.

has developed ever since. I saw perfectly plainly how an artist’s life folded into art, rather as air is folded into egg whites in a soufflé: spirit into material. . . . So 1953 was a turning point for me.”8 Truitt’s translation project solidified for her the key Proustian idea that the sometimes unaccounted for aspects of one’s subjective experience in memory can find an orderly frame, or structure, through objectification in art. Proust begins the novel by introducing the protagonist as a restless youngster, thus setting up the expectation that he will someday find a calling suitable to his sensitive disposition; we assume that he will become the writer whose words we now read. But this plotline eventually falls away, yielding to the narrator’s intense descriptions of sensations and intricate characterizations. At long last, his authorship returns at the end when he realizes that he must not merely revel in his memories, which lend him insights into resolving the tumult he felt at the beginning of the story; instead, he discovers that writing brings together the seemingly disconnected moments of powerful sensation, giving his whole life new purpose. It is not only his vivid recollections that matter, but also the sequencing of those recollections for readers as the mechanism by which his vocation is illuminated. Thus, when Truitt cites Proust’s “formulation of how art came into being,” she places special emphasis on structures: the material coming-into-being of the artwork reveals a conjunction between the artist’s subjective experience of remembering and the viewer’s (or, in Proust’s case, the reader’s) direct experience of the artwork’s form. When Truitt writes that she was “ravished” by Newman, she deploys a word that has strongly sensual connotations corresponding closely to the Proustian paradigm. Take, for instance, an extract on the topic of the famous vignette in which Proust’s narrator tastes a madeleine. The highly embodied sensation of this experience instantly envelops the narrator’s mind with the powerful memories of familiar spaces of his childhood. Of this sensation, Brée wrote, and Truitt translated: When the narrator tastes the madeleine, Combray returns to his consciousness in its entirety, unmarred by the transformations and oblivion of the intervening years. He recognized the very substance of Combray and recaptures through memory what made Combray what it was, his own sheer joy at being alive. Beyond thought, emotion, and disillusionment, the narrator has finally come back to his “native country,” defined by a joyous contact with reality. Proust, therefore, had also consciously to create this magic contact with reality. [ . . . ] Beauty is born of this harmony; it is neither in the individual, who is variable, nor in objects themselves . . . but it comes when they are mutually present.9

In other words, it is through his sensuous perception of objects that Proust’s narrator makes contact with the past. His joy in recovering a past reality, from which he has been disconnected through the passage of time, excites his desire to narrate. The thickness of history between the memory and the sensation is also meaningful to connect the

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points from the originating context of the memory to the present moment when it is felt again—​it helps him answer the crucial question of why this feeling, once lost, now returned.10 Similarly, Truitt’s memories are like flashes of sensory information, souvenirs of the ordinary past made profound by their recovery in the present. Knowing what we do about Truitt’s thinking on Proust in the 1950s, we can see how Proustian memory structured her strong connection to Newman’s painting in 1961, which afforded her a striking visual by which to access memory in a revelatory way. Onement VI demonstrated the potential of a personal sensory connection between a contemporary, material object and the general context of origins to which the painting makes a sublime gesture. Instead of plain stripes, however, Truitt tethered First and other early minimal-type sculptures to her own embodied knowledge of familiar forms from her childhood. Continuing the passage on her responses to Newman, she writes: “The fields and trees and fences and boards and lattices of my childhood rushed across my inner eye as if borne by a great, strong wind. I saw them all, detail and panorama, and my feeling for them welled up to sweep me into the knowledge that I could make them. I knew that that was exactly what I was going to do, and how I was going to do it.”11 Her memory thus constructs representation in terms of both likeness (“fields and trees and fences and boards and lattices”) and affect (“my feeling for them welled up”). In this way we discover how First exceeds likeness and suggests the possibility of additional qualities assigned to it by the artist, or indeed any viewer potentially connected to these or other similar images. Simply put, to Truitt there is no experience of form that can exist outside the information supplied to it by memory. What Truitt realized in 1961 was that memory is not merely imagistic, it is also abundantly spatial. Of particular importance in Truitt’s passage is the phrase “detail and panorama,” which conveys a decidedly topographical view of the objects in Truitt’s mind’s eye. The citation of panoramic qualities in Truitt’s precedent memory reminds us that First is a sculpture formulated as a response to the practice of painting. I would like to think carefully for a moment about this dimensional fluctuation in the operation of Truitt’s memory, one that surpasses the Proustian sensorium. The panorama in Truitt’s metaphor takes on the character of imagination, of daydreaming, visualized as images rushing against the back of her eyelids. In its essence, a panorama is either literally moving or suggestive of the viewer’s mobilized gaze, and Truitt’s mental panorama is of an unusually animated sort. As a complementary formulation, sculpture seems all the more “real” to her, providing the durable surface and haptic experience that are missing from the panoramic visualization.12 Whether exemplified by Newman’s abstract fields or the imagined panorama, the practice of painting is anterior to the solidity of Truitt’s sculpture; the sculpture resolves the remembered images into a material form and a real spatial displacement. Truitt calculates responses to modernist painting throughout her early practice, as we acknowledge here and will discover in subsequent chapters, but First initiates this response by positing that the properly embodied evocation of memory requires three dimensions, not two.

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Time Los t

Truitt’s memory engaged a range of familiar three-dimensional forms to mediate the multisensory co-presence she had begun to long for, painting being insufficient to answer that call. This in turn suggests a new and important direction within the generally unstable relationship between reference and abstraction in modernist art around 1960, one also reminiscent of the Neo-Dadaist response to post-painterly abstraction in the same period. For instance, we can better understand Truitt’s questioning of the visual coherence of paintings as two-dimensional objects, and her perspective on First, by comparing her sculpture with Jasper Johns’s Gray Painting with Ball (1958; fig. 3), which reads as an unsublime version of Newman’s Onement VI. Here Johns reimagines Newman’s central bisecting partition as an actual cut in the canvas, made playfully obvious by the insertion of a little wooden ball apparently holding open the seam. Johns divides the canvas in a strikingly mundane way, but conceptually his division is no less profound than Newman’s stripe. The vertical gash still performs the violence of separation, albeit with a twist: the small, obdurate ball acts as resistance, preventing closure, integration, and flat wholeness.13 It is unlikely that Truitt knew of Johns’s earlier painting, but the way she so closely identified a familiar and divisive architecture with Newman’s Onement VI seems in some way to echo Johns’s complementarily haptic formulation. Though not a ball, and not an insertion into a real painting, First is the material embodiment of deferred integration, a small rupture holding open a spatial divide. What we see emerging at the end of the 1950s is the yielding of holistic visual interpretation to a heightened awareness of the flow of images and commodities that mediate one’s relationships to the real environment. With this in mind, we can begin to see how Truitt’s sculpture represents the picket fence as an imprint from memories connected to a spatial history and to her own lived, human geography. First pulls away from strict reference while also, through its representational likeness to a fence, retaining a strong connection to an originating architectural context. This context was Truitt’s hometown, where the picket fence was an iconic presence in the landscape. Truitt was aiming for the restitution of memory through the historically generalizable concept of fences as architecturally sited divisions; in so doing, she drew attention to the divided space around the sculpture itself, which remained a working practice throughout her career even despite her abandonment of iconography after 1962. What is, then, the cultural heritage of the white picket fence, not only as Truitt might have understood it in these early years of her new sculptural practice, but also from the vantage point of her first recording of these experiences in Daybook? Anne Dean was born in Baltimore in 1921 and raised in the village of Easton, located in the area known as Maryland’s “Eastern Shore,” denoting its location on the east coast of the broad Chesapeake Bay. The Dean family lived on Easton’s stately South Street, in a large, Federal-period home. Anne’s parents were cultivated New Englanders who met in Cuba during the First World War and semiretired to the Chesapeake region, attracted by its

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Figure 3 Jasper Johns, Gray Painting with Ball, 1958, encaustic on canvas with objects, 31½ × 24¼ in.

colonial charms and agreeable climate. During the postwar economic boom the area experienced a need for architectural expansion and modernization, and some of the once-cherished historical properties in Easton were slated for demolition. In response, concerned citizens initiated preservation efforts throughout the Eastern Shore. In 1954, the Historical Society of Talbot County was founded to collect artifacts, writings, and oral histories of Easton and its surrounding areas. A second historic trust, Historic Easton, Inc., was established in 1972 when the Easton Town Council decided to raze the Langsdale houses on Washington Street, the town’s primary avenue. Designed in a style combining elements of Federal period architecture with that of the British West Indies, the threatened houses symbolized Easton’s general connection to the United States’ national heritage as well as to trade routes once fundamental to the town’s maritime economy. Shortly after this preservationist emergency and intervention, in 1975, Truitt visited Easton with her friend John Gossage, a fellow Washingtonian, whom she invited to accompany her and photograph the town’s historical properties. Although Truitt herself may not have made much of these documentary souvenirs, which reside in an album in her personal archive—​she never mentioned them in her journals alongside other stories of visiting Easton—​they do reveal her attraction to the architectures of her childhood.14 Taken as a group, these photographs’ concentration on the placement of buildings in relationship both to one another and to the landscape provides a small visual inventory of her memory. The year is fundamental: 1975 was one year after Truitt’s career retrospectives at the Whitney and the Corcoran, and one year after she set out to record memories in the journal, including her experience in front of Newman’s painting, her breakthrough mnemonic wandering to her childhood home, and their contributions to her emerging artistic career. It is certain that during Truitt’s trip to Easton with Gossage, the connections between her memories and her labor as an artist were very present in her mind. Two of Gossage’s photographs depict two different styles of enclosure in situ, each yielding an internal spatial logic of consequence to First. One is a photograph of what had been the Dean family home on South Street (also known as the historic HughlettHenry House), with its small, white-paled gate, situated to the left of the house, separating the brick sidewalk from the garden (fig. 4). The paled gate delimits space, suggesting a private enclosure to which the house and its concomitant memories belong. The second photo is of the ruins of the seventeenth-century Old Whitemarsh Church and cemetery, photographed against a newer post-and-lintel fence built around the historic site (fig. 5). The fence around the old church’s incinerated brick walls establishes a chronological boundary, such that everything inside the fence belongs to a registered landmark of colonial Maryland, while the exterior space seems contemporary and, literally, extraneous. These images exemplify Truitt’s small photographic survey of Easton as a whole, which depicts the insides and outsides of buildings and shows buildings in juxtaposition but does not dwell on the partitions between them. Rather, it suggests an

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Figure 4 Hughlett-Henry House on South Street, Easton, Maryland, 1975. Figure 5 Old Whitemarsh Cemetery and Church Ruin, Trappe, Maryland, 1975.

openness of movement between these remembered spaces. In this, Truitt’s disposition toward memory seeks to overcome strict chronological division. Truitt would have understood that the domestic picket fence, unlike the post-and-rail fence with its eponymous utilitarian design, had both functional and aesthetic purposes. Early-eighteenth-century directives for the building of Williamsburg in Virginia indicate that owners of properties contiguous to the town’s main avenue were held responsible for enclosing their land with walls or fences.15 Over one hundred years later, the architect of the U.S. Capitol, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, observed the widespread domestic use of the white picket fence in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Washington, DC, in the Federal period.16 Another century on, nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century urban and suburban dwellers encircled their houses with picket fences as a nostalgic referent.17 Beginning right at the time of Truitt’s childhood, an influx of urban dwellers built vacation homes in Easton, seeking the tranquility of seashore life. These moneyed families modeled their village homesteads on the architectures already existing in the county, especially the prominent neoclassical colonial and early Federal period manor

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houses.18 The same preference for colonial-style embellishments to buildings survived midcentury modernization, and persists even today, for old and new Eastonians alike. Truitt knew the picket fence as an emblem of colonial Maryland for longtime residents of Talbot County and as an ostensible way in which outsiders moving into Easton (such as her own family) demonstrated their belonging within the town’s landscape. Adopting language extracted directly from Proust’s Recherche, the artist tells us that her subjectivity in Easton as a little girl was split between the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way.” The first, the Méséglise way, is the “local” way in which a townsperson experiences his or her own locality. The Guermantes way is the outsider’s way, and confers rank or privilege coming from an existing external social hierarchy. As mentioned, Truitt’s parents were not native Eastonians and were comparatively better off than most of their neighbors; therefore, they lived in Easton in the Guermantes way. But Truitt was native to Easton, and therefore able to understand it intimately.19 From a young age, therefore, she cultivated a double consciousness, deriving her identity from both insider and outsider modes, learning how to navigate the town through her parents’ eyes and also through her own. Truitt’s First manifests formal eccentricities that localize and link it to particulars of the Eastonian landscape, most specifically to one of the very oldest buildings in the town, the Third Haven Friends Meeting House. Third Haven, one of several buildings cherished by locals for their distinguished age and architectural interest, was a place of worship for the Society of Friends (Quakers); originally built in 1684, it is the oldest continuously used place of worship built of wood in the United States.20 In 1797, during an expansion of the original cruciform structure, the east and west wings were demolished and the west wall was extended twelve feet along its length. The roof, when rebuilt, had unequal sides, with a steep slope on the east side and a long, low slope on the west side, in what is called a “saltbox” shape (figs. 6a and b).21 When Truitt returned to Easton with Gossage in 1975, he took several photographs of Third Haven, particularly of the exterior white wainscoting, doors, and internal post beams. These architectural attributes are clearly reflected in her work. For instance, the distinctive saltbox shape of the renovated meetinghouse closely matches the asymmetrical slopes of the left and right pickets in First; the parallel, horizontal white slats of the exterior wainscoting appear reoriented by ninety degrees in the gathered vertical pales in later sculptures such as One, Mignon, and Muir; and the dark green shutters and doors are invoked in Green: Five (1962; plate 5).22 The photographs of Third Haven evidence as well the artist’s preoccupation with the interdimensional relationships between surfaces and sites. The close-up snapshots of the wainscoting and doors demonstrate a connection to these forms as two-dimensional attributes; the skewing of the triangular picket engages line equally with volume. Truitt’s memory of architecture addresses the differences, and also the mutual inflections, of line and space. As she wrote on a notebook drawing from 1963, reflecting on the memory of barns in northern Michigan (fig. 7): “Exteriors of barns proclaim their inte-

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FIGURE 6a–​b Third Haven Friends Meeting House, Easton, Maryland (postcard), recto and verso.

riors. Exterior lines proclaim interior space. Interior space declares exterior lines. Bones of building are those supports which determine both line and space. Quantity of these is great. Quality, in perfect, idiosyncratic relation to one another, determines visual image, the concept of the building. Apprehended, visual concept differs from the real. Art crystallizes this concept.”23 Gossage’s photographs of Easton provide textures and suggest spatiality; they give a two-dimensional impression of what exists three-dimensionally. The small photographic study measures the town’s architecture quantitatively, recording the “bones” of houses and churches, which in Truitt’s eyes translated into a qualitative, three-dimensional “visual concept” that exceeds the photographical imprint. In “detail and panorama,” then, Truitt’s “visual concept” both adopts the look and shape of specific architectural elements in Easton and gives a generic impression of historic forms that mark the Eastonian landscape. James Meyer, writing about how First differs from more purely referential sculptures appearing at midcentury, notes that “First is not one fence but the token of all of the fences of Easton that Truitt could remember from the distant past.”24 In this fashion, Meyer protects the ability of the sculpture to signify something beyond one specific, localized context, as is the case

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Figure 7 Anne Truitt, notebook entry, “Exteriors of barns proclaim their interiors . . . ,” June 29, 1963, pen and ink on paper.

with Ellsworth Kelly’s Window, Museum of Modern Art Paris (1949; fig. 8), which derives from a particular window the artist saw and remembered.25 But there is more at work in First than the negation of a nominal tendency. The artist isolates the picket fence and Third Haven’s asymmetrical roof as features within the closed signifying economy of a specific place and time. She then transposes this personal context into one that is fundamentally social, constructed for us not as a picture of a fence in its physical context (which, as the small photographic archive suggests, can also be done), but rather as a fence that must be actively recognized and assimilated by the viewer. The transition from the personal to the social requires us to pause. To comprehend this recirculation of Truitt’s memory, I find Susan Stewart’s theory of the souvenir to be of use. In a passage devoted to postcards, emphasizing the differences between the frontal picture, the textual caption, and the handwritten note, she writes: “The self recovers the [previously visited] object, inscribing the handwriting of the personal beneath the more uniform caption of the social.” Uniformity, in Stewart’s sense, refers not only to the absolute conformity of the commodity (the postcard as a mass-produced object), but also to the imprinted matter (both pictorial and linguistic) that represents the site

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Figure 8 Ellsworth Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris, 1949, oil on wood and canvas, two joined panels, 50½ × 19½ in.

as a “culturally articulated” experience. The social folds back onto the personal as the postcard-souvenir enters the public domain and reaches its recipient reader, who in turn validates the sender’s original experience.26 The sender’s subjectivity, expressive potential, and physical place in the world are all, in this sense, confirmed in relationship to percipient others. In order to orient this concept squarely to our present study, permit me this thought experiment. What if First looked different, perhaps as three symmetrical, identical pales? In that case, I think we might agree that the sculpture wanders into what Stewart calls the “social,” the domain of conventional knowledge. While not a commodity per se, this platonic First might refer to a kind of utopia, a snapshot of Americana whose caption reads, “White picket fence.” Now think again about the real First with all of its strange, built-in irregularity. In making visual connections to the local Eastonian

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context ­( Truitt’s personal “handwriting,” as it were), the sculpture expresses the artist’s memory while it simultaneously measures the extent of social knowledge required to imagine her presumptively private experiences. The white picket fence is “culturally articulated,” a symbol and an experience known both privately and collectively. First’s mimesis notwithstanding, the sculpture also presents us with a spatial situation in which we understand the fence as singularly displaced and recirculated to signify something more. First establishes features of a divided space—​later recapitulated by Truitt’s narratives and Gossage’s photographic mementos—​that continue to exist in the present. I am compelled particularly by Truitt’s key isolation of a symbolic historical structure, one that unites First with the collectively remembered terrain of a nostalgic setting while also refusing that meaning, casting doubt on one’s received cultural notions of the historical landscape. In this way, Truitt’s representation of the picket fence in First is more complex than its connotation of the historical American past suggests at first glance.

F e n c e s at t h e N e w F ro n t i e r

Truitt’s sensory universe is extremely diverse, and so her selection of the picket fence as a publicly resonant iconography draws renewed attention to the range of experiences that this architecture evokes. Certainly Truitt understood the picket fence to be strongly symbolic in an American context, standing in for what I will argue are two different ways of thinking about the historicity of the American landscape in the early 1960s. The first version addresses an entrenched sense of quaint Americana synonymous with postwar nativism, which nevertheless contains a refrain of critical dissent that returns us to aesthetic discourses close to Truitt. The second has to do with the rhetorical framing of certain aspects of the American landscape as historically unprecedented, which assumed significance in the 1960s. What we will see is that Truitt marshaled the iconicity of the fence to stand for—​and significantly resist—​treatments of historical memory within the political and cultural rhetoric of postwar America. The specific complexity at hand is the relationship between historical memory and cultural identity, which manifested in the Cold War as an anxiety about the passing of certain forms of protective hegemony that the white picket fence might be understood to symbolize. Paul Ricoeur’s History and Truth related the fear of “wander[ing] through civilizations as if through vestiges and ruins,” to typify a declining Western cultural monopoly.27 Such Cold War fears operated on a quotidian level. Consider an article in Time from May 19, 1961, “Be Prepared,” describing a meal of “fallout biscuits” shared by President John F. Kennedy and Governor Nelson Rockefeller to publicize the stockpiles of such “vitaminized crackers” kept in a supersized bomb shelter under the New York State Capitol building.28 The article, a charming artifact of the early 1960s containment culture, would be unremarkable, except when we read it in the context of the entire magazine: the “Faraway Places” special edition, dedicated to foreign affairs. With that nuance

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in mind, Ricoeur’s speculation about “wandering through ruins” hits home, set in relief against the ruinous situations described in feature articles about Angola, Honduras, and Iran elsewhere in the issue. If the United States is no less vulnerable to the ravages of war, then its cultural production becomes no less subject to the equivocal stare of history. To begin to unravel these issues of historical memory and cultural identity as they were understood in this fraught context, let us examine the references made by Truitt’s First that sustain yet another analogy with literature—​t his time, instead of Marcel Proust, with Robert Frost, the legendary poet of fences. To many readers, even today, Frost’s verses epitomize the American landscape, invoking values of Yankee enterprise in tributes to wilderness and rugged domesticity. Frost’s poetry recital at President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration on January 21, 1961, moreover represents his absorption into the day’s political rhetoric. This point is suggested by the poet’s earlier meeting with Kennedy to review the inaugural address, in which the president asked him to simplify the last line of his well-known poem “The Gift Outright” before reading it publicly. Characteristic of Frost’s expression, the poem narrates American history from British origins to the Revolution to westward expansion. Each generation’s sacrifices—​t he titular “gifts”—​transform the rugged frontier into American civilization. The original final line of the poem, however, is ambiguous; it calls on the present generation to follow in the footsteps of their pioneering ancestors (Frost’s “she” personifying America): “Such as she was, such as she would become.” After conferring with Kennedy, however, Frost read the last line as “Such as she was, such as she will become,” using the declarative future tense to align the poem with the attitude of the inauguration. The resulting syntactic change affirmed American destiny, and Kennedy successfully harnessed the poem’s imagery to the optimism of his presidential campaign.29 Frost’s poem satisfied the need to understand a coherent American national expression as exceptionally (some might say narrowly) rooted in colonial origins. In the words of the literary critic Paul Giles, Frost invoked “a national identity predicated on ritualistic embodiments of the common good.”30 Interestingly enough, Anne Truitt was a witness to Frost’s reading on that day in 1961. She and her husband, James, ranked among the cultural elite of Washington, DC, and their invitation to the inauguration reflected a newly invigorated arts scene in the national capital. As a young couple, the Truitts had lived periodically in Washington during the 1940s (fig. 9). But on their return to DC in 1951, James having been hired as the Washington Bureau chief of Life, they found a central place in what had blossomed into an active cultural moment. The Truitts settled in the fashionable Georgetown neighborhood, where they raised three children: Alexandra (b. 1955), Mary (b. 1958), and Sam (b. 1960). They were actively involved in the Institute of Contemporary Art, which was now a gathering point for the District’s intelligentsia, hosting such artists as Marcel Duchamp, Rufino Tamayo, Isamu Noguchi, and Naum Gabo. After one such event, Duchamp spent an entire evening on the Truitts’ sofa discussing art.31 The ­Truitts were well established in this circuit and befriended others with similar lifestyles

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Figure 9 Anne Dean Truitt and James McConnell Truitt, n.d.

and interests, including Cord Meyer of the Central Intelligence Agency and his wife, the painter Mary Pinchot Meyer; James Jesus Angleton, also of the CIA, and his wife, Cecily; Philip and Katharine Graham of the Washington Post; and Senator John F. and Jacqueline Kennedy.32 What makes the Truitts’ connection to the Kennedys interesting is their implicit influence on John F. Kennedy’s expansive presidential platform, known as the “New Frontier.” As President-Elect Kennedy wrote to the institute’s director, Robert Richman: “During our forthcoming administration, we hope to seek a productive relationship with our writers, artists, composers, philosophers, scientists and heads of cultural institutions, especially in the nation’s capital.”33 Knowing that Anne Truitt attended the inauguration, we might expect that she understood the event as an exhortation to expand the “protective hegemony” of American culture, just as it was intended for the general audience. But that was not necessarily the case. Truitt and her colleagues, steeped in contemporary modernist criticism, in fact formed a peculiar audience-within-the-audience for Frost. To hear him as Truitt may have heard him reveals his potential distance from the predictions of his quaint poetic motifs. In 1958, the author Lionel Trilling read a speech at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday tribute (published the next year in the Partisan Review) unexpectedly praising Frost’s “terrifying” qualities and suggesting that the modern reader reevaluate the normalizing aspects of his poetry’s well-worn symbols.34 As Trilling pointed out, Frost’s earliest poems were strikingly reactionary against Victorian sentimentality, and there were other disengagements as well, ones angled against romantic positivism, in which the poet’s voice feels oddly removed from the threateningly animate landscapes he describes.35 By reclaiming him as a modernist, Trilling recovered Frost’s poetic sensibility as impressively contrarian.

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“The Gift Outright” is redolent of such displacement, less in terms of its subject matter (which can be read as effusively nativist) than in terms of its irregular vocabulary and tone. Frost’s ambivalence permeates the poem, particularly in the disconnect between words that usually connote positive American cultural meanings (e.g., salvation, westward) and confusing locutions that render those words indefinite.36 Frost’s poem thus could be understood on one level as an intensification of American iconography, and on another as an abstraction or critique. As a representative voice for the nation at the inauguration, a moment of heightened political solidarity, Frost occluded the fractious concluding locution in order to strike a more declarative note at Kennedy’s request. Ironically, then, Kennedy’s New Frontier relied on the provincial Frost (and not the modernist Frost) to constitute a cohesive, progressive social body. Frost’s inclusion in the inauguration invited the American public to envision itself as an undivided, political whole, even if this vision repressed the equivocation of its source. Trilling’s praise of Frost reflects an intellectual strain that brings us closer to Truitt’s First. On the surface, both Truitt and Frost were artists engaging familiar American subjects through stylistically modern modes of art and invoking the American landscape as the general context for their memory. I am interested in a deeper parallelism, however, which is each artist’s ability to evoke American history, political ideology, and artistic modernism at the cusp of the 1960s. True enough, Frost’s typology of the American landscape was politicized to bolster President Kennedy’s rhetoric of boundless enterprise. The poem’s flip from antique colonial landscapes to unenhanced frontiers (“such as she will become”) surprisingly mirrors a situation in the arts that had begun to be systematized by minimalism: namely, a view of space emptied of its usual identifiers. Truitt’s First seems centered on this symbolic interchange between old and new expressions. To understand this more clearly, let us first evaluate the modernist position. At least one critic of the visual arts sensed the political appropriation of cultural capital. Clement Greenberg’s well-known essay “The Case for Abstract Art” appeared in the Saturday Evening Post the same summer Trilling’s essay was published in the Partisan Review. In it, Greenberg argues that the best painting galvanizes vision into a moment of rapt and undivided attention. This act of “detached contemplation,” as he puts it, defends against the intrusions of an insipid commercial culture seeking to debase the meaningfulness of artistic revelation. Clearer in relation to Trilling’s speech on Frost, Greenberg dismisses the misreading of art by those who cannot achieve such detachment, namely those who stood to gain material advantage by roping an artwork into an ideology to which it did not belong. If Greenberg had any interest in the poet Frost, he might have conjectured that one should likewise contemplate Frost’s fine-grained verses while remaining detached from any ulterior nationalist program seeking to instrumentalize them.37 There is a problem with neatly applying this critical apparatus to First, however. ­ ruitt’s To Truitt, the sculpture was not reducible to a purely formal matter. That was T

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first-order reaction to Newman’s painting: that shape, surface, and space were also unremittingly memorial and personal. First presents a situation in which the viewer experiences the picket fence both with “detached contemplation” as an abstraction and as form distilled from an American emblem made newly relevant. It might seem as though these two interpretations of First existed at odds in Greenberg’s perception, although by 1963 he was persuaded that abstraction could in fact coexist with the recognizable visual motifs of a longer national and cultural tradition.38 Even so, Truitt’s invocation of white picket fence imagery was fraught, to say the least. Owing to its historical allusion, Truitt’s invocation of the picket fence also forestalls the later minimalist disposition to envision the landscape as relentlessly new, which by the late 1960s had become one of the defining provocations of minimalist sculpture. In a seminal 1966 interview with Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., the sculptor Tony Smith recounted a nighttime drive he took with his students to the New Jersey Turnpike, still unfinished in the early 1950s. The interview, now well known as a manifesto for minimalism, liberated Smith’s views about traditional forms of art and sharpened his sense that contemporary sculpture should ideally perform an introduction to new experiences rather than accumulate historical references.39 Smith presents the freeway site as a situational experience “without cultural precedent,” indeed, as an artless frontier.40 However, his account belies the ahistorical posture he wished to adopt. In the same memory, Smith acknowledges distant architectural details on the horizon and topographical markers, referring not only to background lights casting shadows on distant buildings, but also to the darkened natural landscape of the low-lying Hackensack Meadowlands, the zone that enabled his perception of spatial emptiness. Smith describes a landscape full of historically circumscribed features and locales, which he selectively diminishes in order to augment the far-out quality of his nighttime ride. Minimalism also sought to arrest the expressive and idiosyncratic potential of vernacular forms. Mel Bochner’s wall-mounted Untitled (Fence Piece) (1966; fig. 10), a graduated six-picket fence reinforced by two pales and painted pink, turns the picket fence ninety degrees so that the pickets point left, an orientation that confuses the piece’s reference to the landscape. Bochner celebrated serial structures as a way to subtract allusion, stating in his 1966 essay “Primary Structures” that “old art attempted to make the non-visible (energy, feelings) visual (marks). The new art is attempting to make the non-visual (mathematics) visible (concrete).”41 Like Smith’s memory of the turnpike, Bochner’s system denies even this most iconic American architecture its geographical specificity. The goal of his sculptures was to impress primarily through objective systems that could not be co-opted by alternative, private meanings. In sum, the appropriation of Frost’s poetry to the political rhetoric of Kennedy’s New Frontier is one prominent example of how Truitt witnessed the gradual narrowing of representational systems available to the historical landscape in the 1960s. The references that First makes to Truitt’s memory become even sharper when we consider the persistent, period-specific imperative of national cultural solidarity based on colo-

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Figure 10 Mel Bochner, Untitled (Fence Piece), 1966, spray enamel on wood, 17⅝ × 11½ × 1⅝ in.

nial origins, an imperative adhered to because it protected a semblance of American hegemony during the Cold War. At the same time, the new art of the sixties had begun to regard the environment as a site for novel experience. The picket fence represents Truitt’s objection to the loss of a varied cultural memory, a loss that she saw around her in extremes. As the opening salvo of her new practice, that is, First calls on the unlikely imagery of the white picket fence to resist both the political artifices of the New Frontier and the historical voids incipient in contemporary art. The work thus provides instructions for comprehending the past as a collaboration of idiosyncratic narrative and culturally relevant experience. In the words of Craig Owens’s critique of Ricoeur, “It is possible to speculate that what has toppled our claims to sovereignty is actually the realization that our culture is neither as homogenous nor as monolithic as we once believed it to be.”42 This is no small point: Truitt’s sculpture is divisive. First revives the memory of an exclusionary space that exists already within culture. It exposes the fence as the historically significant architecture of power, and, as the next section shows, it names its excluded subjects.

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Time Regained

First initiates a confrontation with historical time, renews the relevance of the lived and remembered contexts of white picket fences, and resists the siteless novelty of minimalist sculpture. Now I would like to explore how Truitt invites the beholder to experience the white picket fence as an anxious division, generating uncertainty about its appearance in a spectrum of remembered manifestations. Unlike Newman’s divide, with its pretense of bodily unification and co-presence, First refers to an image of space historically pre-divided. First also fractures its own situational space, however incompletely: the beholder moves around it, from the inside position to the outside, and sees through it, each view referring to its complement in successive paces. It allows the beholder to reenvision himself as his spatial and temporal “other,” on the other side. Truitt’s view of Easton in 1961 was that of an insider but from the outside, a vantage point made possible by the thirty-odd years’ lapse between her childhood and First. In Daybook she reflects melancholically, “What I remember is clearer to me than what I see today. I go back and yet cannot go back. Time has locked it all away from me as if I had died.”43 Here again, Truitt called on a Proustian paradigm. As Proust relates through his narrator, over time and distance from one’s birthplace, the difference between insider and outsider ways ferments in one’s psychology. His return to the familiar village of his childhood unleashes strong emotional affinities, yet he simultaneously harbors a disenchanted view of its social polarities. As discussed above, Brée suggested that objects in Proustian memory convert passive reflection into an active and structured retrogression, whereby time is regained and made newly applicable to the subject as an adult.44 Proust’s shudder of involuntary memory is a contradiction, at once transcending the present moment and repressing the past’s unseemly aspects.45 His ability to leave the past enables him to sensitively recalibrate the role that individual memories play in his psychology, crystallized in successive moments of revelation. Moreover, the past does not return in a moment of perfect recall, but in fragments accreting in importance through intervening time. As Brée wrote (and Truitt translated), “It is in relation to this change in orientation that [Proust’s] novel is constructed, not in a circle but in a planned asymmetry.”46 Truitt came to privilege these circumstantial superimpositions in her practice. Proust’s asymmetry, or near-misalignment of past and present, is a method he used to narrate self-consciously in the present while also admitting memory as a potent, unwieldy force. His novel has no reciprocal beginning and end, and he narrates even the most vivid of his reminiscences only partially. On the formal evidence presented in First, I am captivated by Truitt’s decision to clearly distinguish between the actual fence sculpture and the picket fence as it occurs in her memory, thus reinforcing the sculpture’s estrangement from the regular object it represents. Truitt’s technique attributes special importance to the incongruous visual impressions that the sculpture imparts as one walks around it, impressions that, by their very multiplicity, prevent the picket fence from appearing within a single, conventional system of meaning.

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PLATE 1 Anne Truitt, First, 1961, latex semi-gloss enamel on poplar wood, 44¼ × 17¾ × 7 in.

PLATE 2 Anne Truitt, First (verso).

PLATE 3 Anne Truitt, One, 1962, latex semi-gloss enamel on wood, 54½ × 15 × 7 in.

PLATE 4 Anne Truitt, Untitled, 1959, clay, 8½ × 11½ × 4½ in.

PLATE 5 Anne Truitt, Green: Five, 1962, oil semi-gloss enamel on wood, 59⅞ × 15 × 7 in.

PLATE 6 Anne Truitt, Hardcastle, 1962, acrylic on wood, 99¾ × 42 × 16 in.

PLATE 7 Anne Truitt, Hardcastle (verso), 1962, acrylic on wood.

PLATE 8 Anne Truitt, Southern Elegy, 1962, oil on wood, 47 × 20⅞ × 6⅞ in.

PLATE 9 Anne Truitt, Catawba, 1962, painted wood, 42½ × 60 × 11 in.

PLATE 10 Anne Truitt, Carson, 1963, acrylic on wood, 72 × 72 × 13 in.

PLATE 11 Anne Truitt, Valley Forge, 1963, acrylic on wood, 60⅛ × 60⅜ × 12 in.

PLATE 12 Anne Truitt, Insurrection, 1962, acrylic on wood, 100½ × 42 × 16 in.

PLATE 13 Anne Truitt, Platte, 1962, acrylic on wood, 71⅝ × 10 × 10 in.

It is revealing that Truitt invoked such experiential openness at a time when she was increasingly beginning to think of herself as a professional artist. First, thus, suggests the ripening of her sense of not exactly belonging within the social roles that she accepted, manifesting in the direction for her new practice in 1961. Two corresponding recollections help to explain the sense of incongruousness that she saw reflected in her own life and in the spaces around her. The first remembers her as a young girl in Easton. As an eleven-year-old in 1932, Truitt received a bicycle from her father with which she began to discover the town, at first near her home, then venturing farther away.47 Through these experiences she became aware of a basic opposition between the goings-on of the town—​commercial businesses, systems of transportation leading out of Easton, and so forth—​and the domestic sphere. “When my father put wheels under me,” Truitt remembers, “he offered me a healthy route from the smothering subjectivity of the family to the invigorating objectivity of the world at large.” But she also recalls an overwhelming sadness in realizing that she was alone in the world: “I remember a life-or-death feeling that security lay only in independence. And I remember grief, grief that the cost of independence was an unspeakable loneliness.”48 Truitt cultivated her sense of personal security through the isolation of being, counterintuitively, outside the gate.49 The second vignette recounts Truitt’s reverse journey back to Easton as an adult. In Daybook, Truitt remembers standing in front of Onement VI: “I was completely taken by surprise, the more so as I had only earlier that day been thinking how I felt like a plowed field, my children all born, my life laid out; I saw myself stretched like brown earth in furrows, open to the sky, well planted, my life as a human being complete. My yearning for a family, my husband and my children, had been satisfied. I had looked for no more in the human sense and had felt content.”50 Tellingly, in the very next paragraph Truitt remembers the fences, boards, and lattices so reminiscent of the South Street house and its garden, pungently reminding her of the domestic sphere she had left behind. It is as if her spatial allusions had contracted inward, the “plowed field” insinuating the landscape furthest from the house, with everything drawing closer in—​her own “family,” “husband,” and “children”—​by the end of the vignette.51 Truitt thus reflects on her former life in Easton and her present, adult life in a series of superimposable, spatialized metaphors. However, we must be careful to note that this second story is not merely the first told in reverse. Intervening time allows the childhood memory to be generative in Truitt’s adult context. Each story instantiates the creation of an identity based on her projection outside of an accustomed role: the first discovers the essence of her self-reliance, while the second suggests future estrangement from her otherwise “completed” self.52 From a young age, Truitt determined to live an unrestricted life. In her young adulthood she preferred to be seen as idiosyncratic, as she recounted later when writing about her postgraduate years of psychiatric work at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston: “The more I observed the range of human existence . . . the less convinced I became that

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I wished to restrict my own range to the perpetuation of what psychologists would call ‘normal.’ ”53 As an adult, Truitt arbitrated among architectures and spaces best suited to regain the caustic memory of her first split from the familiar—​and familial—​zone. The fence is the boundary line on which Truitt’s two selves recognized each other in mutual clarity. First is a kind of self-subverting structure; as a fence with two reciprocal sides, it provides no stable separation. It proclaims the merger of insider and outsider modes, locating the origin of this separation in a fragment of historical memory. Truitt deployed the fence image to destabilize the force of its iconographical iterations: first, she identified the reticence of the modern subject to see an innocuous object as the source of intolerable exclusion; second, and more consequentially, Truitt’s fence serves as a brittle reminder that modern society still systematically confirms itself on such exclusionary acts. The very tenacity of her dawning practice—​t hirty-seven sculptures alone in 1962—​ urges us toward an even more personal etiology. Truitt reflected upon the self-fulfillment of artistic creation as new to her in 1961: “I decided, hugging myself with determined delight, to make exactly what I wanted to make,” suggesting that she somehow felt her autonomy threatened by the presumptions of her surrounding social milieu.54 The urgency of independence was discerned as well by Betty Friedan in her landmark book The Feminine Mystique (1963). Interestingly, the course of Truitt’s life at least superficially mirrors that of Friedan’s: both were born in 1921, educated in psychology at an elite women’s college (Truitt graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1943, Friedan from Smith in 1942), and pursued careers after they married and began raising children. Friedan’s study openly critiques women’s continued confinement to flattened social roles, despite apparent efforts to advance equality between the sexes and opportunities for women in higher education. The psychological violence that women experienced constituted what Friedan called the “problem that has no name”: the stifling feeling a woman had of losing her own identity and being required to derive it instead from her husband’s life and those of her children.55 In Washington, Truitt’s closest friendships were with upper- and upper-middle-class housewives. In the prominent society to which the Truitts belonged, highly educated Georgetown wives were encouraged in intellectual pursuits as a way of enforcing a gender division in which men had professional lives and women stayed at home. Kennedy’s White House social secretary Letitia Baldridge remembers, “If you had a husband working for the CIA you learned to become a specialist in medieval art or gardening or something so you had your own life, because your husband would not talk to you.”56 Although James Truitt was a journalist, he was also a confidant of CIA officials James Angleton and Cord Meyer and of others who guarded national intelligence. It was Cord Meyer’s wife, Mary Pinchot Meyer, who accompanied Truitt to the Guggenheim in 1961, and she had attended Vassar with Angleton’s wife, Cicely d’Autremont Angleton. Then there was Alice Denney, who, though also married to a prominent government official, is better known as the first director of Washington’s only avant-garde arts venue, Jefferson Place

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Gallery, and was responsible for introducing Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol to Washingtonians. These distinguished women constructed a network of arts professionals in the capital. For them, forced separation from their husband’s professions had a bright side, for it granted them the independence to pursue their intellectual work. Yet, in what Robert Frost himself deemed the “Augustan age” of American cultural and political superiority, art remained second to policy, and women’s work remained second to that of men.57 As Frost’s inclusion at the inauguration made clear, the artistic voice for America remained traditionally and appropriately male, and duly adaptable to the positivism of Kennedy’s political scheme. Nevertheless, Jacqueline Kennedy quickly assumed a role as doyenne of the arts; as one reporter noted after the inauguration, “Mrs. Kennedy, with her position and appeal, is the person who will inspire this country to recognize and support its arts.”58 Thus, the New Frontier embraced women’s artistic endeavors and gave them a political gloss; women of “position and appeal” nurtured the advancement of the arts and cultivated art appreciation, but only rarely lobbied for the arts in a complementary relationship to first-order politics.59 Their erudition and worldliness became exalted virtues reflecting back on the authority of their erudite and worldly husbands. These social asymmetries are reflected in Truitt’s sculptural invocation of the white picket fence. Proustian memory impelled Truitt to return to a genetic moment of her division, sited in the architectures of her childhood in Easton. As her narrative reveals, the young girl’s wandering outside the domestic zone tainted her idyllic notion of childhood with the violence of isolation, but it also inspired a sense of personal independence. As time passed, Truitt’s distance from her life of hopeful eccentricity became increasingly explicit. To use the Proustian gloss, she led a public life in Washington in the Guermantes way—​a distinguished, urban mode affording her intellectual freedom and station within Georgetown’s social hierarchy. Well positioned in Washington, Truitt reexperienced the double consciousness of her adolescence, one that recognized the range of insider and outsider experiences now available to her within the male-centered political and cultural New Frontier. Through an intensely personal memory of the fence, she was able to name it as the architecture of exclusion, a persistent reminder of an archaic, public system of repression seeking to hem women within their accustomed domestic role—​a role that Truitt was beginning to outgrow with greater intensity. Is this Truitt’s feminism, if such a thing exists? I find compelling the fact that First implies the soaked-in, bodily memory of inclusive and exclusive space and yet does not attempt to achieve resolution between these poles of experience. Rather, it spurs the attentive viewer to move between social divisions, becoming the “other” to one’s self as projected across the pales, potentially without limit. Recently, the interdisciplinary field of memory studies has drawn attention to activist artworks that creatively challenge the viewer to “experience memory as multi-sensual, spatial ways of understanding their worlds.”60 But I can think of no existing feminist ground on which the picket fence as a trope might have found such footing in 1961. Thus, First provided Truitt a genuinely

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unique opportunity to broach these subjects physically and aesthetically. Instead of neutralizing gendered difference, Truitt mobilized it through an evocation of her personal memory, an act that was becoming increasingly urgent to her as a working paradigm. Certainly Truitt’s First robs the teleological authority of history from such well-worn iconography as the white picket fence. However, a primarily iconographical interpretation detracts from ways in which Truitt may have tried to mystify memory and to make it more of a central question within abstract art. First makes it easier to understand how the present is thoroughly suffused by past conventions of form. In 1962, however, Truitt’s sculptures became less ostensibly figurative, raising the issue of how memory could be redistributed through its disconnection from a recognizable image. The stakes of memory phenomena in Truitt’s practice become clearer when we examine more closely the imperfections and perforations in her vivid reminiscences.

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2 HARDCASTLE (1962)

When Anne Truitt revealed her sculpture Hardcastle (plate 6) to the art critic Clement Greenberg in her Washington, DC, studio in 1962, he backed away while muttering under his breath, “Scares the shit out of me.”1 This comment is noteworthy, for it indexes the experiential profundity that led Greenberg later to comment favorably on this and other minimal-type works by Truitt.2 Yet Greenberg’s remark is striking for another reason as well, in that it captures the essence of what Truitt began trying to do in 1962: to evoke viscerally embodied responses to her work without making the human body an explicit referent. Indeed, after First, the artist’s sculptural work gradually loosed its tether to the built environment. Her next several sculptures retained the visual concept of architectural forms while she worked through the idiosyncratic relations between surface and space. These experiments essentially gathered together the open seams between the fence’s pales into vertical plank shapes, and then into rigid, taller, upright structures. In this process of experimentation, her work began to invoke the human body, as she described in Daybook: “The scale of the earliest work in 1961–​62 changed from that of [the] fence to that of human beings.”3 The conversion of Truitt’s practice from a representational program to an abstract one, in other words, happened at the human scale. But what if we introduce the idea that Truitt based Hardcastle on her recollection of a gruesome car accident that took place in Easton when she was a child? Might not the incomplete, denaturalized embodiment of the sculpture, which does not bear an indexical or, presumably, iconic relationship to the narrative it represents, provoke the kind of

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deeply visceral response experienced by Greenberg? Might we accept that this abstract, geometrical sculpture could transfer the affective charge of that incident—​of the host memory—​to a viewer, in a way akin to the involuntary shudder we saw with Truitt’s beloved Proust in the previous chapter? These questions can be answered in the affirmative when we link the partially realized embodiment of Hardcastle to Truitt’s evolving sense of personal and public memory. Her personal memory is not available to us with either the representational clarity or the culturally inculcated sense of division that First connotes. Neither was it precise for the artist. As Truitt readily acknowledged in Daybook, her memories oscillated between clarity and abstraction: “What I remember is clearer to me than what I see today. I go back and yet cannot go back. Time has locked it all away from me as if I had died . . . it is only the abstract part of my experience that is real for me.”4 It thus seems likely that the sculptural abstraction of Hardcastle probes a phenomenology of memory: its fallibility, its incapacity for total recall, and its associative unwieldiness. This chapter explores these possibilities for Hardcastle in four sections. The first describes the salient formal qualities of the sculpture to demonstrate its undeniable, if admittedly indirect, sense of embodiment. The second shows that Truitt’s irruptive memory of the car crash warded off direct representation and was regalvanized instead in an abstract form that has implications for the body. The third examines Truitt’s period-specific interpretation of the accident motif alongside those of pop artists—​perhaps a strange alliance—​to reveal the privilege of mnemonic return. It will become clear in the final section that the narrative thrust of Hardcastle invokes a kind of embodied violence that unexpectedly recurs as a key critical term in the broader shift from modernist painting to minimal-type sculpture in the 1960s. In the end, we will see that Hardcastle retains from First the evocation of a form that bears a fundamental relationship to its embodied and participatory surrounding space. Yet it moves past this place to assert that our cultural expectations of space had been destabilized by violent conditions of modernity. Hardcastle thereby precludes a crystalline recollection of the past.

Encounter

Hardcastle is striking for its formal simplicity and monumentality. The sculpture consists of a ninety-five-inch-tall, one-inch-thick poplar plywood plank arranged vertically on an oblong box platform, about forty-two inches across, six inches high, and sixteen inches deep. The platform is the bulkiest volume of the work and, it seems, the structural element that stabilizes the looming plinth. Both the platform and the plank are painted by hand with Mars black acrylic paint; the facture is smooth and refined, unlike the thicker applications of paint evident in First. While the front of the plank is devoid of articulation, the back is not: two identical wedges, also of poplar but painted in high-key burnt vermillion, run parallel from the platform to just short of the top margin, a jarring optical interruption of the plank’s field of black (plate 7). The narrow wedges, which

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Figure 11 Richard Serra, One-Ton Prop (House of Cards), 1969, lead antimony, four plates, each 48 × 48 × 1 in.

gradually taper from bottom to top, point up and down like arrows, stretching the plank along its vertical axis. In this manner, Truitt sets up two distinct visual experiences: from the front, one sees only an obtrusive, blackened rectangle, but from the rear, color, shape, line, ambient light, and crisp shadows create a dramatic interplay. Truitt’s use of contrasting colors not only creates distance between the black plank and the red wedges, but it also suggests contrasts in the structural dynamics of the sculpture’s components that imply embodiment. The red struts are vertically attenuated triangular volumes with the greatest physical mass near the floor, suggesting a gravitational relationship between wedge, board, and base. The wedges appear to be buttresses that provide structural support for the dead weight of the plank, keeping it in vertical balance. Yet those relationships are in fact deliberately artificial: the wedges do not buttress the plank at all, and so the tie between literal structure and apparent structure is broken. In this way, Hardcastle departs from the interests of later-1960s minimal art, which preferred anti-illusionistic transparency. Contrast, for instance, Truitt’s sculpture with Richard Serra’s One-Ton Prop (1969; fig. 11), in which the composition is determined by gravitational relationships between the lead plates. Hardcastle instead

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proclaims internal relationships of structure constructed around an implicit central line of vertical symmetry, much as defines our own bodies. The artist’s affinity to a conventional bodily armature is enhanced by her decision to include a pediment or base for the plank-and-wedge construction. The lack of a pediment would have made the object’s own space consistent with that of the viewer, providing nothing to mark an encounter with the work as a privileged aesthetic experience. (Indeed, by the late 1960s, art critics, especially Michael Fried, were deriding minimalism for this very reason.)5 Yet in addition to asserting the bodily coherence of the sculpture as an object separate from the viewer’s own space, the platform also renders the work perceptually unstable. Small, invisible risers attached to the base create the illusion that the entire sculpture hovers an inch above the ground; the risers introduce precariousness by visually defying the gravity appealed to by the base itself and by the plank-and-wedge construction. The effect disconnects Hardcastle from the ground that supports it: the sculpture hovers above the floor, not fully earthbound but not quite aloft, the relationship of the vertical body to the horizon gently destabilized. The result is a tangible if subtle distance between the embodied physical space of the beholder and the disembodied—​or, more accurately, partially embodied—​spatial arrangement of the sculpture. Truitt’s approach to embodiment is further clarified by comparing Hardcastle to Robert Morris’s Untitled (Box for Standing) (1961; fig. 12). Constructed as an upended coffinlike box tailored to Morris’s own proportions, the sculpture was made to ensconce the artist’s live, inert body in its interior space. When he is inside the box, Morris is raised off the floor by about three inches, so that his body seems to levitate. Such an arrangement dramatizes the difference between the space of the viewer and that of the artist, much as Truitt did with Hardcastle. Additionally, both works engage in a series of cancellations that negate the human body. Morris’s sculpture cancels his own body, making himself equivalent to an object, muted and interred, while Hardcastle distills the absent body into a rectangular black zone, evocative of the human form through its manifest negation. Yet even as Hardcastle provides us with a sense of bodiliness, it simultaneously refuses to give us a clear return view of our own bodies with which we measure our relationship to the sculpture, for, at almost nine feet high, Hardcastle is in fraught relation to the scale of the human body. If it were somewhat smaller, it could be perceived as being within the normal size range of the human body. If it were any larger, it would be considered out of human scale altogether. Corresponding as it does in both size and shape to a standard doorway, the plank looms as an obtrusive black obstacle. Unlike Morris’s piece, however, Truitt’s engages the space around the sculpture as necessary for its comprehension. Hardcastle activates the space by deliberately attracting the viewer’s intimate contemplation, for it is only at close range that both the fine texture of the poplar and Truitt’s application of paint to the surface can be comprehended. Several successive layers of paint are obvious in certain sections of the plank, in areas where

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Figure 12 Robert Morris, Untitled (Box for Standing), 1961, pine, 74 × 25 × 10½ in.

Truitt painted over vertical brushstrokes with horizontal ones. The artist’s fine layering of matte color shows her concern for the wood while also creating optical depth. This palpitating depth is perceived especially when the viewer moves away from the object, away from the minute details of the brushstrokes and the wooden texture. By moving away, the viewer also apprehends the distinctly different visual information on the recto and verso sides. Truitt thus enforces a viewing distance that is somewhere between the entire sculpture at once and the shifts of depth in facture. This tension in viewing distance is critical, for it provides us with associated contexts that suggest both the sculpture’s abstraction and the embodied space surrounding the work, as repositories of mnemonic matter. The memory defining Hardcastle has both content and form and provides a powerful text on the connection between memory and loss.

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A b s t r a c t i o n/A s s o c i at i o n

Truitt takes as the subject for Hardcastle the memory of a car accident in a marshy, rural area west of Easton, Maryland, that she recalls occurred in 1926 when she was only five. She remembers: “A man was killed in ‘Lee Haven,’ a country place where I spent my fifth summer. . . . [He] was drunk in his car. I guess he got nervous, and a train ran over him. You know, those side places in the country with one-line tracks? One night his car got stuck and he got killed. It was the most terrifying thing!”6 Truitt remembered the victim of the crash as “Mr. Hardcastle,” and the event as the artist’s first cognizance of violent death in childhood memory.7 The specificities of Truitt’s narrative do not match the public record, however, as there is no registered death of a man named Hardcastle in Talbot County in 1926.8 Two yeas later, though, on June 16, 1928, the Easton Star-Democrat reported on an accident headlined “Easton Man Killed at Railroad Crossing—​Body Dragged 400 Feet and Mangled Almost Beyond Recognition” (fig. 13).9 This accident involved a foreman named Howard Porter, who was struck by a train in the early morning as he rounded up pea pickers for work. The locomotive, a small commuter trolley, exploded when its gasoline tank loosened and fell onto the tracks as a result of the impact. Truitt correctly remembered the timing in her journal, where she commented that her summer at Lee Haven was in her seventh year, not her fifth.10 When linked to the public record of Porter’s death in 1928, it may be tempting to see Hardcastle’s sculptural forms iconographically. The blank, foreboding field of black invokes Porter’s blindness induced by the darkness before dawn. The two red parallel wedges suggest the man’s blood, smeared on the lines of the railroad tracks as the trolley collided with him and dragged his fragmented body further than the length of a football field. Moreover, the attenuated sloping of these wedges along the flat surface of the plank resonates with the moments after impact as the car moves along its course impervious to the disaster, gradually slowing and then stopping in flames. Such a reading takes Truitt’s sculpture as an evocation of a memory whose physical sensations can be brought into logical pictorial order. Truitt’s registry of remembered contexts is far more elusive, however, than an iconographic reading would lead us to believe. “Hardcastle” is one name standing in for two concepts that Truitt would have known as an Easton insider. The first is a surname, the title of an Easton family with a long ancestry in the Eastern Shore of Maryland. The second is a name referencing a geographical area: the Hardcastles owned fifty acres of rural land southeast of the town in the Landing Neck area of Talbot County. In 1927, the “Hardcastle tracts” gained a bit of attention in the local newspaper as picturesque, prosperous real estate tenanted by yeoman farmers.11 These two associations for the name Hardcastle—​one personal and one geographical—​assume a third meaning when posed in the nostalgic tone of the newspaper article, which mentions in passing a small river wharf called “Lloyd’s Landing” that was located on the east side of the Hardcastle tracts. “Like other river wharves, it is of little use in these latter days,” the author wrote.

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Figure 13 “Easton Man Killed at Railroad Crossing,” Easton Star-Democrat, June 16, 1928.

This small denouement reflects back on the greater intent of the article, which was one in a series of editorial travelogues on the virtues of Talbot County’s countryside.12 The reporter’s virtual tour of Landing Neck responded to a gradual reduction of the area’s charming rurality. This third meaning—​t hat of loss attributable to modernization—​is salient to our discussion because it links Truitt’s abstraction back to the inaccessibility of the remembered past. Here, though, we are interested not only in the details of Truitt’s traumatic memory, but also in its broader historical diagnosis. In the 1920s, the disconnect between the Porter death and the nostalgic and journalistic light shed on the Hardcastle tracts pronounced a divide between city and country life that was coming into sharper relief in Talbot County. Topographically cut off from the nearby cities of Baltimore and Washington by the Chesapeake Bay, the Eastern Shore remained agrarian and rural until the rise of the expanded probusiness governance characteristic of Maryland in that decade.13 In 1923, for instance, a private development company launched the ClaiborneAnnapolis Ferry, uniting the eastern and western shores by car ferry for the first time.

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Such was the automobile traffic by 1927 that public and private promoters initiated the planning stages for the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which would eventually join Annapolis with Stevensville on the Eastern Shore.14 In the face of this change, the “little wharf at Landing Neck” had no further practical use. For all of its benefits, this rapid expansion also introduced new, technologized forms of danger to Easton. The town became the primary transportation nexus for both railways and automobiles between the western metropolises and rural areas of the Delmarva Peninsula. Consistently throughout the late 1920s, reports of changes to railroad junctions and sensationalized bylines concerning automobile accidents were front-page news in the Easton Star-Democrat. These were the growing pains of urbanization.15 The anxieties felt in Easton were consistent with much of the suburban and rural United States at the time. Tellingly, the short newspaper article reporting on the Porter incident identifies the locomotive as a “Toonerville Trolley,” a popular-culture reference to the cartoon strip Toonerville Folks by Fontaine Fox, syndicated in national newspapers from 1916 to 1956.16 The humor of the comic strip, which featured a dilapidated old trolley car that ferried commuters between larger towns and smaller communities, is derived from both the countrified behavior of the commuters and the reckless driving habits of the conductor (fig. 14). By citing the Toonerville Trolley, the newspaper reporter underscored a cultural consistency between the rural community of Denton, Maryland, where Porter died (seventeen miles from Easton) and the fictional town of Toonerville. The Toonerville Trolley allegorized the incommensurability between rational modernity and the local and specific culture of the country.17 The troubled transition between the older infrastructures and modernized ones was something of which Truitt was well aware in the 1960s. Hardcastle, along with all of her earliest sculptures, was fabricated at the Galliher Brothers mill located at the base of 31st Street on the Potomac River, adjacent to the defunct Baltimore and Ohio Railroad freight station and beneath Washington’s new western arterial freeway. Her trips to the mill thus offered views juxtaposing nineteenth-century train service with mid-twentiethcentury car culture. This period coincides with the end of commuter trolley service in Washington, on January 28, 1962, an event that Truitt surely noted. In the 1950s, the Truitts lived on Georgetown’s P Street, the old streetcar thoroughfare connecting historic Georgetown with downtown Washington, and when they returned after a stint in San Francisco (1957–​60), they settled on 30th Street just one block above P Street. Truitt’s daily travels carried her along and across underground rail slots that were now being rendered obsolete. Although Washingtonians praised the city government for doing away with the hundred-year-old transportation system to make way for increased automobile traffic, they also wistfully remembered the trolleys as a picturesque way of traveling “to visit favorite aunts, to see the holiday parade downtown, to get to the park where Grandpa worked, to go to the circus or the beach.”18 The collective nostalgia conveys the obsolescence of the older landscape and the people associated with it (“where Grandpa worked”)—​resonating here with the observation that the river wharf in Land-

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Figure 14 Fontaine Fox, Toonerville Folks, print cartoon, n.d.

ing Neck was “of little use in these latter days”—​as another variety of mnemonic attrition attendant to an increase in automobility. When the retirement of the electric streetcars and freight rails in the District of Columbia was complete, Georgetown became a reliquary of disused systems.19 I wish to suggest, then, that for Truitt the name Hardcastle invoked an affectively resonant memory of an old trope, one that was nevertheless recognizable in her contemporary landscape, the idea that quite ordinary ways of being in and traversing space were quickly lapsing into obsolescence. She repeated her desire to reassign these environmental typologies to contexts in her past. Truitt’s earliest minimal-type work from 1961 and 1962 drew from what Brée called, and Truitt translated as, a “common matrix,” in which disjointed fragments of the past seen in retrospect gain future continuity, thereby engaging in an uncanny temporal superimposition.20 The porous nature of past and present also concerned Walter Benjamin in his struggle to picture conditions of modernity. Benjamin discusses at length the idea of what we might call “crash moments,” or in his parlance, “flashes,” in which the past and present galvanize into an image. In the often-cited Arcades Project, he writes: “It’s not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather, image is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.” Dislocated in the modernized city, Benjamin articulated the past through residues of memories attached to images and objects. The interplay between past and

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present, and its “constellation” of signification, comes together in “language,” in giving a descriptive structure to images and their possible meanings.21 Hardcastle is irresistibly compatible with Benjamin’s work, for Truitt’s early practice continuously affirms the residue of memory in contemporary spaces and structures, ideas to which she gives sculptural form (an “image”). Whereas First called upon childhood memory to articulate the simultaneous experience of the private past and the public system of signs into which it was enfolded, the traumatic memory that Truitt summons to Hardcastle exerts a different kind of influence. I am convinced that Truitt’s host memory is a crash moment—​a flash—​in which a temporal oscillation occurred. Benjamin understood such chance revelations as predetermined by social and historical context: “Where there is experience in the strict sense of the word, certain contents of the individual past combine with material of the collective past.”22 His individual memories became all the more precious to him because they reclaimed his subjectivity angled against the profusion of deceptive experiences available in modernity.23 For Truitt, it is this kind of image-forming volition that Hardcastle questions as an instrument for thinking through the potentially associative nature of abstraction, citing contexts troubled by their very unrepresentability. Like Benjamin, Truitt merged historical and mnemonic resonances into an image, slowing down the barrage of unstructured visual stimuli attendant to the modernizing environment. But for the artist, the abstract image is also real: it is the image opening up the associative structures that natural memory affirms. The misnomer “Hardcastle” measures Truitt’s removal from the origins of her memory, pronouncing the successive temporal displacements that rendered an unmediated encounter difficult to represent. The literary historian Ian Almond interprets the act of naming as an abstraction as well, a memory after the fact of encounter: “When one is in the presence of something, no name is needed.”24 With Hardcastle, Truitt dilates the memory and its experience in the present through spatial situations introduced by sculpture itself. The lability of Porter/Hardcastle, Easton/Toonerville could easily be overdrawn if it were not for their collective appeal to the American pastoral tradition, a popular historical motif under revision at the time Truitt made Hardcastle. Leo Marx’s landmark book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (1964) explores the powerful fiction of an “American Eden” that represses the truth of rampant industrialization.25 For Marx, one of the fabrications of the pastoral myth is its preference to see the landscape as a zone without history, renewably unspoiled, continuously regenerative, and therefore an exultant symbol from which the nation can perpetually draw strength.26 Truitt’s memory of death on the rails confronts the error of such idealizations, and Hardcastle establishes a zone of emergency and malfunction. But Truitt was not merely reporting on what she remembered, and Hardcastle refuses to represent anything in particular; instead, her resistance to representational clarity proclaims the traumatic memory as deeply associative and contingent upon spatial contexts.27

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Figure 15 Jim Dine, Car Crash, 1959–​60, oil and mixed media on burlap, 60 × 63 in.

T h e M a c h i n e r y of O u r Coll e c t i v e E x i s t e n c e

Crash violence appears as a popular artistic trope in the early 1960s, and it is worth considering Truitt’s memory and Hardcastle’s unrepresentability within this larger context. Jim Dine’s 1959–​60 pastel and mixed media collage Car Crash (fig. 15) hauntingly attaches a burlap shroud, painted black, onto two vertically joined canvases, scumbled over with waxy black and opaque sepia paint. Dine’s infamous 1960 happening, also

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Figure 16 John Chamberlain, Toy, 1961, steel, paint, and plastic, 53½ × 38½ × 30½ in.

titled Car Crash, at the Reuben Gallery in New York put his concept into play through a live performance consisting of aluminum foil masks, lurid maquillage, cacophonic sound, and the repeating plaintive refrain, “Help, help, help, help!”28 Starting in the 1950s, the artist John Chamberlain had produced sculptures by welding together steel ribbons and crumpled metal sheets taken from junked automobiles, such as Gramm (1960), Toy (1961; fig. 16), and Dolores James (1962). Truitt’s sculpture, in contrast, does not modalize memory in the fashion of Dine and Chamberlain. The reference in Hardcastle is only partially complete; it refuses to represent such violent consummation with any clarity. As such, it obliquely animates the mnemonic byproducts that inflect our reading.29 It is also worth considering, in relation to Truitt and Hardcastle, Andy Warhol’s pop pictures of similar subjects. Although it is customary to assume that Warhol’s work resists this kind of deep mnemonic play, one aspect of his practice is suggestive of Truitt’s handling of the crash as an artistic motif. Warhol’s Death and Disaster series was organized for his European debut exhibition at the Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris in 1964, but the concept of the paintings dates as early as 1962, the same year that Truitt completed Hardcastle. The Death pictures depict contemporary car and plane accidents, electric chairs, victims of untimely deaths, and post–​JFK assassination photographs of Jacqueline Kennedy, via isolated or repeated photographic images silkscreened over painted areas of acrid, off-primary shades of colored ink.30 For example, 5 Deaths (1963; fig. 17) depicts an overturned car and five mangled corpses strewn on an indistinct foreground. It is a small canvas, measuring roughly twenty by thirty inches, and thus forces

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Figure 17 Andy Warhol, 5 Deaths, 1963, acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 20⅛ × 30 in.

attention on the disaster represented singly in the center. Warhol repeats the same photograph in Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White (1963), in which the disaster appears contiguously in five separate rows. The strategy here is to force attention on the gruesome content not through small scale, but by repetition in an unsettlingly large format (Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White measures eight and a half by eight feet). In Ambulance Disaster (1963–​64; fig. 18), Warhol selected a photograph of a wrecked ambulance with a body drooping lifelessly through a smashed-out passenger side window. These images, taken from stock newspaper photographs (the “Ambulance Disaster” is a United Press International photograph of a traffic accident in Chicago in 1960), are decidedly unaesthetic and shockingly gruesome. Hal Foster, in an article titled “Death in America,” argues that the formal repetition in these paintings evokes a compulsive disordered response to witnessing disaster. The obsession with violent imagery is not specific to Warhol, but rather is a cultural trait resulting from readily consumed, spectacular violence available to any viewer immersed in American postwar media culture.31 One of Foster’s sources for this reading is psychoanalytic, specifically Jacques Lacan’s theory of the traumatically repressed: the re-representation of a traumatic image helps stabilize it within a normally understood economy of images. In Warhol’s case, the trauma is ultimately unassimilated because of the artist’s play with interfering color schemes and the indistinct forms accidentally produced by the silkscreen medium. Foster’s second source is semiotic, allowing Warhol’s repeti-

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Figure 18 Andy Warhol, Ambulance Disaster, 1963–​64, silkscreen ink on linen, 119 × 80⅛ in.

tion to be understood as an exercise in using the serial logic of mass media against itself, implicitly critiquing the process by which individual images are drained of affective content through seemingly endless reproduction. Whether understood in the psychoanalytic or the semiotic sense, Warhol sustains the affective impact of the imagery. In their representation of disaster, the works comprehend their own traumatic significance at the same time as they produce the shock of violence all over again. The critic Mark Seltzer attributes the frequency of such images in the popular media to a symptom of modern viewership; here, the viewing subject appears as an aggregated, noncorporealized entity witnessing scenes of violent embodiment.32 Although Warhol’s work characteristically evokes mass (consuming) subjects through ordinaries of the commercial

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environment—​kitsch objects, household products, celebrities—​in the Death and Disaster pictures Warhol reconstituted the mass subject through, in Foster’s words, “its very unrepresentability, that is, in its absence and anonymity.”33 Warhol’s silkscreened photographs of car crashes demonstrate a mass-mediated variety of technologized failure, one made available to everyone who read about it in the news. The liquidation of private subjectivity reembodies itself in terms of a public discourse: cognizance of the mediatized, crashed body as the prosthesis of our own bodies, and a disavowed gratification at seeing the inevitable calamity projected onto an anonymous other. The automobile thus emerges as the mechanical incarnation of the threat of disaster attendant to the vertiginous acceleration of this mass subjectivity. Enveloped in the rhetoric of freedom and individual choice, the ubiquitous automobile paradoxically signals the homogeneity of commodity culture. The crash demonstrates not only the anxious merger between the natural body and the machine body, but also the absorption of the natural body by the systems that the automotive industry includes: mechanization, productive labor, economic development, and the organization of politics to accommodate the forces of culture that the car implies.34 To contextualize Warhol’s crashes, Thomas Crow suggests that the artist deployed the image of a car as a signifier of American affluence in the 1950s, changing its promise of pleasure and freedom to one of fatally injurious consequences in the 1960s.35 Crow’s analysis privileges the individual pleasures of the automobile insofar as they comport with an American ideal of ownership and self-possession. Warhol, though, portrays the crash as a breakdown of the commodity exchange, a failure facilitated by the desire for the product itself (ambulances, after all, are cars for car crash victims). Therefore, it is not merely the crash, but advertised and commodified images of technological failures, that Warhol exposes as iconic in American life at midcentury. And now let us return to Truitt, keeping Warhol’s work in mind. Rather than take her practice as antithetical to his (as it must seem), I would like to highlight their striking parallels. Both artists isolate the narrative body as a subject of modern unrepresentability. We already have seen this with Truitt: the traumatic memory is one that inculcates a sense of loss, but evades a single symbolical system. Warhol, for example in his Race Riot paintings, components of his Death and Disaster series, displays a surprisingly humanist dimension: the works, as art historian Anne M. Wagner puts it, contain “essences of the story they have to tell.”36 The subjects of the Race Riot images are frozen in the clear depiction of white aggressors and black victims, as in the eponymous Race Riot (c. 1963; fig. 19). If Warhol’s images indeed conflate individual and mass subjectivity, they also elide the specific history of black victimhood that gives the Race Riot paintings their compelling emotional charge. By repeating singly disturbing images, Warhol holds a mirror up to the cycle of proliferation and consumption that routinely denies this subjective narrative potential. However, as the Race Riot works suggest, Warhol’s impasse to clear narration is not absolute, and his images may actually call upon a range of experiences and feelings that depend on one’s identification with the powerfully violent

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Figure 19 Andy Warhol, Race Riot, c. 1963, screen print on Strathmore paper, 30⅛ × 40 in.

images he invokes. Regarding crashes, we recall that Warhol drew from unpublished sources, suggesting that these photographs exceed the cultural norm for encountering this kind of violence. Similarly, Truitt admits a kind of unrepresentability while maintaining a sense of bodiliness that draws upon the viewer’s affect. The problem Truitt shared with Warhol was how to depict the body involved in a disastrous narrative with enough incompleteness to rupture its purely denotative function. One of Warhol’s tactics was to select photographs especially evocative of the gruesome merger between the natural body and the machine body: twisted bodies flop out of car windows like junked and twisted metal. In 5 Deaths, fluids pooling at the accident site could be read as either blood or motor oil. The mutual unintelligibility of vital and artificial is at the core of Warhol’s performed nonsubjectivity—​recall his infamous dictum “I want to be a machine”—​and reappears as playful superficiality in the Jackies, the Marilyns, and other treatments of mediatized subjects.”37 Finally, what does this comparison between Truitt and Warhol suggest about an expanded view of art in the 1960s, one that accounts for traumatic memory to inflect both pop art and minimalism as practices in formation? As certain critics would have it, an interest in technological infrastructures worked its way into a new discursive order

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in which private subjectivity was dispersed into an anonymous public subject. I think we must be more circumspect, however. Truitt’s and Warhol’s fascination with the crash reinscribes subjective resistance, in Truitt’s case into abstraction, and in Warhol’s into the archival consciousness of news images, both as a result of their acute experience of the technologically saturated visual world. As we continue to discover the expanded role of memory that informed a surprisingly wide range of the period’s artistic practices, we must also consider how the crash motif provided a pointed response to modernism by resisting the leading critics’ demand for revelatory interpretation.

Ag a i n a n d Ag a i n s t t h e O n r u s h

Let us return to where we began, with Clement Greenberg’s curious reaction to Hardcastle: “It scares the shit out of me.” Greenberg’s response is essentially, and perhaps surprisingly, affective. I am interested in this reaction because it does not follow Greenberg’s experience of modernist painting and, as we will see, results from Truitt’s adaptation of modernist painting into sculpture. In his critiques of abstract expressionist painters such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, Greenberg resisted language that aspired to any felt emotion, praising the artists instead in terms of “invention, inspiration, or even intuition.”38 By contrast, waxing lyrical in a 1967 essay on Truitt’s sculptures, Greenberg remarked: “Despite their being covered with rectilinear zones of color, I was stopped by their dead-pan ‘primariness,’ and I had to look again and again, and I had to return again, to discover the power of these ‘boxes’ to move and affect.”39 For Greenberg, Truitt’s sculpture had left behind the instantaneous, optical legibility of modernist painting in favor of something else, something that suggests instead the minimalist perceptual paradigm of duration. Minimalism was not a discursive category in 1962, nor was its confrontation with modernist painting yet full-fledged. Thus I wish to frame the present discussion not in terms of such outright polarities but rather by a reevaluation of the critical terms that led to such oppositions later in the 1960s. Hardcastle is a compelling text for this inquiry because it is an early suggestion of what would later become the contradictory postures of modernism and minimalism, for Hardcastle is foremost the imagining of an absent body in a space containing the traces of past encounters. It is not just the canceled, blacked-out, or negated body that Hardcastle rediscovers in an abstraction, however. What might have been shocking for Greenberg in his encounter with Hardcastle is Truitt’s method of evoking his own embodiment at a moment when the critic had removed the quality of corporeality altogether (either in actuality or in its latency) from his art criticism. When Greenberg’s critical successor Michael Fried wrote his seminal essay against minimalism, “Art and Objecthood,” in 1967, a modernist indictment of the possible failures of embodiment in modern art was complete. By rereading “Art and Objecthood” with Truitt’s sculpture in mind, we can see how Truitt anticipated this issue in the early 1960s. Indeed, when Donald Judd called works that Truitt made

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in 1962 “tombstones,” his language was both specific and general. Truitt’s Southern Elegy (1962; plate 8), for example, adopted the literal shape of a tombstone remembered from one of Easton’s burial grounds. But Judd’s language is additionally coded: these “tombstones” connoted Truitt’s rearrangement of the terms of embodiment, which Judd considered too facile in its inculcation of a sense of bodily presence.40 Greenberg admits the baffling way that Truitt’s sculptures in particular evoked a sense of embodiment. Truitt’s type of expressive minimalism taught Greenberg “how this look could confer an effect of presence. . . . That presence as achieved through the look of non-art was likewise aesthetically extraneous, I did not yet know. Truitt’s sculpture had this kind of presence but did not hide behind it.”41 The presence he expected to feel was related to the loss of one’s sense, in a painting, of the object as something tactile and physical.42 In this exclusively optical mode of perception, Greenberg discounts “irrelevancies” or “aesthetically extraneous” material that would block the flow of instantaneous visual communication running between the painting and its beholder.43 For example, Morris Louis’s diaphanous veils of poured pigment and Kenneth Noland’s floating disks present a visually weightless merger of line, color, and shape. By contrast, Truitt’s heavy, floor-bound Hardcastle is unremittingly corporeal. That Greenberg returned “again and again” to Truitt’s sculptures to determine their power to “move and affect” suggests the possibility of repeated viewings to cumulate in the moment of presence he longed for. One of the obstructions Greenberg faced was that Hardcastle is a sculpture and, as such, by definition situated in an embodied relationship to the viewer. The critic was initially skeptical of Truitt’s three-dimensional structure as too self-consciously enigmatic. However, he emerged satisfied with the emotional value added to the sculpture through sustained engagement. It is impossible to see the object perfectly the first time: each view nests in the memory of the preceding one, and only through such mnemonic incubation does the singular experience reach the beholder in a potentially affective dimension of perception. Neither Truitt’s friend Greenberg nor Michael Fried was able to recognize these sculptures as evocative of an embodied relationship to memory, however. I am convinced that it was their investment in the visual renewability of modernist painting that kept them from doing so. Reviewing Truitt’s solo exhibition at the André Emmerich Gallery in 1963, Fried approved of her sculptures, which were surfaced with geometric bands of dark color, as “fine, intelligent work.” His immediate frames of reference, however, were paintings by Ellsworth Kelly, Raymond Parker, and Ad Reinhardt. He thus was disposed to compare Truitt’s sculpture to these works, which aspired to neither embodiment nor memory.44 Four years later, in “Art and Objecthood,” Fried praised the colorful sculptures of Jules Olitski (but not works by Truitt) as upholding the modernist paradigm of opticality by reconfiguring the painted surface as a material for sculpture. Fried singled out Olitski’s Bunga 45 (1967; fig. 20), an agglomeration of upright welded tubes sprayed with multicolored enamels, as exemplary. Rather than declaring space outright as a matter of three-dimensionality, Fried understood Bunga 45 as primarily

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Figure 20 Jules Olitski, Bunga 45, 1967, aluminum with acrylic paint, 120 × 44 in.

a declaration of surface, collapsing its three dimensions back into two. By contrast, the colored surface of Truitt’s Hardcastle performs differently by ­engaging the viewer’s range of distance around the sculpture to suggest embodiment, as we have seen. Enforced viewing distance in relationship to a sculpture becomes a loaded term in “Art and Objecthood,” where it forms a basis for Fried’s criticism of latent anthropomorphism in minimalist sculpture; as a result, it has gained a powerful sway over modernist art history. Admittedly, “Art and Objecthood” is not about Anne Truitt’s sculptures per se. Rather, it argues primarily against the work of Tony Smith, Robert Morris, and Donald Judd, which by 1967 had assumed canonical status within the newly formed category of minimal art. My intention is not to insert Truitt into this artificial canon, but for the sake of historical specificity it should be stated that Fried’s essay is framed by his meditation on the term presence, as originally used in Greenberg’s essay on Truitt.45 Fried may not have been aware of Greenberg’s initial reaction to Hardcastle, but he had a similar, if less visceral, response to other human-sized minimalist sculptures: “Being

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Figure 21 Tony Smith, Die, model 1962, fabricated 1968, steel with oiled finish, 72 × 72 × 72 in., gross weight 500 lb.

distanced by such objects is not, I suggest, entirely unlike being distanced, or crowded, by the silent presence of another person; the experience of coming upon literalist objects unexpectedly—​for example, in somewhat darkened rooms—​can be strongly, if momentarily, disquieting in just this way.”46 Truitt was not part of Fried’s analysis, yet Hardcastle’s enforcement of a viewing distance may have measured Fried’s own discomfort with the work as literalist sculpture. Here it seems relevant that of all Truitt’s sculptures exhibited at the Emmerich Gallery, the one for which Fried expressed a particular affinity was Catawba (1962; plate 9), a short, boxy sculpture that he could easily see over. In the last chapter, we learned that Truitt’s sculptural practice owed its genesis to the kinds of historical allusions to the landscape that certain artists were expunging in an effort to make space seem new, and in this chapter we have seen how Truitt’s Hardcastle compacts the mnemonic allusions to space begun with First. I would like now to reintroduce Fried’s critical launch against the sculptor Tony Smith, because of a strange parallel between Hardcastle and Smith’s Die (1962; fig. 21) in terms of a reconfiguration

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of human scale. Fried intuited that “what mattered in Minimal visual art was less the object as such and more the object as viewed by the beholder,” in the astute words of Carrie Lambert-Beatty. This conceptualization effectively reversed the modernist paradigm of the object’s self-critique and replaced the exalted visual sense with a more capacious, bodily one.47 Fried’s multiple and insistent citations of Tony Smith’s nighttime drive on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike suggest one way in which “experience” displaces and distances the viewer from the object that purports to be art. It was not just the latency of anthropomorphism in minimalist art that bothered Fried, but also the way the body is implicitly and radically theatricalized by machine aesthetics. Fried began his objection to Smith’s sculpture with a reference to its bodiliness, adapted from the artist Robert Morris’s quotation of Smith in the epigraph to his “Notes on Sculpture: Part II” (1966), charging that Die functioned neither as a grand “monument” (containing the memory of a bygone, living body) nor as a small “object” (one of a pair of dice, small cubic volumes manipulated by hand). The title Die thus takes on doubly effaced meaning. By pairing the word die and the sculpture’s human scale, we arrive at a verbal imperative addressed directly to the human body: “die” as a perforation of the living body and the objectified, dead one. It is worth noting Die’s historical consistency with the motif of human/machine collision found in pop and Truitt’s Hardcastle, which in both cases resulted from the violence experienced in increasingly modernizing infrastructures, as we have seen. Fried describes minimalism’s displacement of the unitary art object by a situational “onrush of experience,” which he attributes to the unsettling distance that Smith’s sculpture created: “The object is, so to speak, replaced by something: for example, on the turnpike by the constant onrush of the road, the simultaneous recession of new reaches of dark pavement illumined by the onrushing headlights, the sense of the turnpike itself as something enormous, abandoned, derelict, existing for Smith alone and for those in the car with him.”48 Fried recognized the centrality of the modernized landscape in Smith’s narrative, too: “In comparison with the unmarked, unlit, all but unstructured turnpike—​more precisely, with the turnpike as experienced from within the car, traveling on it—​art appears to have struck Smith as almost absurdly small . . . circumscribed, conventional.”49 Rather, the experience of driving became an art in which the natural body conjoins with the machine body. The cultural historian Jeffery Schnapp writes about driving as a new medium characterizing the modern subject’s aesthetic expectations: “Speed is the medium that ensures that the conjunction between human and mechanical individuals will engender not relaxation and tedium, but bigger living: quickened senses, aroused faculties, expanded powers of vision . . . spectacular crashes and catastrophes; eruptions of laughter and glee.”50 When one is behind the wheel, the digressions of the natural body no longer interrupt the flow of perception from one moment to the next. Although Fried was unlikely to have been thinking about such human-machine entanglements specifically, the term onrush dramatizes the sense of perpetual expectancy, admitting no discrete moment in which perception crashes into sudden revelation.51

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Truitt’s Hardcastle poses an important question vis-à-vis Fried’s essay, in that it abstracts the loss of a revelatory moment and at the same time relates perception to an outside space that experienced historical loss in late modernism. Concerns for tangible experience are reflected in Truitt’s memory, and they form a starting point for how the artist understood color field painting as a fully embodied—​rather than purely optical—​experience. The transparency of color field painting represented the clarity of unproblematic access, something no longer available as her sculptures approached human scale. As Hardcastle instructs, specific memories of bodies are not transparent; rather, they are inflected by historical loss and misrecognition occurring in the close context of remembered spaces and landscapes. We are also faced with Truitt’s decision, also in 1962, not to make a sculpture that would have resembled Smith’s Die (which she did not know he was working on): Certain concepts seem to choose to come into existence. For example, in 1962 I saw clearly, walked around in my mind and decided not to make, a 6' × 6' × 6' black sculpture. I can see it now perfectly plainly in the loft room of my Twining Court studio. . . . A few years later, I read that Tony Smith had made exactly this sculpture; and somewhat later I saw a picture of it. I have never met Tony Smith, nor has he met me. On the evidence, I can only assume that we caught the same concept.52

That Truitt never made her cube indicates her reticence to embrace the unremittingly externalized systems of meaning that Smith’s sculpture epitomizes. The plainness of a fully external geometric system did not coincide with her rich understanding of the idiosyncratic historical spatial relationship of a structure to the viewer. Truitt chose instead to make Hardcastle, a work that invokes the body remembered as an unresolved, individual death. Hardcastle demonstrates that the ordinary and public systems of self-definition—​technology, history, politics—​are already subverted by the interventions of one’s memory of the past. To make memory functional again, and to make it accrue into a usable and relevant history, is to understand the past as an archive of bodily contingencies. Truitt’s understanding of embodiment was deeply indebted to the criticism of color field painting, from which the artist extrapolated her own comprehension of the twin functionality of color and space. That is the subject of the next chapter.

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3 VALLEY FORGE (1963)

After his visit to Anne Truitt’s Twining Court studio in 1962, the critic Clement Greenberg made a bold assessment: “Now there will be three in Washington.”1 His comment counted her in importance alongside the DC-based color field painters Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, who were prominently the subjects of his criticism, held in high esteem as the standard bearers of formalist modernism. Truitt, Louis, and Noland were also well known to one another in the tightly knit group of artists surrounding Washington’s Institute for Contemporary Art. Truitt rented the Twining Court studio, a coldwater carriage house, from Noland when he moved to New York (fig. 22). And when Louis died in September 1962, Anne and James Truitt hosted a pre-funeral reception at their home in Georgetown. Greenberg and the critic William Rubin traveled from New York to Washington for the occasion, accompanied by Louis’s and Noland’s gallery representative, André Emmerich. On the day of the funeral, Rubin arranged for Emmerich to tour Truitt’s studio. The visit had its intended effect: Emmerich sensed the importance of Truitt’s work and offered her a solo debut, which took place in February 1963 (figs. 23–​25). New York gallery representation meant commercial viability, but more than that, it meant that Truitt now had a place in discourse: she would be measured against the work of contemporary artists on a national platform. Greenberg’s comment—​“Now there will be three in Washington”—​illustrates that, by geography and affiliation, color field painting was the overarching context into which Truitt’s work was inserted at the beginning of her career. The context becomes even more compelling when we consider that in 1963 minimalism was broadly unfamiliar to

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Figure 22 Anne Truitt in Twining Court studio, Washington, DC, 1962. Figure 23 Exhibition announcement, Truitt, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, February 12–​ March 2, 1963.

Figure 24 Sculptures installed at Truitt, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1963. From left: Thirtieth, Hardcastle, Ship-Lap, Platte, Tribute, all 1962. Figure 25 Guestbook from Truitt, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1963.

many in the field and had no established discourse of its own. This chapter traces the steps by which Truitt’s sense of color evolved in relationship to her comprehension of color field painting. As we know, she acknowledged the influence of Barnett Newman and especially Ad Reinhardt, whose art she had seen with Mary Pinchot Meyer at the Guggenheim. But she was also intimately familiar with the artwork of her contemporaries Louis and Noland, which had formed the core conversation in Washington for the better part of a decade. A study of the language used to describe these painters’ handling of color reveals pervasive spatial and bodily metaphors. Such metaphors were invoked, rather counterintuitively, to affirm qualities inherent in painting itself, such as flatness and the limit of the support. But Truitt’s art literalized these spatial arrangements, inviting viewers to consider color in relationship to its environment. Truitt’s gender was also conspicuous right from the start: of the few artists exhibiting this new, minimal-type style of sculpture in New York as early as 1963, Truitt was the only woman. Emmerich’s decision to use only her last name as the title of the debut show was made strategically to elide the issue. Even more revealing is that Greenberg, Noland, and Rubin, who acted unofficially as the curators of the Emmerich show, decided not to display First, the most figurative of Truitt’s early works. First, with its obvious reference to domestic architecture, would have feminized her undoubtedly. But the organization of Truitt’s debut around a nonobjective aesthetic also had the implicit effect of aligning her more precisely with “the other two in Washington,” that is, Louis and Noland. Greenberg noticed Truitt’s use of color especially, which he saw as a matter of gender. Whereas he intellectualized Louis’s and Noland’s ebullient palette, he considered Truitt’s nuanced and personal sense of color as natural to her sex. By her own admission, Truitt deployed “color metaphorically for content,” which eventually set her apart from the circles into which she was critically inserted, color field painting on the one hand and largely monochromatic minimalism on the other.2 Leading up to her debut, and throughout the year following, Truitt endowed her sculptures with a different character, both physically and in terms of their references. These new works were no longer built to look as if they possessed an external armature, such as the post-and-lintel or plank-and-wedge systems exemplified by First and Hardcastle. Instead, Truitt now preferred whole volumes, freestanding blocks or slabs painted with rectangular bands of color. Like such earlier works as Catawba and Watauga (both 1962), several of these refer to the landscape of her early adolescence in western North Carolina. Carson (1963; plate 10), one of the new, large pieces, draws upon an adult memory of the stark horizon and desolate landscape near Carson City in northern Nevada.3 In other works, however, we see Truitt shed the personal past and adopt a more expansive attitude toward retrospection. Although she never fully departed from using seemingly personalized language for her titles, several of these 1963 works—​Valley Forge, Spanish Main, New England Legacy, and Gloucester, among others—​suggest that now American history was a more broadly conceived vehicle through which to express the remembered past. Her new titles appeal to this shared history through place names associated with American colonial origins.

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When considered in concert with these sculptures’ dramatic sense of scale, it would seem that Truitt was reaching for the monumental. Years later, in Prospect, the artist explicitly linked the bright red, wall-shaped Valley Forge (plate 11) with George Washington’s storied Revolutionary War encampment: “Two strong blood-reds, cantilevered one off the other on its rectangular form, at once pull apart and unite the structure of the sculpture; the piece echoes the raw courage of the Colonial militia face-to-face with disunity at Valley Forge, near Bryn Mawr.”4 In this description we can discern a link between public history and the artist’s cherished memories of her alma mater, Bryn Mawr College. As Truitt began to manage the growing physical dimensions—​t he public interface—​of her sculptures, she also began to search for formal methods that would affirm the complex interaction between private and public references in her work. This led her to the formal property of color, which is at once culturally resonant and highly subjective. Her new work demonstrated unprecedented chromatic variation and intensity. In turn, she was emboldened to engage color as a subject “in itself,” thus claiming for it a special importance in her practice. Valley Forge, with its allusions to blood and courage, indicates a high historical reference point. But at the same time, Truitt’s use of color has a destabilizing function. In Valley Forge, she comprehended a dynamic relationship between different shades of red, which she described as “pulling apart” the sculpture. Even though the viewer may feel an initial attachment to what a given color represents, upon further reflection Truitt’s hard-to-name hues are fundamentally unstable, enlisting a range of transmutable meanings held in active tension. In Daybook, she recognized a longer trajectory for her art outside the confines of postwar abstraction, connecting her use of color to American luminism of the nineteenth century. In 1963, Truitt was actively seeking out references to the American past to interrogate history as it was constituted conventionally as subject matter for visual art. In addition to luminism, she was interested in the genre of history painting as a template for representing the past. Through an extended examination of Truitt’s Valley Forge and its ability to reflect or resist historical meaning, we can identify how she faced the inherent problems of carrying meaning through her sculptures and the unique, even surprising, solutions that she arrived at.

O n Color

In Washington, Truitt was part of an active visual arts community that included the painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, whose reputations were growing on the New York scene. Truitt met Noland in 1953 when she enrolled in his life-drawing class at Catholic University. The same year, Noland visited the painter Helen Frankenthaler’s studio in New York City and saw her Mountains and Sea (1952), a monumental painting that involved saturating areas of unprepared canvas in oil paint heavily diluted with turpentine. Back in Washington, Louis and Noland experimented with Frankenthaler’s “soak-staining” technique, substituting high-viscosity acrylic paints thinned with

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mineral spirits for the turpentine-thinned oil. Synthetic paint afforded these artists a full and brilliant range of colors, extending to hues that were nearly fluorescent. These intense colors and the method of painting quickly became part of the central dialogue among Washington artists. In an unsent letter to Clement Greenberg in 1965, Truitt freely acknowledged Noland’s significance to her personally as an artist but denied a formal influence: “At that time, it was not Ken’s work that influenced me, as it was to do in 1965. It was his self, his experience as an artist, generously shared.”5 Even so, her affiliation with these artists, together with the discernible influence of Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt, suggests that color field painting was the context in which Truitt’s art would be received. Above all, color mattered to Truitt, especially in its relation to space. Daybook provides a chronology of her thinking: “Early in 1962, I realized that I was becoming obsessed with color as having meaning not only in counterpoint to the structures of fences and the bulks of weights—​which were, I had thought, my primary concern—​but also in itself, as holding meaning all on its own. As I worked along, making the sculptures as they appeared in my mind’s eye, I slowly came to realize that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake.”6 Truitt had discovered that modifications in color caused certain spatial effects. A notable example is Insurrection (1962; plate 12), built to the same specifications as Hardcastle but painted in two asymmetrical vertical segments of primary red and purplish red. Through the addition of blue, the purplish-red segment recedes in the optical plane. Truitt gave it greater surface area to achieve an apparent covalence between the stripes, adjusting for color with volume. Depending on the ambient light, as the darker plane seems to recede, the vertical boundary between it and the lighter plane suggests an edge joining two angled planes rather than a simple partition on a flat surface. Thus Truitt began to conceive of color as a way of structuring spatial relationships, both between parts and, just as importantly, relative to the viewer. As early as 1962, Truitt worked with semitransparent pigments, brushing each successive coat of color in opposite directions, creating even, crosshatched layers that wrapped tightly around the edges. This technique is showcased by such large, brightly colored works as Valley Forge, owing to their size. The wood’s grain visibly emerges from underneath these translucent coats, creating a distinction between paint and the supporting material. Although conventional expectation would have color appear as a singular, even finish, this expectation is deferred as different degrees of color build one layer upon the next. Seeing one of these large works is a slow process: it takes time to comprehend their polychromatic, multidimensional surfaces. This viewing process is interesting because it takes up again the notion of experiential deferral that Truitt addressed originally in First. Her attempt to work out mnemonic response in relation to painting calls into question a range of formal and compositional tenets belonging to high modernism, ones intended to prevent mnemonic association.

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For instance, in his essay “The Case for Abstract Art” Greenberg stated that the unity of a properly modernist artwork is to be “grasped only in an indivisible instant of time.” 7 By 1960, Greenberg allowed that the expressive possibilities of painting could be conveyed through the consummate quality of “immediacy”—​a kind of perceptual speed with which a painting penetrates the beholder’s eye.8 According to Greenberg, a painting like Newman’s Onement VI (see fig. 1), the revelatory one Truitt saw at the Guggenheim with Mary Pinchot Meyer, would have been thought of not only as perceptually immediate (i.e., not subject to the recourse of memory), but also as a whole unto itself, requiring no additional reference.9 Truitt’s sculptures, however, deny the beholder absolute simultaneity between vision and comprehension because of the movement around the artwork that is required to see all of its colorful surfaces, not to mention the time it takes to perceive the multiple hues implicit in the surfaces themselves. Truitt’s wish to see color spatialized also suggests a formulation elsewhere in Greenberg’s art criticism. In the 1962 essay “After Abstract Expressionism,” he applied the term “color-space” to the paintings of Newman and Mark Rothko. These two painters simplified drawn elements and reduced surface tactility, and Greenberg recognized in their work pure fields of implied space. A closer reading of his words reveals that Greenberg also affirmed the rectilinear edge of the canvas as “open,” like an ellipsis, and suggestive of “indeterminate space,” although he stopped short of conceding an overlap between painterly space and literal space: “The ultimate effect sought is one of more than chromatic intensity; it is rather one of an almost literal openness that embraces and absorbs color in the act of being created by it. Openness, and not only in painting, is the quality that seems most to exhilarate the attuned eyes of our time.”10 One possible reading proposes the painting as a universe of color that suggests limitlessness but returns to the hermetic container of the rectangular canvas. Another reading, however, stresses the painting’s edge as a site of departure into the beholder’s entire viewing environment. Truitt’s Washington colleagues were well known for their dynamic and exhilarating illusions of spatial excess. Greenberg praised the irrepressible larger spatial field that Louis’s and Noland’s color field paintings evoked: “The suppression of the difference between painted and unpainted surfaces causes pictorial space to leak through—​or rather, to seem about to leak through—​t he framing edges of the picture into the space beyond them.”11 For instance, one could easily envision the viscous olive green and bronze layers of Louis’s Faces (1959; fig. 26) spreading onto the marginal blank canvas and then into the space outside the painting. Unbound by the edge, Noland’s bull’s-eye paintings, such as Split (1959; fig. 27), radiate color centrifugally from the central disc. Art historian David Lubin usefully rephrases Greenberg’s notion of a space imminently “leaking through” the framing edge in a description of a Louis painting: “The clouds or rivulets of color spanning the width of the canvas were but a detail, a slice, of some larger field of reference that extended beyond the limits of what could be seen.”12 These comparisons give us insight into Truitt’s compelling expansion of Greenberg’s implied color-space into one that elided into the actual space of the beholder’s environment.

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Figure 26 Morris Louis, Faces, 1959, acrylic on canvas, 91¼ × 136 in.

When Truitt envisioned color as “set free,” she was rejecting prevailing modernist theory. She adopted the language of liberation to define a certain defeat of painting: not so much the medium itself, for Truitt was also a painter, but rather painting as a means of coercion or control over the observer’s senses. By 1963, color field painting had presumed complete subjectivity on the part of the viewer, prioritizing the single and self-aware observer, the single glance, and the single object as the disembodied target of vision. Within the pressure of such a scheme, color is emptied of its conventional meaningfulness and instead registered as an articulation of the surface. The forceful language (“immediate,” “intense”) animating Greenberg’s criticism suppresses the inflections of personal subjectivity that might focus the viewer’s attention in a different direction. In Truitt’s understanding, by contrast, exchanges between the viewer and object were contingent on the viewer’s body of experience. As she moved into working with a varied palette, then, one of her discoveries was that color, in her words, was able to “hold meaning all on its own” and, moreover, that such “meaning” subverted the traditional perceptual situation defined by painting. Truitt, in other words, made color public. Her sense of color is not singly an extension of herself, that is, as a natural expression of her feelings; rather, it is manifested in multiple outside perceptions—​seen, negotiated, and remembered by the beholder in the real environment of encounter. Truitt’s sense of color works in pointed distinction to a key text on color theory: Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color, the now-seminal collection of his lectures at Yale, published in 1963. Albers wrote in the introduction: “In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is—​as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.”13 For all of Albers’s and Truitt’s apparent consistencies in appealing to subjectivity and difference, Truitt much later remarked on Albers with a bit of humor: “While I’m on the subject of color, you couldn’t pay me to study it. . . . I suppose if they offered me a million dollars, I would leaf through Albers’s book; but it would take a

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Figure 27 Kenneth Noland, Split, 1959, acrylic on canvas, 94 × 94¼ in.

million, and I would leaf . . . . If you apply your linear mind to color, you’re going to come out with a linear scheme for color, schema, and I think it would bear no relation for what color means to me.”14 Albers understood the meanings of color to emerge from schematized juxtapositions or interactions, whereas Truitt understood color as having powerfully irrational and involuntarily mnemonic capabilities—​the core Proustian quality of her work. This major discrepancy between Truitt’s and Albers’s sense of color was rooted in its meaningful recurrence in memory. In “Color Recollection—​Visual Memory,” Albers wrote, “it is hard, if not impossible, to remember distinct colors. This underscores the important fact that the visual memory is very poor.”15 In claiming the perception of color to be both subjective and in the present tense, Albers provided an influential pedagogic model that artists in the 1960s variously challenged and expanded. For example, Robert Rauschenberg distanced himself from Albers by adopting a stance of nonintentionality: all of the meaning his colors took on came from the outside, as it were, from the viewer’s subjective experience of the work.16 Donald Judd recognized a certain link to Albers, agreeing that color is the most capricious of all formal qualities. Judd’s early and extensive use of light cadmium red and black paints was the result of his assumption that no amount of mnemonic residue was attached to these colors.17 But Truitt remained distinct from these two examples, in that color did recur meaningfully to her; in fact, it was inseparable from her memory. For Truitt, remembering a color always conveys a sense of time—​time that, in the elegant phrasing of the critic Roger Shattuck, is “deeply penetrated and linked back to itself in wide loops of recall and recognition.”18 Truitt’s color, leaping over fine linear

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gradations, possesses the power to transport, but Albers claimed a different phenomenology. In his lecture “The Relativity of Color,” he analogized the experience of color to a simple experiment that involved dipping one’s warm or cold fingers into a bath of lukewarm water. Warm fingers experience lukewarm as “cold,” and cold fingers experience it as “hot,” which Albers explained as the metric for colors appearing different according to the viewer’s individual proprioception.19 Certainly Truitt would not have disagreed with Albers in the conclusions of his experiment, but she would have reinforced the temporal experience it implied; not that “warm” becomes “cool,” but rather how the content of a given image predisposes other images to come vividly to mind.20 In the case of Valley Forge, for example, primary red and darker red connote the blood reds of “Valley Forge,” which in turn focuses the artist’s memory of “Bryn Mawr.” The first image brings up a reference that, though culturally familiar, in all likelihood cannot be pictured in its entirety in the mind’s eye; it is evocative or imaginative rather than specific. By contrast, the second image, which is well known to the artist (standing in for the viewer), fleshes out the needed sensory information by localizing it. These images are imperfectly transmissible but nonetheless linked; such a restoration of the private to the public constitutes the very structure of memory.

Neo -Luminism

Truitt’s retrospective association with American luminism from the 1860s and 1870s reveals another interesting way to understand the formal demands of her artistic language, outside that of postwar modernism. In Daybook, the artist pointed out her affinity to luminism in a response to the National Gallery of Art’s 1980 exhibition American Light: “I find myself a wholly ardent latter-day Luminist. . . . Artists who use landscape as an armature for light, as I use abstract structure. Artists who wish to set the light free, which is what I also wish to do, to make it visible for its own sake.”21 Unlike the grandiloquent American landscapes by Hudson River School artists such as Frederic Edwin Church and Albert Bierstadt, who attempted to capture the sublime in their massive canvases, luminism is characterized by small-scale representations of New England coastlines. With their quiet and geometrically precise paintings in which the light is diffused uniformly over the surface of the canvas, luminists such as Fitz Henry Lane (fig. 28), John Frederick Kensett, and Martin Johnson Heade had defined themselves against the expressive landscapes painted by their predecessors and, indeed, even by their contemporaries.22 Luminism was important enough to Truitt that she introduced these stark paintings to her students at the University of Maryland years later.23 In the 1960s, Truitt was no doubt hewing instinctively to her own aesthetic, but at the same moment luminism was also experiencing a revival in cultural interest rooted in the formalist art scholarship of the 1950s.24 In an article published in 1954, the critic John I. H. Baur was the first to use the term luminism in his description of a subset of what he called the “realist” American painters working in the nineteenth century.25 In

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Figure 28 Fitz Henry Lane, Brace’s Rock, Brace’s Cove, 1864, oil on canvas, image: 10¼ × 15¼ in., frame: 14¼ × 19¼ in.

an earlier essay that served as the antecedent to the 1954 article, Baur listed the qualities of truth, ideality, and refinement as among the virtues of what would later be known as luminist landscape painting. He nodded to Lane’s paintings as exemplary of “unearthly clarity of light” and “an almost impersonal quality, as if conscious thought had been suspended to permit the scene to impress itself on the senses and feelings in the purity of immediate perception.”26 In 1959, Greenberg defended abstract art for just the same type of indivisible apprehension and detached contemplativeness that Baur had found in Lane’s paintings.27 Ten years later, Barbara Novak’s book American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience was a landmark text for its application of formalism—​of the type Greenberg championed—​to the history of American art. In American Painting, Novak’s arguments parallel Baur’s earlier reading of luminism, expanding his interpretations by reference to the works’ aesthetic immediacy, nullification of process, geometric organization, and exploration of light through subtle gradations of color.28 These intricate applications of formalism to historical American painting were unlikely known to Truitt and her Washington colleagues in the early 1960s; however, these artists were also attuned to the formalist call for purity and openness in painting through their connection to Greenberg. Formalist art criticism avoided evaluating artworks on the basis of subject matter or emotional effects. As the art historian Serge

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Guilbaut has asserted, by working with form, color, and composition alone, formalism distanced itself from the ideological contentiousness of Cold War discourse.29 By the late 1950s, however, abstract expressionism, regarded as the apotheosis of modernist detachment in the years after the Second World War, had become co-opted into a national rhetoric of freedom by those who celebrated its exceptional emotional energy and spontaneity.30 Thus repackaged, abstract expressionism seemed to parallel the drama of midnineteenth-century landscape painting, praised in its time for its derivation from the uniquely American philosophy of transcendentalism and its convenient allegories for the national mission. The drawing of such a pseudo-historical through-line from landscape to abstract expressionism was troubling for postwar formalists. In this scheme, luminist painting was caught in a contest between two rivals. Did it tend more toward the allegorical, or toward the more aesthetically autonomous and therefore modernist? As a tentative resolution, light—​including light’s physical manifestation as color—​ became the byword for luminist painting’s status as both qualitatively American and also appropriately detached from narrative representation. Truitt admired luminism’s uncompromising attention to light as well, as a factor of its unique Americanness. She insisted that the specificity of Washington’s “light” strongly influenced her decision to keep her studio there.31 Novak nimbly argued that the light in luminism acted as an indigenous property (an “American light”) even as she recast the whole movement as a remarkable transformation of American realism into a cosmopolitan, modern style.32 When Truitt belatedly recognized “landscape as an armature for light” in stating her affection for luminism, she effectively centered the genesis of her minimal-type work in a discourse specific to the 1960s, one that was already historicizing itself in an American trajectory of avant-gardes. Truitt’s invocation of American luminism presents a more general perspective within which to analyze the features associated with abstract art in the 1960s. Not only are light and color among these, but also the gridlike organization of shapes in virtual or actual space. The severity of Truitt’s ruled shapes makes her an early and radical example, especially when compared to the diffuseness of Louis’s expressive waves of color or Noland’s radiant disks. Her 1963 sculptures are remarkable for their emphatic perpendicularity. After Insurrection, Truitt built freestanding columns appearing to consist of stacked cubes, such as Platte (1962; plate 13), and the wall-shaped sculptures, including Valley Forge. The grid is, to borrow from Rosalind Krauss, “an introjection of the boundaries of the world into the interior of the work; it is a mapping of the space inside the frame onto itself,” making it fundamentally self-reflexive and therefore characteristically modernist.33 When brought into three dimensions, the grid becomes a lattice and conveys a similar mapping of space, like an architectural projection. However, Truitt’s sculptures do more than give material form to segments within an imaginary spatial matrix. When Truitt envisioned color “set free,” she assuredly intended it in an entire environment extending outside the limit of the supporting structure. For example, Valley Forge is characterized by what Truitt calls a “cantilever”

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shape, like a sideways T. The sculpture is made from three pieces of wood: two equal columns of primary red and darker red, positioned side by side, and a third piece painted to look like a darker plane floating between two horizontal bands. Analogized to the ground, these bands also serve as local horizons and reinforce the sense of perpendicularity in the overall sculpture. In Daybook, Truitt links the concept of an unfolding horizon line with childhood memory and Proustian revelation: A light gray-blue sky and a darker gray-green sea, heaving in humps now delicately articulated outlines above my eye level, now surfaces fretted by windy scatterings of raindrops and lacings of foam. “Keep your eye on the horizon,” said my father firmly, “You’ll be fine in a minute.” . . . My feet rooted on the deck, I hung onto the rounded wooden rail and rode up and down in a world that suited me perfectly. The ship was in a proper proportion to the sea, which met the sky on its own terms: Where the sea ended the sky began, and where the sky ended the sea began. For the very first time in my life, I felt at home. “Right,” was my thought—​as it was to be thirty years later when I rounded the Guggenheim Museum ramp and caught my breath at the grand space of Barnett Newman’s painting.34

In the artist’s maritime memory, we recognize that she was both “rooted” on the deck and suspended in the surrounding Maryland seascape of her youth, an internalized experience of verticality and horizontality in balance. Tellingly, as a coda to the seascape vignette, Truitt instinctually linked her vision of the meeting between sea and sky to her later, “right” feeling in the presence of Onement VI (see fig. 1); Newman’s painted blue field seemed grandly spatialized to her. Even though she does not relate this memory to Valley Forge specifically, the way the sculpture’s vertical columns intersect expansive double horizon lines seems to suggest such suspension in space. The enrichment of perpendicular shape was fundamental to a change in her practice, a critical diagram for the perceiving body oriented in real space, vertically weighted to the floor, surveying an expanse of horizontal space beyond. A cantilever’s shape similarly describes the relationship between an upright body and the space it inhabits (imagine standing with an arm extended in front of your body). Likewise in architecture, a cantilever is a horizontal beam supported on only one end by a vertical mass. The beam itself, which stretches out into open space, is resisted by what engineers call “moment,” an effect of force acting on it in such a way that it would fall if not for the counterbalance of weight in the vertical support. Truitt had first thought about these weighted counterbalances in 1950 when she studied sculpture with Octavio Medellín at the school of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts. Using heavily grogged clay (i.e., dense clay enriched by the dust of previously fired clay), Truitt “engineered” a system of “interior buttresses” and “cross-struts” as she worked, building a stabilizing lattice into the material as she sculpted from bottom to top. Her invocation of the cantilever suggests a continuing loyalty to these architectural embodiments of space.

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Truitt retrospectively identified with luminism because the austerity of its internal compositions focused the viewer on treatments of light and color, and in her own work she too deployed an environment in which the beholder’s perception of color was made newly active. Formalism provided Truitt with technical parameters, but for precisely this reason she needed to think beyond form—​as she already was thinking beyond color field painting—​to mediate the powerful cascades of visual information unleashed by the exercise of Proustian memory. While I have sought out a historical precedent for Truitt’s unfolding comprehension of the effects of composition and color, luminism is but one example of a range of historical genres at the artist’s disposal and that she tapped into. Moreover, there is at least one way in which Truitt is not like the luminists. Even as she was both responding to and departing from the color field painters who were her peers, Truitt invited historical content into a sparse formal vocabulary that seems formulated to refuse it. Valley Forge is a decidedly monumental artwork and, as we will shortly see, a product of collective effort and public memory.

H i s t or y Pa i n t i n g

Truitt understood the risks of importing literal historical references into an art world hostile to representation, so the next claim will seem strange: Valley Forge is a history painting. History painting, or tableaux d’histoire, developed within the French Academy in the seventeenth century and maintained that the highest aspiration of painting is to act as a repository of moral truth. Accordingly, history painting evolved to signify more than the mere narration of past events; rather, it depicts historical events in a stylized way that enhances their lofty overtones.35 In her discussion of Valley Forge, Truitt cites the specific moment in American history of George Washington’s Revolutionary War encampment and the “raw courage” of its actors. With the return to American history thunderously foregrounded, the emotional tone of her sculpture is thus determined. It might follow that Truitt was interested in the affective associations clustered around this historical episode. But it was not the exact narrative content or allegorical message that concerned Truitt as much as the pictorial syntax of history painting: the moral heft of its depiction, its iconographic significance to the artist’s society, and the public nature of its display. Even so, the history of history painting reflects its typically conservative treatment of national literature and myth and predictable compositional styles. These attributes were interesting to Truitt—​not because she subscribed to them, but because she understood her work as reevaluating them. One of the distinguishing features of her approach to perception is that there is no way of encountering visual material without considering what is already imprinted on the observer’s memory—​which includes one’s sense of history as well. History painting thus suggests a regular visual mode through which history is remembered both individually and publicly. For instance, if one is asked to

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Figure 29 Emanuel Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1851, oil on canvas, 149 × 255 in.

picture the American Revolutionary War, it is unlikely that a single, focused image will appear in the mind’s eye; rather, numerous images must be drawn upon to supply vividness. One such image is Emanuel Leutze’s iconic painting Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851; fig. 29). Aside from Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum portrait of Washington (known to us all from the one-dollar bill), Leutze’s painting is perhaps the single most familiar image of the first president. The work commemorates General Washington’s leadership of a surprise attack against the Hessian garrison at the Battle of Trenton in 1776, the moment in which Washington and his men forded the icy Delaware River. Truitt’s Valley Forge closely references Leutze’s large composition, particularly the cantilever shape defined by Washington’s solid vertical in the left third of the composition and the centrally horizontal extension of the American flag. The flag points diagonally upward and to the right of the overall painting, relaying the eye to the foregrounded plane containing Washington’s boat and its oarsmen and behind them to the receding line of patriots who follow. Light in the portrait emanates from two competing sources: there is a centrally diffused light, which seems like it should render our view of Washington in shadow, and an unexplained light coming from the viewer’s direction, fully illuminating Washington’s face and the American flag. These opposite sources of light create an area of delicate pressure at the center of Leutze’s composition, defining the main narrative moment, its actors, and their sense of mission.36 Most Americans know Washington Crossing the Delaware from textbook and other reproductions, but Truitt, significantly, had direct access to Leutze’s well-known history

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Figure 30 Anne Truitt in her studio, Dallas, Texas, 1950.

painting. In 1950 and 1951, as a result of her husband’s job assignment, Truitt lived in Dallas, Texas (fig. 30). As mentioned above, she studied sculpture with Octavio Mede­ llín at the school of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, where her three-month course culminated in a small group show at the museum in 1950. In that same year, amid much fanfare, the museum received Washington Crossing the Delaware for an exhibition marking the painting’s centennial anniversary. Transport of the large canvas from the Metropolitan Museum in New York to Texas—​the first time the painting had left the Met—​was a subject of great public interest, and its uncrating at the museum was ceremoniously overseen by the celebrated American realist painter Thomas Hart Benton, a visiting lecturer at the time. Throngs of museum patrons admired the dramatic painting during its tenure in Dallas.37 Leutze and Truitt occupied the same museum at the same time, but that is not to argue that Leutze’s art should be seen as having left a direct impression on Truitt. Her connection to Medellín, however, is clear: Truitt has written about the sculptor’s early and lasting influence on her technique. During the few months she studied with him, as we have seen, Truitt learned to build cross-struts into grogged clay as she worked it up from the ground into life-size figures. Per Medellín, Truitt began to think of these internal relationships of weight architecturally, describing her work from this period as internally “engineered” and “buttressed.” Even though Truitt abandoned clay work after First, she attributed her essential knowledge of weights and counterbalances to Medellín’s instruction. It seems logical, then, that when she saw Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, she perceived its vertical and horizontal weight distribution spatially—​perhaps even as a cantilever. By visually citing Leutze, Valley Forge demonstrates how such a counterpointed composition might activate a historical discourse, and yet at the same time it neutralized Washington Crossing the Delaware by warding off its specific narrative thrust. Truitt rewired Leutze’s formal composition in order to suggest its belated reappearance as masses and lines, allowing it precisely the kind of unwieldiness one associates with

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Figure 31 Larry Rivers, Washington Crossing the Delaware, 1953, oil, graphite, and charcoal on linen, 83⅝ × 111⅝ in.

memory. Moreover. in her description of the sculpture, Truitt refers tellingly to “Valley Forge, near Bryn Mawr.” Bryn Mawr College was Truitt’s beloved alma mater, and this private source of memory breaches the obviousness of the adjacent, larger public historical requiem. As we now know well, geographical lability is a central tenet of Truitt’s memory work. Consider how she superimposed the childhood memory of riding on the choppy Chesapeake with her adult memory of ascending the ramp at the Guggenheim to see her first Newman; the picket fence alluded to in First as the trace of both one and many fences (hers and the viewers’); the avalanche of locational associations summoned up by Hardcastle; and now, the encampment at Valley Forge and the Battle of Trenton, which coincided historically if not locally. Such situational adjacency was integral to Truitt’s artwork as she deployed idioms emerging from memories both general and particular, thereby implying the slippage between them. My point is not that Truitt wanted somehow to recreate Leutze’s painting for a contemporary viewership—​she did not—​but rather that the gap between the historical memory and her personal experience was increasingly revealed to be in tension. This restyling of history painting becomes clearer when we examine a different citation of Leutze’s painting, this one by Larry Rivers (1953; fig. 31). In his reinterpretation, a gestural abstraction also called Washington Crossing the Delaware, Rivers constructed

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a bricolage of the main elements in Leutze’s painting. Washington appears alone in the boat at the center of Rivers’s work, turned to face the viewer. Human and equine figures scatter across ice floes, denoted by rough swaths of thick white paint. Rivers seemed to leave the piece in an overall state of incompletion: figures and lines blur in an active style recognizably derived from Rivers’s mentor Willem de Kooning. The artist wittily undercut Leutze’s idealized form of history, depicting his figures as partial and fragmentary, in, as the critic Michael Davidson puts it, “recognition of the failure of any recoverable event, whether Washington crossing the Delaware, or the details of a painting.”38 The tone of Rivers’s painting is negative, appropriating Leutze’s subject to deny its ability to speak for the history it seeks to represent. Truitt does not share in the caustic quality of Rivers’s style, but the two are similar in that their artworks share formal transpositions, permitting the viewer to make interpretations not readily available in the original. Truitt’s handling of color is key because color is a quintessentially variable formal quality. In Valley Forge, the two different “blood reds” identify a chromatic range, dark red to light red. The precise definitions of Truitt’s colors are fugitive, mingling historic and personal referents—​the latter shaped by perceptions—​that allow multiple interpretations. For that matter, color is also the most elusive formal property to describe and analyze because each viewer sees color differently based on a range of cultural and physical predispositions. In her astute observation of art as an outsider methodology, Julia Kristeva says of the powerfully associative nature of color: “It is through color—​colors—​t hat the subject escapes its alienation within a code (representational, ideological, symbolic, and so forth) that it, as a conscious subject, accepts.”39 According to Kristeva, the importance of color owes to its slippery definitions, its ability to engender meaning beyond what is literally represented or known. In this way, Truitt’s color was perhaps like Jasper Johns’s gray as the very definition of an intermediate state, and also like the handling by pop artists who marshaled color to highlight and question the appearance of images in culture: Andy Warhol’s acid hues, Roy Lichtenstein’s primary-color BenDay dots, and James Rosenquist’s fluorescents. Such insights also operate in Truitt’s understanding of Proustian memory: sensory impressions constitute themselves in the beholder as a range of highly contingent resonances. In Valley Forge, we perceive the basic compositional shape of a dramatic history painting and, at the same time, an allusive and highly subjective chromatic range. Retrospectively we can see that Truitt’s project was in step with a postmodern episteme by providing a new and unexpected entry point into such a grand récit. According to the historian Lynn Hunt, “History [is] an ongoing tension between stories that have been told and stories that might be told,” a process in which individual memory plays a large role.40 The subject of Truitt’s revision is almost certainly not the Revolutionary War history of Valley Forge exclusively, but rather the discursive framework of painting that has long guided how national history was constructed visually. The latter is present not only in Leutze’s history painting, aspiring to the grand manner in order to claim its same conservative values, but also in the work of those who had gained a

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reputation as the painters of modern times—​Louis, Noland—​t he male inheritors of a mythic history of modernism into which Truitt’s sculptural practice was uncomfortably becoming enfolded. The unwieldiness of Truitt’s color sense redoubles the complexity of her relationship to the color field painters with whom she closely identified, particularly Louis and Noland, and the minimalists with whom she would later be grouped. The valences of meaning that Truitt associated with both color and memory were not translatable to either modernist painting or minimalist sculpture, and her use of color was singled out as a quality of difference. Clement Greenberg, in his 1968 discussion of Truitt in Vogue titled “Changer,” called her use of color a “feminine sensibility.” In his view, if she had embraced monochromy, she would have achieved a more masculine look and her 1963 show at Emmerich would have been rightly recognized as minimalism’s first.41 The art historian James Meyer has analyzed Greenberg’s phrasing in the context of rigidly gendered constructions of minimal art. Meyer finds that the gendering of critical language Greenberg used to describe Truitt gave him an opportunity to lambast minimalism as a whole, which he perceived as weak and faddish (i.e., feminine), even as it masqueraded as serious and aggressive (i.e., masculine).42 Truitt and Greenberg, however, were close friends, and his criticism, though clearly chauvinistic, was intended to strengthen her reputation for the readers of Vogue—​she was, after all one of “the three in Washington” in his eyes. But Truitt’s “feminine sensibility”—​Greenberg’s suggestion that her use of color was essentially biographical—​actually separated her from color field painting as well, and already much earlier than the crucial year of 1963. By all means, her colleagues Louis and Noland worked with an open palette, but their canvases were praised for directness and intensity—​in short, qualities deriving from their virility. I agree with Marcia Brennan that color field painting had “posit[ed] a disembodied artistic presence as a means to reaffirm masculine creative agency.” In Brennan’s insightful and clever turn of phrase, “Formalism lost its body but kept its gender.”43 How do we understand this seeming incongruity? The answer is simply that affect in modern art is masculine, enshrined in male psychology as the subject of scrutiny and the origin of creative expression. Nowhere is this more clearly seen than in the previous generation’s abstract expressionism. How else could Jackson Pollock’s mammoth canvases have been seen as the accumulated evidence of a virile performance in front of (or on top of) the canvas, and Helen Frankenthaler’s soak-stained canvases by comparison as leaky and passive?44 Post-painterly abstraction was regarded no differently within the modernist orthodoxy; Noland and Louis were granted the positive traits of restrained sensuousness, rationality, and control over unpredictable fluid media.45 With opticality as the new norm, Greenberg aligned post-painterly abstraction with implicitly male openness and intelligence.46 This is all especially unsettling when we consider that a male point of view is still so ubiquitous in art that it is transparently the standard, and this would have been especially true in the early 1960s. Male viewers could identify

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readily and intensely with the presumptive male subject, even in canvases that do not overtly suggest their gendering.47 But Truitt, as a woman, could not pretend to speak for or scrutinize maleness. In that sense, Greenberg’s assignment of her use of color to the category of “feminine” haunts us still. Truitt was not ignorant of the ways in which she was feminized, and yet she proceeded with great deliberateness to identify color as the most important feature of her practice going forward. History painting—​like color field painting—​was yet another highly codified aesthetic context in which masculinity was made heroic.48 For his part, Larry Rivers, a bisexual man living in the repressive 1950s, wittily undercut Leutze’s grand painting in a gesture that might be understood as a tacit rejection of its bombastic display of Washington’s manliness. Rivers’s understanding of masculinity represented a diversity of experience that did not accord with conventional institutions, and so he remade history painting in his own, subjectively resonant image. Truitt’s gesture is at once more subtle and more rule-breaking. Valley Forge accepts and even emulates the basic geometric organization of Leutze’s history painting. As sculpture, however, it is an overt projection, an animating focus that enlists the entire environment of perceptual exchange. This larger frame of reference undermines the single and integrated focus of male viewership appealed to by both history painting and color field painting; instead it achieves Truitt’s stated ambition of “tak[ing] paintings off the wall” and “set[ting] them free.” In the end, Valley Forge, with its impressive size and bright colors, can be understood as a history painting insofar as it offered the beholder a template, a way to think about the public culture’s communal myths and conventional moralities. In the middle of the twentieth century, modernist painting stood for its own, highly idealized intellectual standards of transparency and intensity, which traded on male creativity. But the public culture was changing to allow other kinds of selfhood and subjectivity. Truitt, as one of the first artists to take on this new, tumultuous era, had to struggle through the changes that made ideology timid. But the era’s transitions did not dissuade her from the realization of her own vision. In this crucial year of 1963, the exhibition at the Emmerich Gallery had given her new confidence to pursue color ardently. And in 1964, when she moved to Tokyo, she entered a period of even more remarkable experimentation.

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4 TRUITT IN TOKYO (1964–​1967)

Truitt had breakthroughs in Tokyo, but they were hard won. Despite the professional recognition that Truitt achieved while she lived in Japan from 1964 to 1967, it was a time of deep isolation, sadness, and frustration with her studio practice. At the turn of the 1970s, Truitt looked back on the sculptures she made in Japan and found them “simply intelligent,” “lifeless,” and inconsistent with the conceptual thrust of her work since First—​and in December 1971, she had the majority of these Japanese works destroyed, nineteen sculptures in all.1 Yet, despite this iconoclasm, after Truitt returned to the United States she began to make particolored wooden columns with such consistent shape, form, and surface qualities that these artworks became her signature style. Leaving for Japan was a risk for Truitt’s young career but a “duty” to her marriage.2 Just as she had hit her stride with the Emmerich Gallery debut, Truitt’s husband accepted a position in Tokyo as the Far East bureau chief for Newsweek. The couple departed for Japan on March 4, 1964, and in the ensuing years they enjoyed the glamorous social life of leading expatriates. The Truitts were fixtures at the Foreign Correspondents Press Club and various embassies, and they were regular hosts to such illustrious friends and colleagues as the artists Sam Francis and Paul Jenkins; curators James Johnson Sweeney and Bill Lieberman; art critics Jules Langsner, Meyer Schapiro, and Clement Greenberg; architect Nathaniel Owings; choreographer Merce Cunningham; noted literary translators Edward Seidensticker and John Nathan; novelist and poet Yukio Mishima; Governor George Romney; and their longtime friend Cord Meyer of the Central Intelligence Agency.3

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Figure 32 Black, White, and Gray, The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, January 9–​February 9, 1964. From left: Tribute, Ship-Lap, Thirtieth, all 1962.

In addition to these robust social obligations, Truitt sustained a vigorous studio practice and exhibition schedule. Over the course of the three years that Truitt lived in Japan, she enjoyed prominent gallery representation equally in Tokyo and stateside. She headlined two solo shows and one group show at the Minami Gallery, one of three prestigious Tokyo galleries dedicated to contemporary art.4 In 1964, Truitt was included in the seminal Black, White, and Gray exhibition at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, curated by Samuel Wagstaff (fig. 32). In 1965, she exhibited in a solo show again at the Emmerich Gallery in New York, and the following year the curator Kyanston McShine included her work in Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum. Black, White, and Gray and Primary Structures were landmark exhibitions that defined minimalism as an art movement in and of itself. Despite all this success, however, Truitt felt off course. In Daybook, she remembers: “I had all my life been accustomed to feeling alien. In Japan, I was alien. And made to feel it.”5 We have already seen Truitt’s outsider status becoming a discernible trope in her autobiographical writing. She first described the feeling of separateness when the Dean family moved from Baltimore to the seashore hamlet of Easton, taking their place

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Figure 33 Anne Truitt, André Emmerich Gallery, New York, February 24–​March 13, 1965. From Left: Summer Run (partial), Winter Solstice, Morning Walk, Sea Garden, Out (partial), all 1964.

as a family of means in one of the town’s stateliest homes. Then, in her adolescence, she moved to Asheville, North Carolina, during the Great Depression, as a result of her family’s declining financial situation—​a move she called a “dark struggle” and an “exile” from everything that had come to be familiar.6 Truitt’s adult life in the 1960s was similarly defined by certain inclusions and exclusions. She was included within Washington’s social elite in ways that allowed her privileged access to deep channels of political power, but at the same time, as a woman, she was excluded from full professional participation in the art world. Contributing to her sense of professional exile was the fact that there was no precedent for minimalism in Japan, and her work was misunderstood. Her Japanese sculptures were fabricated in aluminum, soldered together by an agent of the Nihon Almit Company of Tokyo, and later painted by hand in Truitt’s studio with marine paint, a type of industrial paint used on commercial and naval watercraft. The 1964 sculptures, like the works exhibited at her Emmerich debut, were human-scale, boxlike pieces painted in geometric bands of color. These works, such as Back, Out, Here, Winter Solstice, and Summer Run (all 1964), were exhibited at Truitt’s second solo show at the Emmerich Gallery in 1965 (fig. 33). The later sculptures of 1965, 1966, and 1967 were constructed with bent sheet aluminum. One of these, an untitled sculpture, was featured in Color and Space at the Minami Gallery, the first showing of minimalist artwork in Japan. Feeling alien in Japan caused Truitt to cease making artworks inflected by her private sense of memory. Instead she emphasized, as she put it, the “purely visual” experience

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of her work, balancing the internal geometry within individual pieces. Truitt eventually found this direction limiting, however, and she began once again to explore effulgent space that exceeds the edge, as assayed in her wall-shaped sculptures such as Valley Forge. When the new work shown at the Emmerich in 1965 received a mediocre reception, she felt confirmed in her misgivings about the direction she’d been following in Japan. She therefore changed course, focusing with renewed vigor on the environments in which her sculptures would be seen. Initially, she envisioned expansive outdoor settings, but she soon gravitated toward a more intimate scale, harnessing space as an angular fold bent into freestanding sheet aluminum. This work was exhibited only once, at Color and Space, and had no viewership in America. The problem of scale and space continued to vex her. To work her way through, Truitt shifted mediums. She began to soak-stain rice paper and create drawings with sumi ink. These “glazed papers” yielded the result Truitt had been longing for, that is, to create the illusion of protuberant and receding space within a field of color on a single surface. With this breakthrough, Truitt gained confidence. And these drawings proved essential to ambitions that would be realized materially in sculpture when she returned to the United States. Once she arrived at this solution, her practice did not waver for the remainder of her life.

F i r s t I m pr e s s i o n s

Upon arrival in Tokyo, the Truitt family took up residence in the Imperial Hotel. The original building was constructed in the Meiji period (1868–​1912), an epoch marked by the reversal of Japan’s historical isolationism. Thus the hotel became synonymous with the cosmopolitan and distinctively modern spirit of Japanese hospitality, especially as it extended to Westerners. After a fire destroyed the original building in 1922, the owners commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design a second iteration to be built on the same site overlooking the Tokyo Imperial Palace. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the hotel—​which was only partially damaged, in sharp contrast to other parts of Tokyo that had sustained more significant bombing—​remained an uneasy reminder of Allied victory. In the early decades of the Cold War, it continued to represent the ongoing and sometimes fraught enmeshment of American and Japanese governments, economies, and cultures. After living at the Imperial Hotel for two months, the Truitts made the eccentric decision to move to the unassuming residential neighborhood of Wakamatsu-chō in the borough of Shinjuku. Most foreigners in Tokyo lived in Roppongi, a modern tangle of Western-style apartment buildings, pedestrian shopping malls, embassies, and, notably, the main American military installation. By comparison, Wakamatsu-chō was traditionally Tokyoite, with small homes and shrines abutting narrow alleyways off the main road. Its modesty also stood in strong contrast to the bustling high-rise constructions of the Shinjuku business district immediately to the west. Although most of Shinjuku

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Figure 34 Anne Truitt in Otowa studio, Bunkyō-ku, Tokyo, 1965, with Sweet Wind.

had been leveled during the Allied bombing raids, it was one of the first such devastated areas to be commercialized in the war’s aftermath, and in the early sixties had been rapidly developing in anticipation of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In Wakamatsu-chō, the Truitts rented a large, historic property that blended traditional Japanese interior features (e.g., shoji screens, tatami floors) with Western architectural characteristics (e.g., a large driveway, small private bedrooms). Anne Truitt hired a maid, a cook, and a driver, and was responsible for running the household affairs while James worked during the day in the Newsweek bureau offices. The couple’s decision not to live in the expatriate neighborhood afforded the family privacy, but the fact that they were white Americans in the biggest house in all-Japanese Wakamatsu-chō rendered them nonetheless conspicuous. Determined to continue developing in the wake of her critical success at the Emmerich Gallery in 1963, Truitt immediately took it upon herself to establish a studio and find gallery representation in Japan. She occupied a temporary studio for visiting artists at the Japan Art Center in Ginza from March to June 1964.7 She then found a bigger studio in Otowa, a neighborhood in the borough of Bunkyō, much closer to her home in Wakamatsu-chō, which gave Truitt the space she needed to build large sculptures (fig. 34). There, she worked quickly. Her first installment of industrially fabricated aluminum sculpture was delivered to the Otowa studio at the end of June, a scant four months after her arrival in Japan. Kusuo Shimizu, the director of the Minami Gallery, visited Truitt in August to see the finished sculptures, and her Japanese debut followed

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at Minami in October. As this timeframe suggests, Truitt demonstrated exceptional vigor within her first six months in Tokyo. The swift showing of Truitt’s studio work notwithstanding, there was no previous critical model for her art in Japan, nor even color field painting as an introductory context for its reception. Throughout the 1950s, Japanese artists had emulated European, especially French, modernism rather than American modern art. In fact, very little was known or understood about Greenbergian formalism in Japan, even though the quintessentially abstract expressionist paintings of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko had been shown there as early as 1951. Rather, the Japanese art world increasingly looked to the French critic Michel Tapié for inspiration. A 1956 exhibition called Art of Today’s World, organized by the Japanese critic Shinichi Segi in collaboration with Tapié, introduced viewers in Tokyo to the diversity of Continental artists working in gestural abstraction. Exchanges between French and Japanese artists and critics intensified in the late 1950s, and were felt even in New York when Tapié facilitated an exhibition of Gutai art at ­Martha Jackson Gallery in 1958.8 By the early 1960s, American contemporary art was beginning to find a place in Japan—​though on the evidence, Truitt remained equally indifferent to both it and the established current in European art.9 American Neo-Dada, introduced to Japan through the young critic Yoshiaki Tōno, gradually replaced the influence of art informel. Tōno had traveled earlier to New York, where he befriended Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, both of whom he later invited to visit Tokyo. Established in 1958, the Sōgetsu Art Center began to attract emerging artists experimenting with music and happenings, while the artists Genpei Akasegawa, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, and Ushio Shinohara took to performing guerrilla-style theater pieces outside traditional art spaces altogether. Tōno coined this new work han-geijutsu (“anti-art”), in reference to both the rejectionist European Dada movement of the early twentieth century and its reprisal in the work of the Americans Johns and Rauschenberg. Johns visited Tokyo in May 1964 and Rauschenberg that November, and their work was generally well received.10 Although Truitt’s arrival in Tokyo preceded theirs, she makes only passing mention of Johns and no mention of the Japanese anti-art artists in her notes. She listed Ushio Shinohara’s phone number in her datebook, but there is no record of substantive interaction. As further evidence of her lack of connection to this group, Truitt’s first visit to Sōgetsu was not until 1966, which is surprisingly late. Truitt’s difference from the Neo-Dada group—​at least in the context of the Tokyo art world—​is made clear by a comparison to Kate Millett. Millett is best known as the author of Sexual Politics (1970), a foundational text in radical second-wave feminism; accordingly, her written output has captured the majority of scholarly attention. But Millett was also a sculptor by training and had worked as an artist in New York in the late 1950s. Finding the sexism of the New York scene intolerable, Millett left for Tokyo, where she lived between October 1961 and June 1963, sustaining her practice on an income earned as an English teacher at Waseda University. Her sculptures from the

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period have a strong Dadaist inflection, extensively incorporating found objects, and her work was easily assimilated into the critical framework evolving around like-minded younger Japanese artists. The Minami Gallery offered Millett a solo exhibition in March 1963, which art historian Kathy O’Dell rightly characterizes as “a remarkable feat for any twenty-eight-year-old artist, female or male, American or Japanese.”11 Entitled Things, Millett’s debut offered the viewer a range of everyday objects made semantically eccentric or ironic through their juxtaposition with other objects. For instance, Oksamma (1963) is an old-fashioned icebox connected to two bicycle wheels and a metal chassis, in turn connected to a wooden shoe, giving the general impression of a quirky ice-fetching automaton. Millett did not shy away from Japanese content in her works, and in some instances the references were overt. Oksamma, loosely translated, means “the lady of the house” in Japanese, and with the same archaic inflection. Millett’s presumption to critique traditional Japanese women’s domesticity strikes an odd note, coming as she did from an entirely Western point of view. But in other sculptures, her status as an American actually aided her work’s positive reception. Millett applied her antirationalist techniques to address the motifs of wartime destruction and postwar rebuilding, in a manner implicitly critical of American aggression. Young Japanese artists appreciated Millett’s offerings and received her as a fellow iconoclast. By contrast, Anne Truitt, because of her connection to her husband’s work in Japan, was a part of the American establishment, with all of the political and economic superiority it implied. Although in Washington she remained separate from James’s journalism as a matter of custom, this was impossible to do in Tokyo. She had moved to Japan because of him; she was not traveling independently like Millett, and her access to Japanese culture was mediated by this restriction. In a Fuji-TV interview in March 1964—​already an extraordinary feat of publicity given the newness and exclusivity of television broadcast in Japan—​t he announcer introduced her: “She is American and the mother of three children. . . . She came to Japan with her husband, Mr. James Truitt, who became Tokyo Bureau Chief of Newsweek, [a] U.S. weekly magazine. She is not only an ordinary house-wife, but also a mama-san sculptor.”12 Mama-san is not the honorific term that a Westerner might assume (-san is usually a title of respect), but rather connotes a woman who works professionally outside the home. Thus in Japan, her success as an artist was perceived as an interesting adjunct of her nationality, her gender, and her husband’s career. Truitt’s work was received in this context of its foreignness. As was mentioned above, the discourse of Greenbergian modernism that prevailed in the United States was not fully realized in Japan (indeed, Japanese indifference to Greenberg persisted even after it was digested and understood later in the 1960s). Truitt, unlike Millett, did not collaborate with young Japanese artists, in large part because her style was unrecognizable to those who would be her peers. Instead, Truitt’s collaborators were not artists but corporations. She consulted with foundries to obtain sheet aluminum and solder, and shipbuilders to obtain paint. It was an intricate business expertly managed. Her

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l­edgers reveal a web of transactions between Almit, a young, cold-solder enterprise; Aisin Keikinzoku, a light metals company affiliated with the automotive sector; and Nihon Paint, a paint products manufacturer with ties to worldwide naval industries.13 Yet her approach to the artistic process was not simply a matter of “outside fabrication,” as it might have been written in American art criticism. Rather, Truitt operated her studio like the executive of a small international corporation, which no doubt led to a public perception tinged by America’s commercial expansion in Asia after the war. Japan’s continued dependence on the American economy was redoubled by the controversial 1960 renewal of the military alliance between Japan and the United States originally set forward in the Treaty of San Francisco at the end of World War Two.14 There is one relevant exception to Truitt’s isolation from the Japanese art world. Sometime in 1964 she reached out to Kenzō Tange, a leading Japanese architect, for advice on obtaining an acrylic finish for her sculptures.15 Her question to Tange was a small gesture, perhaps inconsequential, but strange—​why would a seasoned artist like Truitt have consulted an architect for advice about, of all things, paint? Tange, and the metabolist group he established, represented an alternative avant-garde to the anti-art projects of his younger visual arts contemporaries. Metabolism took its name from the biological process of energy exchange between organisms and the exterior world. The Japanese name for the movement, shinchintaisha, has the larger meaning of replacing the old with the new (i.e., old breath leaving the body and new breath coming into it). Metabolists like Tange believed that postwar ruin generated the opportunity for new environments, which he envisioned as futuristic master-planned communities. NeoDada artists refuted Tange’s rationalized plans, regarding them as an attempt to master Tokyo’s chaotic urban environment and thereby sanitize its history.16 Surely Truitt felt a conceptual kinship with Tange and his work, given that her own questions about structure and space stemmed from her Proustian reencounter with old environments in new contexts. She demonstrated her appreciation for Tange’s advice by having Emmerich send him a copy of the Primary Structures catalog, which included a photograph of her Japanese-made sculpture Sea Garden (1964; fig. 35). I would like to return to the Fuji-TV interview as a unique piece of publicity and a prospectus for Truitt’s work. Knowing the business of journalism via her husband’s work, Truitt understood that the interview would set the stage for her reception in Japan. Because the artist was later dissatisfied with her metal sculptures, to the point of ordering their destruction less than a decade later, it is fascinating to learn that she told the Fuji-TV interviewer that aluminum was the “easiest” material through which she could express herself. This is especially counterintuitive in that she had not built any sculptures with prefabricated aluminum in the States; rather, her work with light metals seemed to be an innovation associated with her move to Tokyo. Perhaps sensing the unorthodoxy of outside industrial fabrication of art in Japan, Truitt remarked that her sculptures were, in fact, expressive and therefore aesthetic: “For me, sculpture is one of the self-expressions. I see a thing and feel its beauty or strength. Then I express what I

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Figure 35 Title page, Primary Structures catalog, Jewish Museum, New York, 1966.

saw or felt, through the means of materials, shape and color, which I like. Therefore my sculpture is not an imitation of the subject.” Expression is not a common word in Truitt’s argot. She tended to “see,” “perceive,” or even “feel,” but she was disinclined to “express” as it pertained to her own art. In the interview, however, Truitt was intent on characterizing her artwork as expressive. Indeed, she deployed the word expression in clear contradistinction to the word imita-

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tion. Truitt might have meant imitation in the classic sense, as in mimesis, but in the context of Japanese contemporary art the word denoted a specific stylistic affiliation with the anti-art artists. Ushio Shinohara began his “imitation art” series in 1963, and even if Truitt was not familiar with Shinohara’s particular nomenclature, it is reasonable to assume that she wanted to distinguish her technique from the anti-art appropriation of Shinohara, Millett, and others who were in the bull’s-eye of the Tokyo scene.17 Articulating the expressive qualities of her work also aligned her with the expatriate painters Sam Francis and Paul Jenkins, whose gestural, highly chromatic works were already accepted in Japan. Truitt then proceeded to describe certain features of Japan, apparently seeking to demonstrate that she was intellectually receptive and had assimilated her new surrounding context into her preexisting studio concerns. Having understood the point that color was integral to Truitt’s practice, the interviewer asked her to speak about what was impressive about Japan “from the viewpoint of color.” Truitt replied: I’ve been here less than a week, so my impression is not enough yet, but there is one thing [I’m] amazed at especially, among all the other wonderful colors of Japan. That is torii. I have never seen such a magnificent thing, both its color and its shape. Looking at torii, I feel that Japanese people have solved the central problem of sculpture. What I mean is the problem of making small things look large. If we want to express all we feel, we often need a huge building. I was amazed at torii because one gate of simple materials and simple shape and color gives us an impression of such a width and bigness. Speaking of the color, I was told that there had been a discussion in Japan whether to make the part of the red ball of the hinomaru [national flag] bigger or not. I think it is a marvelously interesting problem. I am very much interested.

The idea that the torii, the gate traditionally found at the entrance to a Shinto shrine, implies largeness beyond the limit of the support is analogous to what Truitt had conveyed through structural and nonstructural colors in Valley Forge and others of her 1963 wall-shaped works. The torii was also maximally expressive within an economy of means. Her citation of the torii was predominantly about its grand scale achieved partly through color, which makes it seem to displace a certain amount of space. Truitt’s second example, the hinomaru, was a delicate social issue, one that perhaps demonstrated the artist’s problematic foreignness. When the U.S.-​led Allies took control of Japan in 1945, the Occupation leaders prohibited the flying of the hinomaru without special permission. The restrictions were officially lifted in 1949, but public sensitivity to raising the flag remained throughout the 1950s and 1960s. For instance, in light of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, it was understood that the flag would need to be raised for a Japanese athlete’s victory. A debate ensued on how to make the flag more visually prominent by changing the area of the central red disc relative to the surrounding white space.18 It is little wonder, given Truitt’s profound feeling for national symbols and ideological representations, that she found the hinomaru controversy “marvelously interesting.”

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PLATE 14 Anne Truitt, Sandcastle, 1963, acrylic on wood, 1097⁄₁₆ × 18 9⁄₁₆ × 8 in.

PLATE 15 Anne Truitt, working drawing, Japan, 1964, acrylic and graphite on paper, 11¾ × 8¼ in.

PLATE 16 Anne Truitt, Truitt '64, 1964, acrylic on paper, 22 × 30 in.

PLATE 17 Anne Truitt, fabrication maquette, Japan, 1964, acrylic on paper, 8 × 8 in.

PLATE 18 Anne Truitt, Out, 1964, acrylic on aluminum, 78 × 14 × 19¾ in.

PLATE 19 Anne Truitt, Back, 1964, acrylic on aluminum, 72 × 19 × 19 in.

PLATE 20 Anne Truitt, Truitt '66, 1966, acrylic on paper, 2¾ × 27¼ in.

PLATE 21 Anne Truitt, Signal, 1965, Nippon A-Marine finish acrylic on welded slab aluminum, 79 × 33½ × 12 in.

PLATE 22 Anne Truitt, Bolt, 1965, acrylic on aluminum, 78½ × 33 × 12 in.

PLATE 23 Anne Truitt, Untitled, 1966, ink on Japanese rice paper, 12¼ × 9 in.

PLATE 24 Anne Truitt, 28 September 1965 for James, Christmas, 1965, acrylic on paper, 20½ × 27½ in.

PLATE 25 Anne Truitt, Return, 1967, acrylic on wood, 84 × 18 × 18 in.

But it is easy to see how her interpretation of the problem—​entirely the perspective of a foreigner, and an American, no less—​may have reduced a sensitive issue of east-west relations to a matter of aesthetics and graphic design. Stated another way, since the war Japanese people have exercised great caution in the flying of their national flag due to the cultural shift toward pacifism; Americans simply do not have the same issues flying their flag, certainly at home but even in Japan as well, as their continued postwar military presence in that country illustrates. Whether or not the structure of the torii or the relational color balance of the hinomaru left a lasting mark on Truitt’s vision, her first impressions were merely that, and she never mentioned them again. By her own admission, Truitt did not incorporate Japanese influence into her work until 1965, when she began to paint with sumi ink on paper. This was a crucial turning point, in which she perceived the spatial effects of differently saturated colors in juxtaposition. After her return to the United States in 1967, this multidimensionality became the key feature of her vigorous new practice. While in Japan, she was eager for Japanese viewers to accept her work, but her primary frustration derived from the lukewarm reception of her second solo Emmerich show in 1965. This disappointment led to a period of intellectual ferment and hermetic formal experimentation.

Objec ts Experienced as Objec ts

In Daybook, Truitt wrote of her time in Japan as one in which she felt off course: “I was so out of touch with myself that I used aluminum instead of my customary wood for my structures.” From this we might assume that her experimentation with light metals was wholly a Japanese endeavor. But even though the aluminum works were fabricated in Japan using Japanese materials, Truitt had planned to make sculptures in aluminum before she left the States. This is a small but important point, because it reveals that Truitt considered herself “out of touch” only in retrospect, looking back from a later point in her career on a body of seeming anomalous work. As it turns out, these Japanese works were the result not of a dramatic caesura, but rather of certain perceptual questions about the visual experience of a structure within its surrounding space—​a “desperate intellectual preoccupation,” she called it—​which in turn prompted technical and material changes to her art.19 Truitt’s earliest reference to aluminum is in a sketchbook she brought with her on a vacation with her children to Michigan in the summer of 1963, only a few months after her first Emmerich exhibition. These drawings collectively demonstrate her continuing interest in architectural space, with special attention to doorways, windows, and the positioning of buildings within the close confines of the surrounding landscape. One sketch (see fig. 7) reveals a narrow base and two posts supporting a pitched roof, creating a freestanding armature around a central void. The effect is one of a door or window; the presumptive form structures the viewer’s experience of space as seen through or having been passed through. She noted beneath this sketch: “Exterior lines proclaim their interior

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Figure 36 Anne Truitt, working drawing, 1963, graphite on envelope, 3¾ × 6¾ in. Figure 37 Anne Truitt, working drawing, 1963, acrylic and graphite on paper, 11 × 8½ in.

Figure 38 Anne Truitt, Fabrication Drawing No. 55, 1964, graphite on paper, 14 × 17 in.

space. Interior space declares exterior lines.” In a similar sketch, she pondered this visual concept in material terms, noting beneath an enclosed trapezoidal shape: “Aluminum?”20 The diversity of design in her working drawings from late 1963/early 1964 suggests that using aluminum freed Truitt to pursue curvature and angularity in a way that she could not with other materials. Aluminum is not only lighter in weight than wood, but also easily bent using a sheet metal brake. In December 1963, Truitt made working drawings on the back of an envelope for a sculpture to be realized in aluminum (fig. 36). The sculpture is horizontal in orientation, flush with the ground, with one or two vertical or diagonal struts inclining from the base. Another working drawing shows that Truitt had also thought about making short, rounded aluminum volumes, measuring between five and eight feet at the base (fig. 37). One of these sculptures, although apparently contiguous from the top view, was actually partitioned into four wedges by very narrow slivers of negative space. Truitt also thought about perpendicular compositions in aluminum; in a separate fabrication drawing (fig. 38), she indicated a comparatively

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Figure 39 David Smith, Cubi XXVII, 1965, stainless steel, 111⅜ × 87¾ × 34 in.

simplified horizontal sculpture with one small vertical element positioned near the edge and perpendicular to the ground. However, Truitt had already realized a similar composition in the painted wooden sculpture Sandcastle (1963; plate 14). It seems that Truitt envisioned both rectilinear and freeform structures made of aluminum, but only rectilinear structures made of wood. The switch to aluminum altered Truitt’s thoughts about scale. She wrote to her close friend, the sculptor David Smith, about the change in November 1964: “Am working in aluminum, epoxy paint, larger.”21 The news would have been of interest to Smith, whose recent Cubis likewise suggested an increased emphasis on volume and monumentality. Several of these works—​known collectively as his “gates” or “arches”—​resemble large rectangular portals, such as Cubi XXVII (1965; fig. 39). Smith’s “gates,” bent and rolled sheets of burnished steel seeming at once powerful and precarious, frame space, creating thresholds of visual experience: there is the real space displaced by the obtrusive sculpture, as well as the space framed by or seen through the opening. Truitt, too, was thinking about ways of framing space, including its possible relationship to the limens of psychological experience. She wrote: “A space enclosed by a heavy, fat line will have more psychological bulk than a space enclosed by a thin line.”22 Her emphasis on the word bulk has volumetric connotations, volume being as much psychological as ­physical—​something that originally dawned in her practice in 1961—​and space becoming more psychologically provocative when the beholder’s awareness of it is heightened in relationship to other proximal spaces. The sculptural object is what activates the threshold of distinct sensations felt between contiguous spaces.

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Framing visual sensation was at the center of Truitt’s “desperate intellectual preoccupation.” She marshaled the formal property of shape to experiment with the differences between rational and antirational form. Over the course of 1963 and 1964, perpendicularity was a salient issue in Truitt’s studio, as evidenced by her many drawings of grids and sketches on graph paper. As a compositional device, the grid connotes the limitless extension of lateral space. The grid also symbolizes a rational system—​ideality—​and in that, the opposite of reality and tangible experience. For instance, in one working drawing (plate 15), Truitt drew a grid with graphite pencil and then filled in a humpshaped fragment of it with blue and red acrylic paint as if looking through an irregular aperture highlighting a specifically resonant section within a larger field of interest. Later, she formalized this practice in works on paper, such as Truitt ʼ64 (plate 16). In both of these images, the shape of the aperture operates independently from the regular, colored pattern of the expansive image that it occupies: it introduces contingency to what the viewer perceives as an orderly underlying system. Although they are not sculptures, these small, painted drawings are succinct metaphors for involuntary memory. A memory, too, is an irrational, vivid fragment that penetrates lived experience. Moreover, memory returns to us so frequently in a jagged and unpredictable way, a shape with no regular boundary. Its vividness suggests the utopia of a fully commemorated past and, at the same time, the impossibility of total recall.23 Truitt spatialized this metaphor by translating it into sculptures. In a 1964 fabrication maquette (plate 17), she stapled together four irregular quadrilateral shapes as the four sides of a proposed sculpture. The maquette bears a strong resemblance to the realized sculptures Out and Back (1964; plates 18 and 19). Also, this maquette is unique in Truitt’s archive; no similar paper constructions are retained among her working drawings. Here we understand the particular way in which Truitt understood shape to relate to space. Each cutout of stapled paper represents a fragment of limitless colored space. When these four fragments converge in an enclosed volume, the resulting object seems both compact and expansive at once. It is important to distinguish these surfaces from the painted surfaces of Jules Olitski’s Bunga 45 (1967; see fig. 20). As discussed in chapter 2, Olitski’s surfaces are highly self-reflexive. Each surface refers to itself rather than to a field of boundless space. By contrast, Truitt wrote that the viewer was “incidental” to the “range” of her new artworks, meaning that while the particolored and divided surfaces refer compositionally to the shape of the sculpture as a whole, the resulting planes and spaces also reach imaginatively beyond the limits of the composition, into the viewer’s own space.24 The tension between objecthood and spatiality was pertinent in the mid-1960s, with many artists asserting that an object’s shape could not exist independently of its environment. Robert Morris’s Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1966) and Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes are suitable examples, although Sol LeWitt’s architectural lattices such as Serial Project, I (ABCD) (1966; fig. 40) are more apropos to Truitt’s thinking at the time. In each of these artworks, the sculptural object reflects (Morris), illuminates (Flavin), or frames

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Figure 40 Sol LeWitt, Serial Project, I (ABCD), 1966, baked enamel on steel units over baked enamel on aluminum, 240 × 163 × 163 in.

(LeWitt) the real and occupiable space in which it stands. Art criticism between 1964 and 1967 attributed this emerging feature of the new art to the American assimilation of early-twentieth-century French theory that had recently come into English translation, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s seminal Phenomenology of Perception.25 By the mid1960s, artists like these had adopted strategies of antinarrativity precisely to counteract the subjectivizing impulses of the artist and the viewer’s desire to interpret their art. The intention in doing so was to launch a clear interrogation of the infrastructure that underlies bodily perception. Truitt distinguished her approach to perception by limiting any possibility for an imaginary phenomenological encounter outside the systems of history, language, and sex that the body already knows. Rather, her practice was always about the subtle meanings that break through ordinary perception, that demonstrate how a moment of perception cannot be abstracted from its context: the intuitive meanings of a shape, a color, an armature are, in fact, the very substrate of perception itself. To Truitt’s dismay, the critical reception of her new aluminum sculptures, which she exhibited with various works on paper at the Minami Gallery in October 1964, was the opposite of what she wanted. The show itself was a subject of great interest, and certainly

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different from anything that had been seen in Tokyo to date. One Japanese newspaper called her works “sculpture-like three-dimensional paintings,” emphasizing their handmade, painterly quality.26 When they were shown in New York at the Emmerich Gallery in early 1965, the reviews hit a similar pitch. Owing to a dock strike, Emmerich first installed her older wooden sculptures, and then replaced them with the aluminum works when the shipment arrived. Clement Greenberg later noted that the older work looked strong in comparison to the Japanese work.27 Truitt immediately protested the notion that her three-dimensional artworks were “painted sculptures.” In fact, the negation of the phrase “painted sculpture” appears regularly in Truitt’s notes from this time. For example, on the reverse side of an airmail envelope sent to her care of André Emmerich, Truitt noted: “Not painted sculpture, but sculpture which is color. Color doesn’t necessarily identify shape. Color is light. Shape is weight and form. BUT apperception of form and weight is in terms of color.”28 Although the precise date when Truitt made this note is not known, we may infer that it was a time roughly consistent with or just after her Emmerich opening—​that is, before she returned to Japan in early March. She must have vented her frustration to Greenberg, who wrote her on March 12: “I’d had an idea you might have gone back to Tokyo a little upset about your show . . . Whatever the actual seeming reception of your show right now, I know for myself that there’s no doubt about its quality.”29 Although Truitt’s sculptures are in fact painted, the notion that they were “painted sculpture” touched a nerve. As early as 1961, Truitt understood the practice of twodimensional painting as being powerfully communicative but exclusively visual. Her ensuing explorations of sculpture were bodily and haptic; Truitt painted her wood or metal armatures to get an effect of color that was physical, not optical. The idea that her sculptures were arbitrarily painted, or merely decorated with color, ran counter to her ambitions; since her transformative experience with Barnett Newman’s painting, she hoped to carry forward the direct perception of sensuously colored forms into the viewer’s space. Throughout 1965, and especially in the first months after her return to Tokyo, Truitt conducted a series of formal experiments to deal with the “painted sculpture” problem. In a working drawing of March 18, Truitt wrote that “what I FEEL are lines of force (weight—​where the land is heaviest, where the land goes in & out, up & down). The object is composed of these lines of force. What I SEE are variations of light (hue, intensity & brightness variations) which make me FEEL the lines of force. The color is composed of these variations of light.”30 In order to achieve the properly physical encounter with color that Truitt wanted, color needed a kind of independence from shape that had not been adequately achieved by her boxy aluminum constructions. Instead of individual shapes, Truitt once again turned her attention to an expansive concept of space. She reiterated that her preferred “lines of force” related to the “land”: vectors that incline or decline to an implicit horizon. Truitt thought ambitiously about making sculptures that were so large that they created immersive environments for the viewer, such that the idea of force would be perceived automatically as a consequence

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Figure 41 Ronald Bladen, Rockers, 1965, wood prototype for metal editions, 240 × 180 × 132 in.

of scale. In an unsent letter, Truitt wrote to Greenberg that she wanted to make “bigger and bigger objects,” as large as thirty feet by fifty feet by 150 feet. Modern sculpture this large was unprecedented in 1965. Ronald Bladen’s work is roughly analogous, but even his huge sculpture Rockers (1965; fig. 41) measures only twenty feet on its longest side. Unable to make such supersized artworks, Truitt wrote Greenberg, she had been looking for solutions to this creative impasse: I felt really hung up, and spent my time making paper constructions and trying to work my way out—​you can imagine. I could just feel those big pieces, exactly what they should be and clamored to be. Until they pushed at me so that I turned, shifted, to another dimension of perception: could it be, I thought, that if I used what my eyes saw, the visual cues of volume and weight, combined with the lines of forces of what I felt plastically, that could make objects of viable size experiences as objects as forceful as the ones that compelled me. So I turned to sheets of aluminum which would define a space for me in plastic terms, a volume, that I could then organize in terms of color, line and value. I started slowly out on this path, and it felt to me all right and the things looked good to me in the context in which I was seeing them.31

The paper constructions she refers to in the letter were the inverse of the red-andblue paper maquette she made in 1964. In the maquette, Truitt understood each

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Figure 42 Anne Truitt, Untitled, 1966, acrylic and graphite on paper, 10¼ × 13¾ in. Figure 43 Anne Truitt, Untitled, 1966, acrylic and graphite on paper, 10⅜ × 12⅜ in.

stapled-­together fragment as a shape defining one face of the resulting sculpture. Here instead, Truitt composed contiguous, different-colored shapes on a sheet of rectangular paper, and then cut the paper into narrow, ribbonlike strips. The shape of the aperture is now rectangular, that is to say, conventionally pictorial, and the internal color scheme is asymmetrical. Moreover, the act of cutting is spatial: each strip stands apart from the original composition, and yet contains one or more elements of the diagonal lines. Certain works on paper formally resemble these small, attenuated strips, such as Truitt ʼ66 (plate 20). Also, these lateral structures harkened back to her original fences, which she revisited in several drawings made in 1965 and 1966 (figs. 42 and 43). A physical boundary, like a fence, and a “line of force” were substantially similar concepts in the artist’s mind, accounting for why Truitt regarded the colors in her sculptures and works

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on paper to refer to an entire spatial field—​and why it frustrated her when these colored sections appeared to the viewer simply as shapes abutting other shapes. These drawings enabled Truitt to envision a type of highly activated space existing between angled lines, but ultimately they were unsuccessful as sculptures. Manifested in aluminum in late 1965 and early 1966, these folded structures sat flush on the ground without a supportive base and “defined a space”—​an angle between the facing sheets—​ around which to orient her diagonal lines in relationship to the ground, and therefore implicitly the horizon. For instance, in Signal (1965; plate 21), the diagonal boundary line between white and navy blue was a “line of force” acting as a vector continuing beyond the limit of the sculpture into real space. The diagonals defined by the planes forming the sculpture’s angular fold echo and reinforce this implied vector. Truitt experimented with proportion and size, finding that the taller sculptures needed two angular folds to keep the armature upright, as in the yellow-and-white sculpture Bolt (1965; plate 22). Her attempts related to the spatial situation invoked also by the fence. Truitt wrote to her dealer, André Emmerich: “I turned, shifted, to another dimension of perception: could it be, I thought, that if I used only what my eyes saw, actually saw, combined with the lines of force of what I felt plastically, that I could make objects of viable size experienced as objects as forceful as the ones which compelled me.”32 Her phrase, although rhetorically dense, gives us insight. First, these sculptures are to be experienced as objects—​note the redundancy of the phrase “objects . . . experienced as objects”—​that are the consequence of a studied vision. Second, Truitt wanted these objects to have the profoundness and primacy of the fences drawn from her memory: the ones that compelled her to make this artwork in the first place. And yet these images are not exact; like a signet ring pressed into a dollop of wax, they record the similarity between the memory of a thing and the thing itself. For Truitt, the “similarity” is not indexical, but affective; Truitt pursued “objects as forceful as the ones” in her memory. When she later called these Japanese works “lifeless,” it is this point to which she is referring. None of the sculptures she made in Japan sufficiently begat a forceful mnemonic experience. In February 1966, twelve of Truitt’s folded sculptures began the long voyage back to the United States, arriving in New York in early April. With the exception of three additional folded works, which have not been identified and may not be extant, Truitt made no more sculpture during the remainder of her time in Japan. Instead, works on paper accounted for the majority of her studio time. In the same year, Truitt was involved in two important exhibitions of her work. The first, Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum in New York City, was one of the earliest exhibitions to canonize minimalism. The second, Color and Space at the Minami Gallery, was similarly important within Japan for publicly recognizing the new “fabrication art” (hacchu geijutsu, literally “order-made art”) style and establishing, through Truitt, a link to minimal art in the United States. Color and Space is the only public exhibition in which Truitt displayed her folded aluminum work (figs. 44 and 45). The critic Yoshiaki Tōno curated the Minami show after he saw Primary Structures in New York in 1966, and Truitt was the only artist with works in both exhibitions. Her contribu-

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Figure 44 Color and Space poster, Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 1966, 40 × 30 in.

Figure 45 Anne Truitt, untitled aluminum sculpture, 1966, exact dimensions unknown. Reproduced from a review of Color and Space that appeared in Bijutsu Techō, December 1966.

tion to Color and Space was an untitled piece that apparently was left in Japan (the exhibition wrapped up well after Truitt shipped the last of her sculptures home to the States). The qualities of interactivity, spatial displacement, and hard-edged formality that characterized the next generation of Japanese artists suggest that Truitt’s work was connected to the transition from the anti-art aesthetic of the 1960s to the environmental intermedia works of the 1970s and beyond, even though specific networks of influence are elusive. Given the historical popularity of performance and Fluxus work in Japan, minimalism has only recently emerged in art history as a bellwether for Japanese midcentury artists.33 Despite the inclusion of one of her folded aluminum sculptures in Tōno’s highly publicized Color and Space, Truitt had already relinquished working in sculpture, and that remained the case for the rest of her time in Tokyo. While her working drawings and paper constructions were highly sculptural—​even architectural—​in their concern for axes and line weights, Truitt now began experimenting with color in a two-dimensional medium. These works on paper mark a prolific period in Truitt’s practice that, perhaps even more successfully than her sculptures made in Japan, accrued an understanding of space and color that would eventually be expressed in three-dimensional form when she moved back to the United States in 1967.

Appro a c h i n g R e t u r n

Truitt rarely described the artworks she made in Japan as possessing personal mnemonic origins. Yet in a 1997 interview she offered that Back (1964) was about “looking

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back over your shoulder.”34 Back (plate 19) was one of the enclosed sculptural objects whose asymmetrical surfaces were designed to replicate memory’s irregularity. Its title is a curious one, contending with memory through a general sense of longing—​t he very word back is redolent of loss and displacement—​rather than the sharp, episodic recollections that Truitt had earlier embraced. At the same time, the action of looking back indexes Truitt’s reticence during her time in Japan to be fully immersed in her present experience—​whereas in her earlier work it was the sensory demands of the present by which the remembered past was so powerfully conjured. By “looking back,” it seems that Truitt had also severed herself from a present context that allowed past sensation to emerge with its aura of meaningfulness. After the critical ambivalence of the 1965 Emmerich show, Truitt had a strong feeling of being off course, despite having working continuously from the time she left the United States. Thus, what she deemed as her “acceptance of Japan” came as a remarkable reconciliation. Upon her return to Tokyo early in 1965, Truitt bought a variety of Japanese-made papers, or washi, from Haibara, an elegant Meiji-era papeterie in the fashionable Ginza district. Of the experience, she recalls: I began to accept Japan. I began to dye the papers. I began to use Japanese materials. I gave in. I used Japanese materials. I went to the Japanese paper store. My Japanese was really pretty good by that time. . . . Hundreds, maybe even thousand kinds of different paper and in different sizes and shapes and all hand made. I took to using Japanese paper of various sorts and experimented with various kinds of paper to see what I could saturate and I began to soak them in color. That is when I found out that color won’t do it because I tried to do it and it wouldn’t work. So I saturated the color and then I bought myself a clothes line and some clothespins, I had clotheslines and sheets of colored paper hanging all over the studio, like kind of a maze and I was really quite happy doing that.35

These “glazed papers” were a turning point for several reasons. In order to reclaim the deep personal response she sought in her work, she relinquished “looking back” in favor of gaining material closeness to her present experience in Japan. This is not to suggest that Truitt adopted Japanese culture or felt fully accepted by her Japanese contemporaries—​she did not. In fact, her discovery of traditional Japanese paper occurred in the utopian retail equivalent of the Imperial Hotel, in which intercultural encounters were naturalized as a matter of commercial exchange. But it is wrong to discount Truitt’s experimentation with Japanese paper merely as a superficial hybridization. The act of using washi from Haibara was an honest attempt to assimilate Japan via the range of experiences available to her, and it led to two important discoveries that buoyed her work into its next, and most lasting, phase. Contrary to what she had thought, Truitt found that color alone did not convey a sense of space. More precisely, she discovered that it was how colors relate to one another in terms of brightness that creates visual depth. Owing to the inherent irregularities

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Figure 46 Hanging glazed papers in Anne Truitt’s studio, Otowa, Bunkyō-ku, Tokyo, c. 1965.

of the soaking process and the paper’s texture, the resulting stains created overlapping areas of color (plate 23). Differences in value made some of these shapes recessive and others protuberant—​convex and concave at the same time. In Daybook, Truitt wrote about this paradox in terms of Heraclitus’s dictum, which she first learned as an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr: “The concept of the Logos and the Flux lying along a curved line that is at once convex and concave and unifies opposite forces in one identity has remained a spine as intimate to my thought as my backbone is to my body.”36 Similarly, the lines between colors in the glazed papers resemble fault lines separating different topographical elevations. When Truitt hung these dyed papers to dry on clotheslines strewn around her studio (fig. 46), she realized the immersive experience of color that she had longed for since her return from America. Recall that one of her first instincts for working her way out of the “painted sculpture” problem was to create dramatically large sculptural environments that emphasized sensory impact through dynamic line. She believed for a time that working at a huge scale would literalize the “lines of force” between colors and reduce the seeming arbitrariness of a sculpture’s geometrically patterned, painted surfaces. Yet seeing the glazed papers suspended on lines around her studio was a revelation, delivering the bodily immersion in color that Truitt wanted to evoke sculpturally. As she came to realize, the sense of visual depth conveyed by the particolored surfaces only enhanced the actual space displaced by a sculptural object, bringing into alignment the optical and spatiotemporal dimensions of experience.

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Truitt’s fresh understanding of the spatial dimensions of color saturation led to numerous further enrichments in other works on paper. Truitt expressed confidence in this body of work to her close friend the artist Louisa Jenkins when, in a letter dated March 13, 1967, she wrote of a “boom” in the studio.37 Her optimism here contrasts with the frustration she felt after returning from the States in March 1965. These glazed papers led to drawings blocked off into colored segments, such as 28 Sept. ʼ65 (1965; plate 24). While the latter works on paper formally reproduce the stacked or side-by-side color blocking familiar in Truitt’s pre-Japan artwork, the impetus was different: these were not colors in juxtaposition, but rather relative saturations of colors. In the “chromatic” series of 1967, Truitt elevated the ideas introduced by the glazedpaper working drawings into complete works on paper. The space conveyed by these color fields was inherent, and had the potential to be dynamic without necessarily counterbalancing weights in other parts of the composition. At her final solo show at the Minami Gallery in 1967 (fig. 47), Truitt exhibited a number of the chromatics alongside the stacked blocks of color arranged in horizontal or vertical rectangles on a white ground. Shimizu used one of the blocklike works on paper as the invitation to the opening (fig. 48). Truitt had almost totally departed from the diagonality that had marked her “lines of force” preoccupation. These new artworks, therefore, signaled a firm separation from the intellectual problems of weight and force that had beleaguered her for the last two years. Although the glazed papers and chromatic works reveal a new attitude toward color, Truitt’s sumi ink drawings underscore her gravitation toward the columnar format. Each of these is similar in composition, comprising two perfectly straight side-by-side stripes of different values of gray, painted from edge to edge lengthwise on Fabriano watercolor paper (fig. 49). Though apparently monochromatic, they actually are not: Truitt mixed brown Carter’s ink into the sumi ink in order to achieve subtly different colors and levels of saturation. The artist later remembered: “My sensibility is perfectly tuned to sumi because I really care desperately about those faint differences and I can see those. The only thing I can see is little variations. The one thing that happened with my eyes in Tokyo was that because of living all of the time with what was for me a colorless land, my eyes did change so that I was able to discern very slight differences in hue and value to a much greater degree than I remember.”38 Truitt’s comments acknowledge an important connection between Japan and the work she undertook when she returned to Tokyo, particularly in terms of delicate changes in hue. When she made them in November 1966, Truitt signed the sumi ink drawings in a horizontal orientation. Later, after she returned to the United States in 1967, she erased her signatures, realigned the drawings vertically, and re-signed them. The revision from horizontal to vertical reveals that Truitt had begun to comprehend chromatic subtlety in the form of a column—​t he iconic shape by which her practice is recognized today. This brings me to what Truitt obtained in Japan. Although her time abroad might seem to be dominated by a narrative of exile and loss, important things were gained and

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Figure 47 Anne Truitt and Kusuo Shimizu, Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 1967. Figure 48 Exhibition announcement (recto) for Anne Truitt 1967, Minami Gallery, Tokyo, February 28–​March 11, 1967.

even unconsciously sought: the sharpness of vision, the ability to discern between slight gradations of hue, and the gratifying acceptance of Japanese materials crucial to the evolution of her artistic process. When the Fuji-TV interviewer asked her what impressed her about color in Japan, Truitt referred to the torii and the “marvelously interesting” problem of the hinomaru. But that was within two weeks of her arrival in Tokyo, and reflected her interest in the interaction between colors and space that had marked her recent work. When asked again about her impressions of Japan many decades later, she asserted that Japan was a “colorless land” that counterintuitively enhanced her visual propensity to discern subtly different colors.

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Figure 49 Anne Truitt, Sumi Drawing, 1966, ink on paper, 27¼ × 8¾ in.

If we look beyond this specific paradox, we see the broader story. Truitt’s time in Japan was but one strand in the arc of her lifetime where insight grew out of estrangement. It seems to me that the paradox of color in Japan runs parallel to her memory of the bicycle that her father gave her as an adolescent, filling her at once with the desire to ride out of town like an independent adult and, at the same time, terror at leaving the nest of childhood. Months before her death, she wrote that exile “is the condition we all and every one come to by way of birth.”39 As a larger metaphor, an exile is a period of self-alienation—​a phase change—​to be pondered and redeemed after it is endured. Such narratives, although at the time painful, were integral for Truitt to make sense of her life’s arc. Return (1967; plate 25) is the first sculpture Truitt made after returning to the United States from Japan. It is a slender wooden column, painted on each of its faces with two equal, vertical stripes in offset shades of magenta. The sculpture was fabricated at Galliher Brothers, the same carpenters who made First, and painted with Liquitex acrylic in the same method of crosshatched undercoating that she had used since 1962. Truitt’s side-by-side partitions of color are familiar from such earlier works as Southern Elegy (plate 8) and Insurrection (plate 12), but as a freestanding column the experience is markedly different. The position of the viewer’s body relative to the sculpture creates ambiguity, with the subtle boundary between colors on a single surface suggesting an edge: the beholder thus experiences vertiginous uncertainty as to whether he is looking at the sculpture face on or obliquely. In order to stabilize perception, the beholder must rely on ambient light and real space around the sculpture—​for instance, by seeing the sculpture’s shadow. In continuity with her immediately previous sculptural work, Truitt’s new innovation was to evoke space through the juxtaposition of color alone, rather than creating a literal space as she did in the interior angles of her folded work. Thus Return delivers an experience that is both visual and embodied, virtual and spatial. Despite Truitt’s satisfaction with her newer work, her homecoming was not an abrupt volte-face. Truitt continued to exhibit her Japanese-made sculptures through 1968: she showed Back at HemisFair in San Antonio, Texas, and Late Snow (1964) at A Contemporary Selection, hosted by the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio. These two exhibitions were the last public displays of the aluminum work. In 1971, Walter Hopps offered Truitt two career retrospectives, one at the Whitney Museum of American Art in December 1973, the second at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in April 1974. In the process of reviewing her work with Hopps, Truitt sensed the Japanese sculptures’ incompatibility with her current vision and in December 1971 ordered them destroyed. By 1976, she candidly panned her aluminum work in an interview with Howard Fox: “I just don’t like it . . . I’m not comfortable with it . . . I just never was able to feel satisfied with painted aluminum. [Pause.] In Japan, I used my head a lot.”40 In the same interview, she identified the absorptive quality of wood as key to the distinctive finish of her new work. And this new work—​all fabricated after 1967—​was validated in grand

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fashion by a sold-out exhibition at the Emmerich Gallery (1969) and a laudatory article about Truitt by Clement Greenberg in Vogue, “Changer: Anne Truitt” (1968). Truitt’s destruction of her aluminum sculptures is interesting because although it seems to be an extreme action, the artist thought of it as a matter of course. To Truitt, obliteration is not the same as forgetting. Her making of these pieces and the period they represent in her life and practice did not disappear with the objects. Just like any other of Truitt’s memories, the Japanese work remains a virtual presence. The same is true in Proust’s masterwork: loss is the precondition for recuperation. The Proustian narrator’s imaginative contact with the past allowed him to see the present with a different focus and vision. Return holds to this type of retrospection. The very word return signifies new contact with a point of origin, new understandings of familiar forms and spaces. Ultimately, it is this that distinguishes Truitt from other minimalists: the idea that bodily encounters with objects are mediated not only by the existential facts of our surroundings, but also frequently and profoundly by the traces of past encounters, sensations on the limen of consciousness. To borrow once again from Truitt’s Daybook: “A force is only visible in its effect, and it is the split second in which this effect becomes just visible that haunts me. The turns of life are secret.”41

Af t e rwor d : W or d s

Truitt’s minimalist work grappled with the era’s changing ideas about how the perception of art could shift from the optical to the immersive; it also, as seen in the aesthetic choices she made, reflected the influence of the psychology and philosophy of memory. To return to where we started: the cultural moment in which Truitt was finding her voice—​the 1960s—​was a time in which the place of personal subjectivity within the tide of history was receiving telling scrutiny. The remarkable struggles and liberations characteristic of that tumultuous decade continue to compel historians. Truitt, however, did not shrink from the personally resonant, at a time when other artists and critics believed that it had no place in art. That she was a woman exploring her own subjectivity within a male-dominated art world was especially radical. As a result, she was ostracized from the ordinary canons, her work accorded summary status as the exception rather than the rule. With this book, I hope to change that view. As I have argued, Truitt was an original, and the Proustian roots of her phenomenology should give historians more complex insight into minimalism’s tentative beginnings. Art history will know Truitt for her sculptures, paintings, and the hundreds of works on paper that she made in her lifetime. That said, it is possible that Truitt intended her legacy to be that of a writer as much as a visual artist. Truitt’s words animate this book. I have relied extensively on her writings because her eloquently narrated memories are consequential to her studio practice. Adding to these stories are the titles of her sculptures—​First, Hardcastle, Valley Forge, Return, among dozens of others—​t hat were intended as passwords to access the temporally flexible dimensions of remembered

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experience. Such meaningful texts are everywhere in her archive, sustaining decades of artistic work. Her copious late, unpublished writings have the cadence of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project. Like Benjamin, Truitt wrote fragmentary paragraphs of insight punctuated by single, enigmatic words bracketed by double vertical bars: ||WAKING||, ||TAP-ROOT||, ||FUSED||, ||DOCUMENT||, ||UNDERTOW||.42 The papers she donated to Bryn Mawr College in 1987 (with, it should be mentioned, her own extensive typewritten annotations) contain scores of draft poems and short stories she wrote not only as a student there, but also later as a young woman living independently in Boston and, now married, in Washington in the 1950s. Her archives also contain thousands of pages of typescript for the later books Daybook, Turn, and Prospect. Clearly, Truitt was fully invested as an author. Published in 1982, Daybook is a particularly important product of Truitt’s career, the first full and public written account of her lifelong coming to terms with being a professional artist. The decade after her return to Washington from Tokyo was one of intense self-scrutiny. Her Emmerich success in 1969 and Greenberg’s Vogue article elevated her profile in the New York art world. Simultaneously, having separated from James Truitt in 1969, she found herself for the first time relying on her art as a source of income for herself and her children. When Walter Hopps approached her in 1971 with the idea of consecutive retrospectives at the Whitney and Corcoran, taking inventory of a decade’s work required a massive effort—​in her words, she felt emotionally “brutalized.”43 As we have seen, one outcome was the destruction of the Japanese aluminum work in December 1971, a move that represented evolving confidence in her artistic vision. Another eventual outcome was that in June 1974, Truitt began to keep a journal to write down the insights she had gained as a working artist—​fitting reflections in the wake of her retrospectives. This journal and ensuing others formed the basis for Daybook. Daybook is also the gesture of Truitt’s memory work, germinated by her translation of Germaine Brée’s book about Marcel Proust. The ultimate understanding drawn from Proust’s immersive memory work is what he calls a life that is “really lived,” what Brée wrote (and Truitt translated) as “not an exceptional or extraordinary life but an ordinary, daily life.”44 In both Truitt’s artist journals and Proust’s masterwork, individual episodes of mnemonic vividness impart meaning to the road already traveled. That is not to suggest that Proust was boilerplate for her, because there are manifold differences in her writing’s structure and prose. But Truitt’s close weaving of seemingly discontinuous memory episodes lends a sure sense of internal development toward the present, narrated in the artist’s strong voice. Truitt sprinkles revelations throughout her text, allowing the lessons derived from her intense narrations to remain always in the reader’s mind. If it had been published before 1982, Daybook might have been received as a manifesto for the feminist movement, so vivid is her story of overcoming the sexist divide between the “masculine” labor of artistic creation, on one hand, and the “feminine” labor of domestic maintenance, on the other. Starting in the 1970s, the idea that art

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was meaningful feminist labor motivated revolts on the part of several artists—​I think of interventions as diverse as Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s Maintenance Art—​P roposal for an Exhibition manifesto (1969), Mary Kelly’s Post Partum Document (1973–​79), and Nancy Spero’s epic Torture of Women (1975), powerful text-driven artworks and artist statements. Daybook answered to the generation of women who, ignited by the political struggles of the mid-1970s, now were sustaining a career. Truitt’s art and words continue to resonate for artists because of how she captures the inherent human desire for self-expression that underlies creativity. She also understood that creative professions more often than not demand an extra measure of determination to surmount personal vulnerability and sacrifice, and she willingly addressed these peculiarities of the trade. In the last journal entry she wrote before she died, Truitt discussed a conversation she had had with the artist Carl Andre about the installation of her sculpture Catawba (plate 9) at the Museum of Modern Art after its renovation in 2004—​t he discussion with which I opened this book. Truitt wrote in full: “Carl said, ‘It has ontology.’ He added, ‘It must have cost you to make it.’ Intelligence and understanding of how things are made—​intellect met with intuition.” Beyond the sake of material or language, it is the residue of lived experience that is the basis of artistic creation. Her ability to communicate this to others was “infinitely consoling in a lonely business.”45

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Notes

I n t ro d u c t i o n

1. Anne Truitt, journal entry, December 10, 2004, Estate of Anne Truitt, South Salem, NY. 2. Anne Truitt, “G. Brée,” box 1, folder 17, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. 3. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 4. In addition to Meyer, this book owes a large debt to the historical revision accomplished by Ann Goldstein’s exhibition A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–​1968, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 2004, and the resulting catalog: Ann Goldstein, ed., A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–​1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). In 2009, Truitt was the subject of a major retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. The catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition, Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection, edited by Kristen Hileman (London: D. Giles, 2009), contains a biographical essay by the curator and an interpretive essay by James Meyer. 4. Meyer, Minimalism, 8. 5. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 43. 6. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1999), 17–​19. 7. Hayden V. White, “The Burden of History,” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 111–​34. 8. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 50. See also Terdiman as paraphrased by Jeffery K. Olick and

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9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 116. Frederic C. Bartlett, Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1932), 211–​12, 215–​18. Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 6. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 3. Ibid., 278; emphasis in original. Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 8. Olick and Robbins, “Social Memory,” 121. Johanna Burton and Lisa Pasquariello, “ ‘Ask Somebody Something Else’: Analyzing the Artist Interview,” Art Journal 64, no. 3 (2005): 47. Meyer, Minimalism, 160–​66. Lee, Chronophobia, 181–​82. Anne Truitt, “G. Brée,” box 1, folder 17, Anne Truitt Papers. Larkin B. Price, review of Marcel Proust and the Deliverance from Time, by Germaine Brée, trans. C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt, French Review 43, no. 4 (1970): 686–​87. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 204–​5. Ibid. Anne Truitt, Turn: The Journal of an Artist (New York: Penguin, 1987), 60. Meyer’s analysis acknowledges that Greenberg’s approval of Truitt masculinized her appropriately “modernist” mode in order to feminize the “non-art” sensibility of the minimalists, reifying gender as a category for validation. Meyer, Minimalism, 224–​28. Caroline Jones historicized Greenberg’s tenet of opticality in Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). My understanding of Greenberg’s opticality has been cultivated through the notion of modernism’s exclusivity, as argued by Andreas Huyssen: “Modernism constituted itself through a conscious strategy of exclusion, an anxiety of contamination by its other: an increasingly consuming and engulfing mass culture. Both the strengths and the weaknesses of modernism as an adversary culture derive from that fact” (Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism [Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986], vii). The exclusion that Huyssen raises is the modernist exclusion of “mass culture,” which I address in my analysis because the associative nature of memory itself cannot discriminate between the vernacular and other aesthetic categories. In my study, memory is the “other” just as bodily participation is the “other,” opposite term of “opticality,” and both memory and physicality are mechanisms for slowing down the instantaneity that Greenberg had argued for the apprehension of properly modernist painting. See especially chapter 4, “How Formalism Lost Its Body but Kept Its Gender: Frankenthaler, Louis, and Noland in the Sixties,” in Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and Post-Painterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA:

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26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

MIT Press, 2004). See also Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997); Michael Leja, “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3 (Spring 1995): 556–​80; and Alexander Nemerov, “Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era,” in Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006), 21–​38. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963), 312; emphasis added. Monique Wittig’s oft-quoted statement, “Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent,” appears in Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 89. See also Gayle Green, “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory,” Signs 16, no. 2 (1992), 290–​321. Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982; reprint New York: Penguin, 1984), 110. Ibid., 112. Ibid., 4. Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and Biography,” Art Bulletin 82, no. 1 (March 2000): 149–​53. Truitt, Daybook, 13, 28, 48, 73. Walter Benjamin called this primal origin of naming the Urgeschichte. Naming constitutes objectification and reflects disintegration and difference rather than phenomenological continuity. For this reason, naming and loss are closely related concepts. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1998), 166.

1. F i r s t ( 19 6 1)

1. My vocabulary for discussing the components of a picket fence derives from an encyclopedia of landscape architecture by George A. Martin, Fences, Gates and Bridges: A Practical Manual (New York: O. Judd, 1887; reprint Brattleboro: Stephen Greene Press, 1974), 31–​42. 2. Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 158, 191–​92. 3. Anne Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982; reprint New York: Penguin, 1984), 150. Nassos Daphnis was a Greek American artist whose early wooden planar constructions evidence a strongly De Stijl aesthetic. Truitt was most likely referring to No. 32–​61 M (1961), which is painted cork, masonite, and tekwood (jigsaw-puzzle wood); see American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1961), 104. 4. Truitt, Daybook, 150–​51. 5. James Meyer, ed., Minimalism (London: Phaidon, 2000), n.p. 6. Thomas B. Hess, Barnett Newman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971), 56. 7. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 193; emphasis in the original. 8. Anne Truitt, “G. Brée,” box 1, folder 17, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. 9. Germaine Brée, Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, trans. C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 72; emphasis added.

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10. Julia Kristeva, Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature, trans. Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 204–​5. 11. Truitt, Daybook, 151–​52. 12. Elaine Scarry, “On Vivacity: The Difference between Daydreaming and ImaginingUnder-Authorial-Instruction,” Representations 52 (Autumn 1995): 7. 13. The woodenness of the ball comports with Johns’s larger fissuring of representation and reality; his ball is a figment of a real ball, just like Truitt’s fence piece: not “real,” but imagined, evoking the memory of the real. Jasper Johns recounts the material construction of this work in Nan Rosenthal, “A Conversation with Jasper Johns,” in Jasper Johns: Gray, ed. James Rondeau and Douglas Druick (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007), 156–​61. 14. In Turn: The Journal of an Artist (New York: Penguin, 1987), 69–​73, Truitt writes of her plans to bring her childhood home’s dilapidated interiors and exteriors in line with the likeness of her memory. 15. “Act Directing the Building the Capitoll and the City of Williamsburgh” (originally published in 1699 and revised in 1705): “Every person having any lots . . . contiguous to the great street, shall inclose the said lots . . . with a wall, pails, or post and rails, within six months after the building, which the law requires to be erected thereupon, shall be finished.” Quoted in Marcus Whiffen, The Eighteenth-Century Houses of Williamsburg: A Study of Architecture and Building in the Colonial Capital of Virginia (Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1984), 81–​82. 16. Edward C. Carter II, John C. Van Horn, and Charles E. Brownell, eds., Latrobe’s View of America, 1795–​1820 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 102–​3. 17. Philip Dole, “The Picket Fence at Home,” in Between Fences, ed. Gregory K. Dreicer (Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press for the National Building Museum, 1996), 26–​35. 18. The majority of properties in Easton favor the colonial and Georgian revival styles. According to Fiske Kimball in an October 1919 article in the Architectural Record titled “The American Country House,” the period after the First World War saw a sharp rise in demand for homes built with traditional American architectural flourishes but outfitted with modern conveniences. These newer houses, such as the ones built in Easton during its heyday in the 1920s, afforded all the affectations of a country manor with the comforts of “plumbing, electricity, central heating, fans, [a] modern water system, rural mail delivery, telephones, and, most important of all, the automobile” (quoted in Christopher Weeks, Where Land and Water Intertwine: An Architectural History of Talbot County, Maryland [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984], 132). 19. Oral history interview with Anne Truitt, 2002 Apr.–​Aug., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 20. Henry C. Forman, Tidewater Maryland: Architecture and Gardens (New York: Architectural Book, 1956), xiii. 21. Kenneth Lane Carroll, Three Hundred Years and More of Third Haven Quakerism (Easton, MD: Queen Anne Press, 1984), 72–​73. 22. Truitt later remembered the dark green sculptures following First as representations of “trellises in the gardens of my childhood.” Rather than contradicting the specificity of the influence of shutters and doors of the Third Haven Meetinghouse, her narrative

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23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

confirms the lability of these architectural forms in her memory. Anne Truitt, Prospect: The Journal of an Artist (New York: Scribner, 1996), 22. “Box: AT Studio I,” Estate of Anne Truitt, South Salem, NY; underlining in the original. Meyer, Minimalism, 70. In Kelly’s words, “At the Museum of Modern Art in Paris I noticed the large windows between the paintings interested me more than the art exhibited. I made a drawing of the window and later in my studio I made what I considered my first object, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris. From then on, painting as I had known it was finished for me. . . . Everywhere I looked, everything I saw became something to be made.” Ellsworth Kelly as quoted in Yve-Alain Bois, “Ellsworth Kelly in France: Anti-Composition in Its Many Guises,” in Ellsworth Kelly: The Years in France, 1948–​1954, ed. Yve-Alain Bois (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1992), 14. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 138. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 278. “Be Prepared,” Time, May 19, 1961, 26. Robert Frost, “The Gift Outright,” in A Witness Tree (New York: Henry Holt, 1942), 41. Paul Giles, “From Decadent Aesthetics to Political Fetishism: The ‘Oracle Effect’ of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 713. Truitt, oral history interview, Apr.–​Aug. 2002. For a fuller recounting of the relationship between the Truitts and the Kennedys, see Nina Burleigh’s biography of Mary Pinchot Meyer, A Very Private Woman: The Life and Unsolved Murder of Presidential Mistress Mary Meyer (New York: Bantam, 1998). John F. Kennedy, telegram to Robert Richman, Jan. 13, 1961, Institute of Contemporary Arts records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Lionel Trilling, “A Speech on Robert Frost: A Cultural Episode,” Partisan Review 26 (Summer 1959): 451. The 1950s and 1960s were characterized by a larger reevaluation of the place of Frost in the American canon. For an exploration of the revision of Frost’s biography, see Christopher Benfey, “A Terrifying Poet,” review of Robert Frost: A Life by Jay Parini, New York Times, April 25, 1999, sec. 7. For example, in one of his first poems, “Twilight” (1913), Frost feels the environment itself gazing back upon him, cleaving his subjectivity in two: “Why am I first in thy so sad regard, O twilight gazing from I know not where? I feel myself as one more than I guessed!” Robert Frost, A Boy’s Will (London: D. Nutt, 1913), n.p. Hamida Bosmajian, “Robert Frost’s ‘The Gift Outright’: Wish and Reality in History and Poetry,” American Quarterly 22, no. 1 (1970): 99. “The fact that fad and fashion are also involved does not invalidate what I say [about the growing popularity of abstract art in America]. I know that abstract art of the latest variety . . . has gotten associated with progressive jazz and its cultists; but what of it? That Wagner’s music became associated with ultranationalism, and that Wagner was Hitler’s favorite composer, still doesn’t detract from its sheer quality as music. That the present vogue for folk music started, back in the 1930’s, among the Communists doesn’t make our liking for it any the less genuine, or take anything away from folk

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38.

39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

music itself.” Clement Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 81. Greenberg largely elides the point of cultural tradition with respect to national origin. In 1963, the magazine Canadian Art invited Greenberg to comment on the state of modern Canadian painting and sculpture. The critic articulated his generally favorable impressions of abstracted landscape paintings, remarking on their “freshness and authenticity.” He tellingly found the abstraction of these paintings, particularly those executed by the “Group of Seven,” to have been derived from the emptiness and isolation of the landscape itself. Clement Greenberg, “Painting and Sculpture in Prairie Canada Today,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 165–​72. Tony Smith, interviewed by Samuel Wagstaff, Jr., “Talking with Tony Smith,” Artforum 5, no. 4 (December 1966): 19. Smith as quoted in Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press): 158. Mel Bochner, “Primary Structures: A Declaration of a New Attitude as Revealed by an Important Current Exhibition,” Arts Magazine 40 (June 1966): 34. Craig Owens, “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), 58. Truitt, Daybook, 164. Brée, Marcel Proust, 20. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 165–​67. Brée, Marcel Proust, 20. James Meyer’s analysis of First takes the bicycle vignette as a key to the provocations of Truitt’s sculpture in terms of narrative, space, and scale; see Meyer, “The Bicycle,” in Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection, ed. Kristen Hileman (London: D. Giles, 2009), 50–​63. First is more than a reflection of Truitt’s awakening to the memory of the fence as the architecture of confinement, one that must be subverted and transgressed. My position is that First calls to mind the broader history of confinement, identifying it as a feature of the artist’s childhood and also as a type of constant social division. Truitt, Prospect, 30, 31. Meyer, “The Bicycle,” 53–​54. Truitt, Daybook, 151. In Prospect (22), Truitt remembers that the fences, boards, and lattices returning to her mind’s eye in 1961 reflect spaces proximate to her home on South Street and her mother’s flower garden, the ones that she would leave behind on her bicycle as an adolescent to pursue increasingly distant horizons. Philip Dole (“Picket Fence at Home,” 32–​33) explains fences as enclosures in terms of “three different but concentric zones”: picket fences enclosing the areas nearest to the house, horizontal rail fences around backyards and everyday functional parts of domestic farms, and split rail fences around distant property. These discrete concentric zones in turn represent the social values corresponding to each. The furthest reaches of fenced land are less organized and appear

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52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60.

more “natural,” whereas the areas closer to the home, by virtue of their smallness, are more tightly monitored, compartmentalized, and controlled. I do not wish to suggest that First reflects the artist’s repressed unhappiness in her roles as a child, or later as a wife and mother. Her books and private letters, however, provide ample evidence that Truitt suffered from periodic bouts of unhappiness as a child in Easton and later in her marriage to James Truitt, and in each case her depression was exacerbated by episodes of physical illness. Her feelings of despondency seemed to reach their nadir on Valentine’s Day 1949: “Facing death. So nearly possible. [I] honestly believe I would relish experience if I could prepare myself to part from this world and all I so dearly love” (Anne Truitt, diary from February 14, 1949, box 1, folder 16, Anne Truitt Papers). Truitt, Daybook, 65. Ibid., 151. To quote Friedan: “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States . . . she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—​‘Is this all?’ ” (Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [New York: Norton, 1963], 15). Baldridge as quoted in Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, 128. The phrase appears in a poem, “Dedication,” that Frost originally intended to present to the crowd assembled at the inauguration. However, because the sun became too bright, he managed to read the poem only in part—​“It makes the prophet in all of us presage /  The glory of a next Augustan age / Of a power leading from its strength and pride /  Of young ambition eager to be tried”—​before switching to “The Gift Outright.” John Wetenhall, “Camelot’s Legacy to Public Art: Aesthetic Ideology in the New Frontier,” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (1989): 303. Jean Battey, “New Emphasis on the Arts Teas Off,” Washington Post, Times Herald, January 26, 1961, C19. For example, in 1963 Alice Denney fought for a controversial Tom Wesselmann collage, Great American Nude, No. 44, to remain in a show at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. It was only at President Kennedy’s injunction that the work was allowed to hang. Burleigh, A Very Private Woman, 182–​83. Karen E. Till, “Artistic and Activist Memory-Work: Approaching a Place-Based Practice,” Memory Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 101.

2 . H a r d c a s t l e ( 19 6 2)

1. Truitt as quoted in Meyer, “Grand Allusion,” Artforum 40 (May 2002): 159. 2. Clement Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture” and “Changer: Anne Truitt,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–​1969, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 250–​56 and 288–​91, respectively. 3. Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982; reprint New York: Penguin, 1984), 120. 4. Ibid., 164.

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5. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 165. 6. Truitt as quoted in James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 72. 7. Anne Truitt, audio interview with Alexandra Truitt, Washington, DC, December 12–​15, 1997, Estate of Anne Truitt, South Salem, NY. 8. A search in area newspapers from the time and in Maryland state death records to find the proposed incident involving a “Hardcastle” meets without success. From the period 1924 to 1933, there are four registered deaths of persons surnamed Hardcastle in the state of Maryland, all of them elderly women who died of natural causes; all lived and died in Talbot County, Maryland, the same county in which Truitt lived during her childhood. Maryland State Archives, Vital Records Indexing Project Online: http:// mdvitalrec.net. 9. “Easton Man Killed at Railroad Crossing,” Easton Star-Democrat, June 16, 1928, 11. 10. Truitt remembers the summer at Lee Haven in Daybook (29): “Blackberry bushes grew close to the dirt road at Lee Haven, a house near Easton, Maryland, in which we spent a summer when I was about seven [i.e., 1928].” 11. Wilson M. Tyler, “Landing Neck, Trappe, MD,” Easton Star-Democrat. November 12, 1927. 12. The articles concerned the rural southern part of Talbot County, near the town of Trappe located nine miles south of Easton. These areas remain mostly rural today. The Hardcastle tracts were located north and east of Trappe, near the settlement of Manadier. 13. In the 1920s, the Maryland economy was brought under the dominance of Baltimore as a shipping hub. By 1926, Baltimore was the third largest import and export hub in the United States after New York and New Orleans. Aided by aggressive probusiness governance, Maryland expanded its entire land and maritime transportation infrastructure to accommodate higher levels of intrastate trade. In 1927, the three-time elected Progressive governor, Albert C. Ritchie, inaugurated a ten-year campaign for building roads in rural and suburban areas as a continuation of transportation policy begun in his second term. Dorothy M. Brown, “Maryland Between the Wars,” in Maryland: A History, 1632–​1974, ed. Richard Walsh and William Lloyd Fox (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1974): 698–​99. 14. The popularity of the ferry service persisted through the first half of the twentieth century, and increasingly sophisticated vessels made the journey from Annapolis on the Western Shore to Claiborne and Matapeake in the East. The Chesapeake Bridge was not completed until 1951, the market crash of 1929 and the Second World War having significantly postponed its construction. Ibid., 699–​700. 15. Accident reports and railroad news are nearly ubiquitous in the Easton Star-Democrat, more often than not as front-page items. Some examples from the time coinciding with the misremembered Hardcastle incident include “More Rumors of a Union Station at Railroad Junction,” May 22, 1926, 1; “Bad Auto Accident on Dover Street,” July 10, 1926, 1; and “Pennsylvania R.R. Blocks Traffic at Cordova Crossing,” July 31, 1926, 1. Moreover, Truitt remembered Hardcastle as “drunk in his car”; the offense of driving while intoxicated was often prominently newsworthy, e.g., “Got Thirty Days for Operating a Car under the Influence of Liquor,” July 19, 1926, 1.

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16. William B. Rhoads, “The Machine in the Garden: Trolley Cottage as Romantic Artifact,” in People, Power, Places, ed. Sally McMurray and Annmarie Adams, special issue, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8 (2000): 19. 17. In the popular cartoon strip, the conductor, called “the Skipper,” commonly finds himself wanting to spend time with neighbors that he sees along the trolley route, at the expense of locomotive maintenance and repair or punctuality. As a result of the Skipper’s frequent and unscheduled stops, the Toonerville Trolley is always in a rush to meet trains in the larger towns and cities, train lines that Fox names by their scheduled arrival times (e.g., “the 7:47”). Fox uses his poetic license to make light of the “to the minute” precision of modern (and, therefore, urban) life, contrasted with the slower rhythms of the backwaters. Herb Galewitz and Don Winslow, eds., Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley (New York: Weathervane Books, 1972), 1–​28. 18. Jack Eisen, “Trolley Runs Out of Juice after 99 1/2 Years,” Washington Post, Times Herald, January 28, 1962, E3. See also “Streetcars Gaily Come to End of the Line,” Washington Post, Times Herald, January 28, 1962, B7. 19. Georgetown in Washington has always had the character of a topographical palimpsest. Originally a colonial settlement in Maryland, Georgetown vexed the grid-and-axis design of Pierre L’Enfant’s Plan for the City of Washington (1789). Later in the nineteenth century, the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal began its 184.5-mile journey into western Maryland via a series of locks originating in Georgetown, a project that ended in the 1930s after a disastrous flood made it too expensive to repair. The abandoned culverts and aqueducts today are quintessential to the look of Georgetown and an important source of its aesthetic difference from downtown Washington. 20. Germaine Brée, Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, trans. C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 58. 21. Benjamin continues in “Convolute N: On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress”: “Only dialectical images are genuine images (that is, not archaic); and the place where one encounters them is language. || Awakening ||” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999), 462. 22. Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: N.L.B., 1973), 112–​13. 23. Richard Terdiman, Present Past: Modernity and the Memory Crisis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 37–​38. 24. Ian Almond, “Doing Violence upon God: Nonviolent Alterities and Their Medieval Precedents,” Harvard Theological Review 92, no. 3 (1999): 331. Almond’s source is Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 283. 25. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 5–​11. 26. Marx refers to the national acquiescence to increased industrialization as an enhancement—​rather than a disruption—​of nature. See his chapter 5, “Two Kingdoms of Force,” 227–​353. 27. In terms of Hardcastle, it may be easiest to understand such unrepresentability through

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28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

the visual suggestion made by the sculpture’s red wedges, which similarly hedge at Truitt’s referential incompleteness. It is tempting to read the wedges as paralleling the tracks and road where the accident took place: maps of the Eastern Shore from the period reveal the railroad track and asphalt road running parallel for miles at a stretch, through towns and cities, each within sight of the other. While such a reading is far too literal, the forms can be said to share an intersection with the flat, black surface of the erect and upended plank (I deliberately use the term upended here because Truitt’s host memory alludes primarily to horizontal phenomena; landscapes, roads, and crashes occur on the ground). By rotating the sculpture from the horizontal axis into the vertical, Truitt stages a confrontation between the viewer and the body suggested by the plank’s very uprightness. The unrepresented vertical body at once appears to lean on the two wedges—​that is, to acquiesce to their supportive mechanics—​and yet is estranged from them in color and structure. Truitt’s memory thus recurs as an embodied system in constant negotiation with its structural dynamics rather than pictorially. Dine conducted the happening “Car Crash” in November 1960. Claes Oldenburg hosted another happening, “Autobodys,” in December 1963, an uncanny reverberation of the Kennedy assassination the previous month. See Michael Kirby, ed., Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965), 184–​203, 262–​88; and Jeffery T. Schnapp, “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” Modernism/Modernity 6, no. 1 (1999): 36n100. Rosalind Krauss mentions the apparent hollowness of these sculptures as an evolution in the externalization of meaning that would come to characterize minimalism. While Krauss details Chamberlain’s use of sheet metal, she does not identify it as an automobile metal, thereby suppressing its larger symbolic allusion to car culture in the postwar era. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 181–​83. While Warhol was working on the series in 1963, he envisioned that it would be shown at the Sonnabend Gallery under the title Death in America, but his title was not used when the exhibition was realized the following year. Subsequently the series has been commonly referred to as the Death and Disaster paintings or simply as Death and Disasters. See Hal Foster, “Death in America,” October 75 (Winter 1996): 36n2. See also Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol: Death and Disasters (Houston: Menil Collection and Houston Fine Art Press, 1988); and Marco Livingstone, “Do It Yourself: Notes on Warhol’s Techniques,” in Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, ed. Kynaston McShine (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989): 70–​72. For a discussion of the rhetoric of Warhol’s isolated and serial images, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art: 1956–​1966,” in Andy Warhol, ed. Annette Michelson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001): 22–​23. Foster, “Death in America,” 42–​46. Mark Seltzer, “Serial Killers (II): The Pathological Public Sphere,” Critical Inquiry 22, no. 1 (1995): 130–​31. Foster, “Death in America,” 51. Of this cultural atmosphere, the anthropologist S. Lochlann Jain posits: “Virtually every user of public space came to be defined in relation to the automobile, and in this context, the bystander [here, read as the “natural body”] emerges precisely as an

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35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51.

52.

immobilized subject without access to law or influence over decisions about technology design” (Jain, “ ‘Dangerous Instrumentality’: The Bystander as Subject in Automobility,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 1 [2004]: 64). Similarly, the automobile was oftentimes identified as an agent of death, with ambiguity concerning the role of the driver. The “driving” subject seemed to be under heightened scrutiny in “crash investigations,” which attempted to assign liability to automotive death. One prominent example is the Harvard Fatal Highway Collision Project (1959–​60), which studied, among other things, the varied liability of the driver (driving too fast, in the wrong lane, etc.) and of the automobile itself (its “crashworthiness”). See James Stewart-Gordon, “Hidden Factors of Auto Deaths,” Reader’s Digest 80 (June 1962): 124–​28. Thomas Crow, “Saturday Disasters: Trace and Reference in Early Warhol,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–​1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 322. Anne M. Wagner, “Warhol Paints History; or, Race in America,” in Race and Representation: Affirmative Action, ed. Robert Post and Michael Rogin, special issue, Representations 55 (Summer 1996): 112. G. R. Swenson, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” Art News 62 (November 1963): 26. Clement Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 132. Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 255; emphasis added. Donald Judd, “Anne Truitt,” Arts Magazine 37, no. 7 (1963): 50. Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 255–​56; emphasis in the original. Clement Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 97. Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 82. Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 7, no. 4 (1963): 56. Greenberg, “Recentness of Sculpture,” 255–​56. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 155. Carrie Lambert, “More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Art in the 1960s,” in A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–​1968, ed. Ann Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), 103. Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” 159; emphasis added. Ibid., 156. Schnapp, “Crash,” 34–​35. Pamela Lee has written about Fried’s “presence” as an opposition to the temporality informed by postwar technology and mediated by minimalism. The car crash is an instant of such consummation that holds up the temporality Lee extrapolates from Fried’s essay. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 36–​81. Truitt, Daybook, 96; emphasis in the original.

3. Va l l e y F o r g e ( 19 6 3)

1. Truitt as quoted in James Meyer, “Grand Allusion,” Artforum 40 (May 2002): 159. 2. Ibid.

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3. Anne Truitt, audio interview with Alexandra Truitt, Washington, DC, December 12–​15, 1997, Estate of Anne Truitt, South Salem, NY (hereafter cited as Estate of Anne Truitt). 4. Truitt, Prospect: The Journal of an Artist (New York: Scribner, 1996), 198. 5. Anne Truitt to Clement Greenberg, December 10, 1965, box 1, folder 20, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library; emphasis in the original. 6. Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982; reprint New York: Penguin, 1984), 81. 7. Greenberg, “The Case for Abstract Art,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 80. 8. Leo Steinberg famously rebutted the formalist assignment of the quality of “speed” to Kenneth Noland’s paintings in his “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 79–​81. For a greater discussion of “speed” as a factor of abstract expressionism’s masculinity, see also Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 100. 9. Yve-Alain Bois, Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 193. 10. I believe that Greenberg borrowed the term “color-space” from early-twentieth-century De Stijl painting. Because he saw modernism as a progressive continuum of avantgarde styles, it makes sense that he would imply such a through-line to color field painting. It was also generally accepted by the late 1960s that color-as-space had proceeded from color-as-line as set forward in Jackson Pollock’s mature abstract expressionist works. The critic Michael Fried shared Greenberg’s sense of “color-space,” but adapted it in application to the painters and sculptors he championed in the later 1960s such as Frank Stella and Jules Olitski. See E. A. Carmean, Jr., “Modernist Art 1960 to 1970,” in The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960–​1970 (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1974), 26–​27; Greenberg, “After Abstract Expressionism,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 131, emphasis added; and Michael Fried, “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 232. 11. Greenberg, “Louis and Noland,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 97. 12. David M. Lubin, Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 183. 13. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (1963; reprint New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 1. 14. Oral history interview with Anne Truitt, 2002 Apr.–​Aug, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 15. Albers, Interaction of Color, 3. 16. Branden Wayne Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 72–​119. 17. Donald Judd, “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular,” Artforum 32, no. 10 (1994): 113. 18. Roger Shattuck, Marcel Proust (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), 113. 19. Albers, Interaction of Color, 8.

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20. Frederick A. Horowitz and Brenda Danilowitz, Josef Albers: To Open Eyes—​T he Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale (London: Phaidon, 2006), 198, 228. The “free exercises” are found in Albers, Interaction of Color, 47–​51. 21. Truitt, Daybook, 218. 22. The rise in prominence of American landscape painting in the early nineteenth century is usually attributed to Thomas Cole (1801–​48). His picturesque and highly allegorical paintings gave a romantic and symbolic identity to American landscape that continued long into the 1800s. See William H. Truettner, Alan Wallach, and Christin Stansell, Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); and James Thomas Flexner, Nineteenth-Century American Painting (New York: Putnam, 1970), 47–​57. 23. “Lecture Slides: Miscellaneous for Teaching,” Estate of Anne Truitt. 24. J. Gray Sweeney, “Inventing Luminism: ‘Labels Are the Dickens,’ ” Oxford Art Journal 26, no. 2 (2003): 93. 25. The essay in question is John I. H. Baur, “American Luminism: A Neglected Aspect of the Realist Movement in Nineteenth-Century America,” Perspectives USA 1 (1952): 91–​8. See also Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (New York: Praeger, 1969), 105. 26. John I. H. Baur, “Trends in American Painting: 1815–​1865,” in The M. and M. Karolik Collection of American Paintings, 1815 to 1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1949), xli. 27. Greenberg, “Case for Abstract Art,” 80–​82. 28. Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century, 104–​5, 131. 29. Sweeney, “Luminism,” 105. 30. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 1–​16. 31. Truitt, Daybook, 95. 32. “For scholars and curators of Baur and Novak’s period, acutely conscious of America’s new found position in the world, a challenge existed to sustain an art historical ‘ism’ that would confer historical legitimacy and authority on nineteenth-century American art comparable to that enjoyed by the other established ‘isms’ of modernity, such as Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, and most recently Abstract Expressionism.” Sweeney, “Luminism,” 102. 33. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October 9 (Summer 1979): 61. 34. Truitt, Daybook, 197. 35. André Félibien’s De l’origine de la peinture et des plus excellents peintres d’antiquité (Paris: Chez Pierre Le Petit, 1660) set forth the hierarchy of genres that held sway in academic art until the nineteenth century. Félibien ennobled history painting as the artistic paradigm for expressing the essence of moral truth. 36. For a comprehensive biography of Emanuel Leutze and a fuller contextual history of Washington Crossing the Delaware, see Barbara S. Groseclose, Emanuel Leutze, 1816–​ 1868: Freedom Is the Only King (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1975), 33–​47. Ellen Wiley Todd has advanced some aspects of the postmodernist appropriation

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37.

38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44.

45. 46.

of Leutze in “Two Georges and Us: Multiple Perspectives on the Image,” American Art 17, no. 2 (2003): 13–​17. Truitt included the details of Medellín’s influence in typewritten annotations to an exhibition chronology, box 1, folder 1, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library. For an account of Leutze’s painting in Dallas, see Jerry Bywaters, Seventy-Five Years of Art in Dallas: The History of the Dallas Art Association and the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (Dallas: Dallas Museum of Art, 1978), n.p. Michael Davidson, “Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 42, no. 1 (1983): 74. Julia Kristeva, “Giotto’s Joy,” in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 221. Lynn Hunt, “History as Gesture; or, The Scandal of History,” in Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987–​88, ed. Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 103. “The success of the given piece depended on how its various silhouettes and surfaces, and chromatic divisions of surface interacted. It was hard to tell, in Truitt’s art, where the pictorial and where the sculptural began and ended. Had they been monochrome, the ‘objects’ in Truitt’s 1963 show would have qualified as first examples of orthodox Minimal Art. And with the help of monochrome the artist would have been able to dissemble her feminine sensibility behind a more aggressively far-out, non-art look, as so many masculine Minimalists have their rather feminine sensibilities.” Greenberg, “Changer: Anne Truitt,” in Modernism with a Vengeance, 290. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 227. Marcia Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects: Matisse, the New York School, and PostPainterly Abstraction (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 118–​19. The term openness applied to color field painting as the reduction of (male) emotion evident in abstract expressionism. See Max Kozloff, “Abstract Attrition,” Arts Magazine 39 (January 1965): 48; and Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter: Miró and Motherwell,” Art International 9 (December 1965): 35. Brennan, Modernism’s Masculine Subjects, 142–​45. Shepherd Steiner has advanced a theory of Morris Louis’s veil paintings as originating in his psychological repression related to the shame of having borrowed his soak-stain technique from Helen Frankenthaler. Steiner’s work, however important for opening up color field painting to new psychological readings, does not fully realize the gendered basis of his aggrandizement of male emotion. For Steiner, Louis’s appropriation of Frankenthaler’s technique is an issue of his own male psychology. In so arguing, Steiner rehearses the cycle of repression and expression routinely offered as a validation of modernist art. Shepherd F. Steiner, “Loose Ends: Untitled, Unstretched, Rolled Round,” in Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited (Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006), 52–​53. See also Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” London Magazine 1, no. 4 (1961): 45–​56; and Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 281, 283, 306.

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47. Michael Leja, “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3 (1995): 560. 48. Although he does not address Truitt’s sculptures, Alexander Nemerov persuasively shows that Morris Louis’s “restrained and regal depiction of the era’s burgeoning ethos of sensuous gratification” amounted to an implicit kind of history painting for the Kennedy era. Nemerov, “Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era,” in Morris Louis Now, 21.

4 . Tr u i t t i n To k yo ( 19 6 4 –​1 9 6 7 )

1. Truitt reviewed the artwork at the behest of Walter Hopps, as he was surveying her entire body of work for back-to-back career retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1973 and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1974. Truitt sent the work out for destruction in batches starting in December 1971. Two aluminum sculptures survive in private collections: Sea Garden and Back (both 1964). See Truitt, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982; reprint New York: Penguin, 1984), 37–38. 2. Oral history interview with Anne Truitt, 2002 Apr.–Aug., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 3. Appointment calendars dated 1964–​67, Estate of Anne Truitt, South Salem, NY (hereafter cited as Estate of Anne Truitt). 4. Hiroko Ikegami, The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 163. 5. Truitt, Daybook, 38. 6. “The root of Catawba was my dark struggle with exile in Asheville, N.C., from my lands and peoples of the Eastern Shore of Maryland. High words—​‘lands’ and ‘peoples,’—​but so I felt it.” Anne Truitt, unpublished artist journal entry dated November 14, 2004, Estate of Anne Truitt. 7. What Truitt recalls as the “Japan Art Center” is likely a variant rendition of Bijutsuka kaikan (also translated as “Artist’s Hall”). Temporary studios were offered to foreign artists carrying a letter of introduction from a Japanese counterpart. Jasper Johns also occupied a studio at Bijutsuka kaikan when he visited Japan in May 1964. Although Truitt remembered that Johns preceded her in the studio, the timeline seems to suggest that they overlapped, but there is no evidence of their interaction. Truitt, oral history interview, Apr.–​Aug. 2002. 8. Ikegami, Great Migrator, 157–​68. 9. Although it falls outside the purview of this chapter, it is important to mention Truitt’s very close friendship with the American artist James Lee Byars. Byars lived in Japan between 1958 and 1968 and incorporated various Far Eastern religious ceremonial aspects into his conceptual and performance artworks. Later, in Daybook (142), Truitt proclaimed indifference to conceptual art, but her lasting admiration for Byars’s work presents a subject for future inquiry. 10. Ikegami, Great Migrator, 157–​68. 11. Kathy O’Dell, “Shaping Identity, Reshaping Constraints: The Sculpture of Kate Millett,” in Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years, ed. Kathy O’Dell (Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1997), 5.

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12. Anne Truitt, in discussion with a Japanese interviewer on Fuji-TV, March 1964, transcript, box 8, folder 5, Anne Truitt Papers, Special Collections Department, Bryn Mawr College Library (hereafter cited as Anne Truitt Papers). 13. Handwritten ledgers and receipts from manufacturers, box 11, folder 26, Anne Truitt Papers. 14. Doryun Chong, “Tokyo 1955–​1970: A New Avant-Garde,” in Tokyo 1955–​1970: A New Avant-Garde, ed. Doryun Chong (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 29. 15. Anne Truitt, draft letter to André Emmerich, December 23, 1965, box 8, folder 8, Anne Truitt Papers. 16. Chong, “Tokyo 1955–​1970,” 30. See also Zhongjie Lin, Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan (London: Routledge, 2010), 22. 17. Ikegami, Great Migrator, 174–​81. 18. Denise Cripps, “Flags and Fanfares: The Hinomaru Flag and Kimigayo Anthem,” in Case Studies on Human Rights in Japan, ed. Roger Goodman and Ian Neary (Richmond, UK: Japan Library, 1996), 81–​83. 19. Truitt, Daybook, 38. 20. Anne Truitt, sketchbook dated 1963, box 11, Anne Truitt Papers. 21. Anne Truitt to David Smith, November 26, 1964, David Smith Papers, Microfilm reel NDSmith-1, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 22. Anne Truitt, miscellaneous notes, box 1, folder 19, Anne Truitt Papers. 23. Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 26. 24. Truitt, Daybook, 120. 25. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 161. 26. “Art Shows by Jenkins, Miss Truitt,” Mainichi Daily News, October 29, 1964, box 8, folder 5, Anne Truitt Papers. 27. Clement Greenberg, “Changer: Anne Truitt,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 290. 28. Anne Truitt, miscellaneous note on an airmail envelope, Estate of Anne Truitt. 29. Anne Truitt to André Emmerich, March 12, 1965, box 12, folder 21, Anne Truitt Papers. 30. Anne Truitt, working drawing WD 386, Estate of Anne Truitt. 31. Anne Truitt to Clement Greenberg, June 22, 1966, box 12, folder 21, Anne Truitt Papers. 32. Anne Truitt to André Emmerich, June 20, 1965, box 14, folder 7, Anne Truitt Papers. 33. Midori Yoshimoto, “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyō and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan,” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 24–​45; Reiko Tomii, “ ‘International Contemporaneity’ in the 1960s: Discoursing on Art in Japan and Beyond,” Japan Review 21 (2009): 123–​47. 34. Anne Truitt, audio interview with Alexandra Truitt, Washington, DC, December 12–​15, 1997, Estate of Anne Truitt. 35. Ibid. 36. Truitt, Daybook, 69. 37. Anne Truitt to Louisa Jenkins, March 13, 1967, Estate of Anne Truitt.

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38. Anne Truitt, edited narrative statement, Estate of Anne Truitt. 39. Anne Truitt, artist journal entry dated November 14, 2004, Estate of Anne Truitt. 40. “Anne Truitt Interviewed by Howard Fox,” in Sun and Moon: A Quarterly of Literature and Art 1 (1976): 49–​50. 41. Truitt, Daybook, 99. 42. Anne Truitt, unpublished artist journal, various entries dated 2002–​4, Estate of Anne Truitt. 43. The full quotation follows: “Confronted, actually, by the reactivation of feelings I had thought to get rid of forever, now so objectified that I felt myself brutalized by them, defenseless because I had depended on objectification for defense.” Truitt, Daybook, 4. 44. Germaine Brée, Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, trans. C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 7. 45. Anne Truitt, journal entry, December 10, 2004, Estate of Anne Truitt.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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———. “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella.” In Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, 213–​68. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 1963. Frost, Robert. A Boy’s Will. London: D. Nutt, 1913. ———. “The Gift Outright.” In A Witness Tree, 41. New York: Henry Holt, 1942. Galewitz, Herb, and Don Winslow. Fontaine Fox’s Toonerville Trolley. New York: Weathervane Books, 1972. Gibson, Ann Eden. Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997. Giles, Paul. “From Decadent Aesthetics to Political Fetishism: The ‘Oracle Effect’ of Robert Frost’s Poetry.” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 713–​4 4.The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art, 1960–​1970. Edited by E. A. Carmean, Jr. Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 1974. Exhibition catalog. Green, Gayle. “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory.” Signs 16, no. 2 (1992): 290–​321. Greenberg, Clement. “After Abstract Expressionism.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, edited by John O’Brian, 121–​4 4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “The Case for Abstract Art.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, edited by John O’Brian, 75–​84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “Changer: Anne Truitt.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, edited by John O’Brian, 288–​91. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “Louis and Noland.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, ed. John O’Brian, 94–​100. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “Painting and Sculpture in Prairie Canada Today.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, edited by John O’Brian, 153–​75. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “Recentness of Sculpture.” In Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, edited by John O’Brian, 250–​56. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Groseclose, Barbara S. Emanuel Leutze, 1816–​1868: Freedom Is the Only King. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1975. Exhibition catalog. Guilbaut, Serge. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ———, ed. Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–​1964. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Hess, Thomas B. Barnett Newman. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1971. Horowitz, Frederick A., and Brenda Danilowitz. Josef Albers: To Open Eyes—​T he Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and Yale. London: Phaidon, 2006.

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Hunt, Lynn. “History as Gesture; or, the Scandal of History.” In Consequences of Theory: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1987–​88, edited by Jonathan Arac and Barbara Johnson, 91–​107. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. Ikegami, Hiroko. The Great Migrator: Robert Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Jain, S. Lochlann. “ ‘Dangerous Instrumentality’: The Bystander as Subject in Automobility.” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2004): 61–​94. Jasper Johns: Gray. Edited by James Rondeau and Douglas Druick. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Art Institute of Chicago, 2007. Exhibition catalog. Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Joseph, Branden Wayne. Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Judd, Donald. “Anne Truitt.” Arts Magazine 37, no. 7 (1963): 50. ———. “Some Aspects of Color in General and Red and Black in Particular.” Artforum 32, no. 10 (1994): 70–​78, 110, 113. Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years. Edited by Kathy O’Dell. Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1997. Exhibition catalog. Kirby, Michael, ed. Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965. Kozloff, Max. “Abstract Attrition.” Arts Magazine 39 (January 1965): 46–​50. Krauss, Rosalind E. “Grids.” October 9 (Summer 1979): 50–​64. ———. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. ———. “Giotto’s Joy.” In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, translated by Leon S. Roudiez, 210–​36. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. ———. Time and Sense: Proust and the Experience of Literature. Translated by Ross Guberman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. Lambert, Carrie. “More or Less Minimalism: Six Notes on Performance and Visual Art in the 1960s.” In A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–​1968, edited by Ann Goldstein, 102–​9. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004. Exhibition catalog. Lee, Pamela M. Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Leja, Michael. “Barnett Newman’s Solo Tango.“ Critical Inquiry 21, no. 3 (1995): 556–​80. ———. Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993. Lin, Zhongjie. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement: Urban Utopias of Modern Japan. London: Routledge, 2010. Lippard, Lucy. “New York Letter: Miró and Motherwell.” Art International 9 (December 1965): 33–​35.

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Livingstone, Marco. “Do It Yourself: Notes on Warhol’s Techniques.” In Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, edited by Kynaston McShine, 63–​78. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989. Exhibition catalog. Lubin, David M. Shooting Kennedy: JFK and the Culture of Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Martin, George A. Fences, Gates and Bridges: A Practical Manual. New York: O. Judd, 1887; reprint Brattleboro, VT: Stephen Greene Press, 1974. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Meyer, James. “The Bicycle.” In Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection, edited by Kristen Hileman, 50–​63. London: D. Giles, 2009. Exhibition catalog. ———. “Grand Allusion.” Artforum 40 (May 2002): 156–​61. ———, ed. Minimalism. London: Phaidon, 2000. ———. Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Michelson, Annette, ed. Andy Warhol. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001. A Minimal Future? Art as Object, 1958–​1968. Edited by Ann Goldstein. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2004. Exhibition catalog. Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Nemerov, Alexander. “Morris Louis: Court Painter of the Kennedy Era.” In Morris Louis Now: An American Master Revisited, 21–​38. Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2006. Exhibition catalog. Novak, Barbara. American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience. New York: Praeger, 1969. O’Brian, John, ed. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism. Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. O’Dell, Kathy. “Shaping Identity, Reshaping Constraints: The Sculpture of Kate Millett.” In Kate Millett, Sculptor: The First 38 Years, edited by Kathy O’Dell, 1–​39. Baltimore: Fine Arts Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 1997. Exhibition catalog. Olick, Jeffery K., and Joyce Robbins. “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices.” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–​40. Owens, Craig. “The Discourse of Others: Feminists and Postmodernism.” In The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster, 57–​82. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983. Price, Larkin B. Review of Marcel Proust and the Deliverance from Time, by Germaine Brée, translated by C. J. Richards and A. D. Truitt, 2nd ed. French Review 43, no. 4 (1970): 686–​87. Rhoads, William B. “The Machine in the Garden: The Trolley Cottage as Romantic Artifact.” In People, Power, Places, edited by Sally McMurray and Annmarie Adams, special issue, Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 8 (2000): 17–​32. Ricoeur, Paul. History and Truth. Translated by Charles A. Kelbley. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1965.

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Affirmative Action, edited by Robert Post and Michael Rogin, special issue, Representations 55 (Summer 1996): 98–​112. Wagstaff, Samuel, Jr. “Talking with Tony Smith.” Artforum 5, no. 4 (1996): 19. Walsh, Richard, and William Lloyd Fox, eds. Maryland: A History, 1632–​1974. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1974. Weeks, Christopher. Where Land and Water Intertwine: An Architectural History of Talbot County, Maryland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Wetenhall, John. “Camelot’s Legacy to Public Art: Aesthetic Ideology in the New Frontier.” Art Journal 48, no. 4 (1989): 303–​8. Whiffen, Marcus. The Eighteenth-Century Houses of Williamsburg: A Study of Architecture and Building in the Colonial Capital of Virginia. Williamsburg: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1984. White, Hayden V. “The Burden of History.” History and Theory 5, no. 2 (1966): 111–​34. Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères. Translated by David Le Vay. Boston: Beacon, 1985. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. London: Pimlico, 1999. Yoshimoto, Midori. “From Space to Environment: The Origins of Kankyō and the Emergence of Intermedia Art in Japan.” Art Journal 67, no. 3 (2008): 24–​45. carsdf

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Illustration Credits

PLATES 1–​8, 10–​25:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. PLATE 9:  The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously (115.1973). © annetruitt.org. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA /  Art Resource, NY. FIGURE 1:  Fondazione Prada, Milan. © 2015 The Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. FIGURE 2:  © 1955 by the Trustees of Rutgers College in New Jersey. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press. FIGURE 3:  Private Collection. Art © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. FIGURES 4–​7:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 8:  Collection of the artist. Artwork © Ellsworth Kelly, photo by Hulya Kolbas, courtesy the artist. FIGURE 9:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 10:  The Art Institute of Chicago. © Mel Bochner. FIGURE 11:  The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photo courtesy Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2015 Richard Serra / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. FIGURE 12:  Photo courtesy Castelli Gallery, New York; photo credit: Mark Heddon © Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. FIGURE 13:  Collection of the Maryland State Archives. FIGURE 15:  Private Collection / Bridgeman Images. © Jim Dine / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. FIGURE 16:  Gift of William Hokin, 1969.809, The Art Institute of Chicago. © 2014 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

13 9

FIGURES 17–​19:  Collection of The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh. © 2014 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. FIGURE 20:  Art © Estate of Jules Oltiski / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. FIGURE 21:  Gift of the Collectors Committee, 2003.77.1, National Gallery of Art. © 2014 Estate of Tony Smith / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. FIGURES 22–​25:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 26:  Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase from the Vincent Melzac Collection through the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program, 1980.5.5.© 2014 Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Rights administered by the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, All Rights Reserved. FIGURE 27:  Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift from the Vincent Melzac Collection, 1980.6.2. Art © Estate of Kenneth Noland / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. FIGURE 28:  Terra Foundation for American Art. Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.83. Photography © Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago. FIGURE 29:  The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. FIGURE 30:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 31:  The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Given anonymously. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. Art © Estate of Larry Rivers / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. FIGURE 32:  Courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Archives, Hartford, CT. Photographed by Joseph Szaszfai. FIGURES 33–​34:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 35:  The Jewish Museum, New York. FIGURES 36–​38:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images. FIGURE 39:  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. By exchange. David Heald; courtesy The Estate of David Smith, New York, Art © Estate of David Smith / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. FIGURE 40:  The Museum of Modern Art, New York. © 2014 The LeWitt Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY. FIGURE 41:  Neue Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Gift of Agnes Gund and purchase (by exchange). Art © The Estate of Ronald Bladen, LLC / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. FIGURES 42–​49:  © annetruitt.org / Bridgeman Images.

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Credits

Index

Page numbers in italic refer to figures. Plates are indicated as pl. followed by the number. abstract art, 1, 19, 38, 39, 43, 71–​72; painting, 1, 8; sculpture, 13, 43. See also abstraction abstract expressionism, 55, 72, 79; and gender, 79; and modernism, 72 abstraction (concept), 11, 20, 31–​32, 39–​40, 55, 60, 65, 70, 77–​78, 96; and affect, 40; and cultural tradition, 118n38; and embodiment, 40; and representation, 44–​48 adolescence, 37, 64, 83, 108, 118n51 Aisin Keikinzoku Co., Ltd., 88 Akasegawa, Genpei, 86 À la recherche du temps perdu, 6, 16, 18, 24, 109. See also Proust, Marcel Albers, Josef: Interaction of Color (book), 68–​70 aluminum, 12, 50, 57, 83, 84–​85, 87–​88, 91, 93–​94, 96–​98, 96, 100, 102, 108–​10 American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (Guggenheim Museum, 1961), 15, 36, 64, 67, 73, 77 American Revolution, 12, 29, 65, 74–​75, 78 Andre, Carl, 1, 111

André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 56, 58, 61–​64, 62, 63, 79–​85, 83, 91, 97, 103, 109–​ 10; Sculpture (1965), 82–​84, 83, 91, 97, 103; Sculpture (1969), 109–​10; Truitt (1963), 8, 56, 58, 61–​64, 62, 63, 79–​85, 91 Angleton, Cecily d’Autremont, 30, 36 Angleton, James Jesus, 30, 36 anthropomorphism, 57, 59 anti-art (han-geijutsu), 86, 88, 90, 102 architecture, 11, 16, 20, 22–​25, 36–​37, 64, 73; cantilever, 73; in Easton, MD, 22–​25, 36–​37. See also Federal period; fence Arnason, H. H., 15 art media. See architecture; collage; drawing; graphic design; happenings; painted sculpture; painting; sculpture; works on paper Art of Today’s World (Tokyo, 1956), 86 Asheville, NC, 83, 127n6 audience. See beholder authorship. See Proust, Marcel; see also under Truitt, Anne

141

automobile accidents, 11, 40, 44, 46, 59; in art, 49–​55 automobiles, 46, 50, 53, 122n34 Baltimore, MD, 45, 82 Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad, 46 Bartlett, Sir Frederic, 3–​4 beholder: affect in, 40, 52, 54, 57; effects of memory in, 1–​2, 7, 11–​12, 26, 56, 78; embodiment of, 7, 8, 42, 54, 56–​57, 60; experience of painting, 19, 56, 67; experience of sculpture, 6–​7, 11, 14, 19, 32, 34, 42, 80, 100, 108; experience of space, 91, 94–​ 95, 97–​98, 108; experience of temporality, 8; gender, 79–​80; identification with verticality, 16; immersive experience, 7; perception of color, 12, 64–​70, 74, 78, 97; sensory awareness, 7; special status in minimalism, 59; subjectivity, 5, 8, 37, 68, 96; viewing distance, 42–​43, 59 Benjamin, Walter, 4–​5, 47–​48, 110; Arcades Project, 47–​48, 110 Benton, Thomas Hart, 76 Bergson, Henri, 4–​5 Bierstadt, Albert, 70 Bijutsuka kaikan (studio), 127n7 Black, White, and Gray (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, 1964), 82, 82 Bladen, Ronald: Rockers (1965), 98, 98 Bochner, Mel: “Primary Structures: A Declaration of a New Attitude as Revealed by an Important Current Exhibition,” 32; Untitled (Fence Piece) (1966), 32, 33 boundary, boundaries: chronological, 22; fence as type of, 36, 99; and grids, 72; and memory, 95 Brée, Germaine, 1, 6, 16–​18, 34, 47, 110; Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time, 16–​18, 17 Bryn Mawr College, PA, 12, 16, 36, 65, 70, 77, 104, 110 Bunkyō (Tokyo borough), 85, 85, 104 Byars, James Lee, 127n9 cantilever, 73 cars. See automobiles Catholic University, Washington, DC, 65 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 30, 36, 81

14 2   •   I n d e x

Chamberlain, John: Dolores James (1962), 50; Gramm (1960), 50; Toy (1961), 50, 50 childhood, 18–​19, 22, 34, 37, 108 childhood memory, 35, 44, 48, 73, 77, 116n14, 116n22. See also childhood “chromatics” (Truitt series), 105 Church, Frederic Edwin, 70 Cold War, 28, 33, 72, 84 collage, 49; Car Crash (1959–​60), 49, 49. See also Dine, Jim color: Albers’s theory of, 68–​70; beholder’s perception of, 12, 64–​70, 74, 78, 97; in color field painting, 56, 67; difficulty of defining, 65, 78, 81; Fried’s perception of, 56; and gender, 64, 79–​80; Greenberg’s perception of, 55, 64, 67, 79–​80; in Judd’s art, 69; juxtapositions, 7, 65, 103–​4 , 105, 108; Kristeva’s theory of, 78; in Louis’s art, 67; in luminism, 71, 74; as manifestation of light, 72, 97; memory and, 7, 69, 79; in Noland’s art, 67; in Olitski’s art, 56; in pop art, 78; in Rauschenberg’s art, 69; as relational to its environment, 64, 66, 104; as “set free,” 68, 72; as structural, 41, 66, 90; as subject of art, 65; as supplemental to space, 12, 66, 84, 91, 103, 105; in Truitt’s impressions of Japan, 90–​91, 105–​6, 108; variant meanings of, 68, 70, 96; in Warhol’s art, 51, 78; in works on paper, 102–​5 Color and Space (Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 1966), 83–​84, 100–​102, 101, 102 “color-space,” 67, 124n10 columns, 12, 72, 73, 81, 108. See also sculptural columns conceptual art, 127n9 containment culture, 28. See also Cold War Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 9, 22, 108, 110, 127n1; Anne Truitt Retrospective: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961–​ 1973 (1974), 9, 22, 108, 110, 127n1 crash (concept), 47–​48 Cunningham, Merce, 81 Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 73, 76; Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze (1950), 76 Daphnis, Nassos, 15, 115n3 Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (Truitt), 9, 10,

15, 19, 20, 34, 35, 36, 39, 40, 44, 60, 65, 66, 70, 72, 73, 81, 82, 91, 95, 104, 109–​11 Dean family, 20, 22, 82 de Kooning, Willem, 78 Denney, Alice, 36–37 De Stijl, 115n3, 124n10 destruction (of art), 81, 88, 108–​10 Dine, Jim, 49–​50, 49 domesticity, 35, 37, 87, 110 double consciousness, 24, 37 drawing, 24, 84, 91–​93, 92, 93, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 105. See also working drawings Duchamp, Marcel, 29 duration (concept), 55 Eastern Shore, MD, 20, 22, 44–​46, 122n27, 127n6 Easton, MD, 20, 22–​25, 23, 27, 34–​35, 37, 39, 44–​46, 45, 48, 56, 82, 116n18. See also Hughlett-Henry House edge: of paintings, 66–​67; of sculptures, 12, 66, 94, 108; of works on paper, 105. See also boundary Emmerich, André, 8, 56, 61, 64, 88, 100. See also André Emmerich Gallery, New York; exhibitions exhibitions, of other artists: American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1961), 15; American Light (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1980), 70; Art of Today’s World (Tokyo, 1956), 86; 6th Gutai Art Exhibition (Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 1958), 86; Things (Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 1963), 87; Warhol (Galerie Ileana Sonnabend, Paris, 1964), 50, 122n30; Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze (Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, 1950), 76 exhibitions, Truitt solo: Anne Truitt Retrospective: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961–​ 1973 (Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1974), 9, 22, 108, 110; Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961–​1973 (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1973), 9, 22, 108, 110; Sculpture (Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 1964), 82, 85, 96; Sculpture (Minami, 1965), 12, 82–​84, 91, 97, 103; Sculpture (André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1965),

82–​84, 83, 91, 97, 103; Sculpture (Emmerich, 1969), 109–​10; Truitt (Emmerich, 1963), 8, 56, 58, 61–​64, 62, 63, 79, 80, 81, 83, 85, 91; Truitt (also called Anne Truitt 1967; Minami, 1967), 105–​6, 106 exhibitions, of Truitt with other artists: Black, White, and Gray (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT, 1964), 82, 82; Color and Space (Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 1966), 83–​84, 100–​102, 101, 102; HemisFair ʼ68 (San Antonio, TX, 1968), 108; International Selection 1968 (Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH, 1968), 108; Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture (Jewish Museum, New York, 1966), 82, 88–​ 89, 89, 100 exile, 83, 105, 108 expression: and color, 68; and gender, 79; and imitation, 89–​90; and memory, 2–​3, 6 fabrication art (hacchu geijutsu), 100 fabrication maquette, 95, pl. 17 Federal period (architecture), 20, 22–​23 Feminine Mystique, The (Friedan), 8, 36 femininity, 8–​9, 36, 79–​80, 110, 126n41 feminism, 8–​9, 37–​38, 86, 110–​11 fence, 99–​100; metaphor for social division, 35–​37; picket, 2, 7, 11, 13–​15, 19–​20, 23, 26–​ 28, 32–​35, 77; post-and-lintel, 22 Flavin, Dan, 95 Fluxus, 102 formalism, 61, 70–​72, 74, 79, 86 Francis, Sam, 81, 90 Frankenthaler, Helen, 65, 79, 126n46; Mountains and Sea (1952), 65 Friedan, Betty, 8, 36; and memory, 8; similarities to Truitt, 36 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 5, 9 Fried, Michael, 42, 55–​59; “Art and Objecthood,” 55–​59 Frost, Robert, 29–​32, 37; “The Gift Outright,” 29, 31; as modernist, 30; proclamation of “Augustan age” in America, 37 Fuji-TV, 87–​88, 106 Gabo, Naum, 29 gender, 8–​9, 14, 36, 38, 64, 79–​80, 83, 87, 126n46

Index

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geometric compositions, 11, 14, 40, 56, 60, 70, 71, 80, 83, 84, 104 gestural abstraction, 77, 86, 90 Gilbert, Stuart, 75 Ginza (Tokyo district), 85 “glazed papers” (Truitt), 103 Gossage, John, 22, 24–​25, 28 Graham, Katharine (Kay), 30 Graham, Philip, 30 graphic design, 91 Greenberg, Clement, 7, 8, 31–​32, 39, 40, 55–​57, 61, 64, 66–​68, 71, 79–​81, 86–​87, 97–​98, 109–​110; acceptance in Japan, 86–​87; “After Abstract Expressionism,” “The Case for Abstract Art,” 31, 67; “Changer: Anne Truitt,” 8, 79, 109–​10; and gender, 8, 64, 79–​80; and national tradition, 32; opinion of color field painting, 7, 8, 67, 79; and “presence,” 56–​57; “Recentness of Sculpture,” 55–​57 Guermantes way (Proust), 24, 37 Guggenheim Museum (New York): American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists (1961), 15, 36, 64, 67, 73, 77 Gutai, 86 hacchu geijutsu (fabrication art), 100 han-geijutsu (anti-art), 86, 88, 90, 102 happenings, 49–​50; Car Crash (1960), 50 Heade, Martin Johnson, 70 Heraclitus, 104 hinomaru (Japanese national flag), 90–​91, 106 historical preservation, 22 Historical Society of Talbot County, 22 Historic Easton, Inc., 22 history: of American landscape, 48; “burden of,” 3; difference from memory, 3, 12; of memory, 2–​8; “nightmare of,” 3; as public, 12, 60, 65; of racial violence, 53; revision of, 109; significance of, 4; as subject matter for art, 65, 74–​80; as a system, 96; of Tokyo, 88; of the United States, 29, 31, 64–​65, 74–​ 80; of the West in decline, 4, 28–​29 history painting, 65, 74–​80, 125n35; origin and definition (tableaux d’histoire), 74, 125n35 Hopps, Walter, 108, 110 Hudson River School, 70 Hughlett-Henry House, Easton, MD, 22–​23, 23

14 4    •   I n d e x

iconography, 14, 20, 28, 31, 36, 38, 44, 74 identity: of an artist, 10; derived from history; 28–​29; national, 29; personal, 35; as split, 24, 104. See also femininity; gender; masculinity images: abstract, 48; as commodities, 53; contemporary access to, 4, 20; invoked by poetry, 29; in memory, 3, 5, 7, 11, 19, 38, 48, 70; in mind’s eye, 2–​3, 75; in news, 51, 55; of past and present at same time, 47–​48, 100; violent, 51–​53; and visuality, 25 Imperial Hotel, 84, 103 Institute of Contemporary Art, Washington, DC, 29–​30 Japan. See Tokyo Japan Art Center (Bijutsuka kaikan), 85, 127n7 Jefferson Place Gallery, Washington, DC, 36–37 Jenkins, Louisa, 105 Jenkins, Paul, 81, 90 Jewish Museum, New York: Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture (1966), 82, 88–​89, 89, 100 Johns, Jasper, 20–​21, 21, 78, 86, 127n7; Gray Painting with Ball (1958), 20–​21, 21 Joyce, James: Ulysses, 3 Judd, Donald, 8, 55–​57, 69 Kelly, Ellsworth, 26–​27, 27, 56, 117n25; Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1949), 27, 117n25 Kelly, Mary, 111 Kennedy, Jacqueline, 30, 37, 50 Kennedy, John F., 13, 28–​31 Kensett, John Frederick, 70 Kooning, Willem de, 78 Kristeva, Julia, 6–​7, 78 Lacan, Jacques, 51 landscape: cultural importance in America, 13, 28–​29, 32, 48; in Easton, MD, 24–​25; and fences, 20; in Frost’s poetry, 29–​31; in memory, 14–​15, 30, 60, 64; and nostalgia, 29–​31, 46–​47; perceived as new by minimalists, 13–​1 4, 32, 58–​59; placement of buildings within, 22, 91 landscape architecture. See fence landscape painting, 70–​72. See also luminism

Lane, Fitz Henry, 70–​71; Brace’s Rock, Brace’s Cove (1864), 71 Langsner, Jules, 81 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry, 23 letters, from Truitt: to Emmerich, 88, 100; to Greenberg, 66, 98; to Louisa Jenkins, 105; to David Smith, 94 Leutze, Emanuel: Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) 75–​76, 75, 125n36 LeWitt, Sol: Serial Project, I (ABCD) (1966), 95–​96, 96 Lichtenstein, Roy, 78 Lieberman, Bill, 81 Life magazine, 29 “lines of force,” 97–​98, 100, 104–​5 literalism, 2, 58 Louis, Morris, 7–​8, 56, 61, 64–​65, 67–​68, 68, 72, 79; Faces (1959), 68; funeral, 61 luminism, 65, 70–​72, 74 manifestos, 10, 32, 110–​11 maquette, 95, pl. 17 Marcel Proust and Deliverance from Time (Brée), 16–​17, 17 Martha Jackson Gallery, New York, 86 Marx, Karl: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 3 masculinity, 8–​9, 36–​37, 79–​80, 110; and authority, 8–​9, 36–​37; in history painting, 80, 110; and minimalism, 79; and modernism, 8, 79 Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, 35 mass subjectivity, 53, 55 McShine, Kynaston, 82 Medellín, Octavio, 73, 76 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 5, 96 Méséglise way (Proust), 24 Mesoamerican architecture, 16 metabolism (architecture), 88 Meyer, Cord, 30, 36, 81 Meyer, James, 2, 5, 8, 16, 25, 79, 118n47; Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, 2, 5, 8, 25, 79 Meyer, Mary Pinchot, 15, 30, 36, 64, 67, 117n32 Millett, Kate, 86–​87; Oksamma (1963), 87 Minami Gallery, Tokyo, 82–​83, 85–​87, 96, 100–​ 101, 101, 105–​6, 106. See also exhibitions Mishima, Yukio, 81

modernism, 4–​6, 31, 55, 60, 61, 66, 70, 79, 86–​87, 114n24, 124n10 monumentality, 4–​5, 40, 59, 65, 74; in contemporary art, 4–​5 Morris, Robert, 42–​43, 43, 57, 59, 95; “Notes on Sculpture: Part II,” 59; Untitled (Box for Standing) (1961), 42–​43, 43; Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1966), 95 Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1, 111 Nathan, John, 81 National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 70. See also exhibitions Natsuyuki, Nakanishi, 86 Neo-Dada, 20, 86, 88 New Frontier, 13, 30–​33, 37; women’s role in, 37 New Jersey Turnpike, 32, 59 Newman, Barnett, 11, 15–​16, 15, 18–​20, 22, 32, 34, 55, 64, 66–​67, 73, 77, 97; Onement VI (1953), 15, 19–​20, 35, 67, 73; and spirituality, 16; “zip” paintings, 11, 16 Newsweek magazine, 81, 85, 87 Nihon Almit Company, 83, 88 Nihon Paint, 88 Noguchi, Isamu, 29 Noland, Kenneth, 7–​8, 56, 61, 64–​65, 67, 69, 72, 79, 124n8; influence on Truitt, 65–​66; Split (1959), 69 nonobjectivity, 11, 60, 64 Nora, Pierre, 4 Old Whitemarsh Church and Cemetery, Trappe, MD, 22–​23, 23 Olitski, Jules: Bunga 45 (1967), 56–​57, 57, 95 Olympic Games, 85, 90 opticality, 56, 79, 114n24 Otowa (studio), 85, 85, 104 Owings, Nathaniel, 81 painted sculpture, 12–​1 4, 32, 40, 43, 56, 64, 66, 73, 83, 94–​95, 97, 104, 108 painting: abstract, 1, 8, 31, 40, 118n38, abstract expressionist, 72, 86; color field, 7, 56, 60, 61, 64–​68, 74, 79–​80, 86, 126nn44,46; “color-space” in, 67; history painting, 65, 74–​79, 80, 125n35, 127n48; landscape, 72, 125n22; luminist, 70–​72; modernist, 8, 13, 15, 19, 55–​56, 79, 80, 114n24; painted

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painting (continued) sculpture, 56–​57, 95, 97, 104; perception of, 7, 31–​32, 56, 67–​68; post-painterly abstract, 8, 65; sculptural reaction to, 13, 16, 19, 55; as two-dimensional, 20, 97. See also panorama; tableaux d’ histoire paintings (specific works): Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea (1952), 65; Johns, Gray Painting with Ball (1958), 20–​21, 21; Kelly, Window, Museum of Modern Art, Paris (1949), 26–​27, 27; Lane, Brace’s Rock, Brace’s Cove (1864), 71; Leutze, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851), 75–​77, 75, 80; Louis, Faces (1959), 67–​68, 68; Newman, Cathedra (1951), 16; Newman, Genesis— ​the Break (1946), 16; Newman, Genetic Moments (1947), 16; Newman, Onement VI (1953), 15–​16, 15, 19–​20, 35, 67, 73; Noland, Split (1959), 67, 69; Rivers, Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), 77–​78, 77; Warhol, Ambulance Disaster (1963), 52, 52; Warhol, 5 Deaths (1963), 50–​51, 51, 54; Warhol, Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White (1963), 51; Warhol, Race Riot (c. 1963), 53–​54, 54 panorama, 19, 25 Parker, Raymond, 56 Partisan Review, 30–​31 perception (concept): changing in the 1960s, 1, 109; of color, 68–​70, 78, 97; disembodied, 7, 32, 56; embodied, 5, 7, 11, 96–​97; emotional, 56; immediate, 1, 67, 71; limitations of, 6; and memory, 2, 7–​8, 68, 74, 78, 96; optical, 56, 68; Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty), 5, 96; and reference, 7, 11; sensory, 2, 7, 18; spatial, 11, 32, 42, 60, 80, 91, 98, 100, 108; temporal, 55, 59 phenomenology: of color, 70; of memory, 5, 40, 109, Phenomenology of Perception (MerleauPonty), 5, 96 photography, 22, 24–​26, 28, 50–​51, 53–​54 poetry, 29–​31, 32 Pollock, Jackson, 79, 124n10 pop art, 11, 40, 50, 54–​55, 59, 78 post-painterly abstraction, 8, 20, 79; and gender, 8, 79. See also painting: color field Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculpture (Jewish Museum, New York, 1966), 32, 82

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proprioception, 70 Prospect: The Journal of an Artist (Truitt), 35, 65, 110, 116n22 Proust, Marcel, 1–​2, 4–​5, 29; and aesthetic experience, 6–​7, 12, 18, 74; À la recherche du temps perdu, 6, 16, 18, 24, 109; involuntary memory, 6, 34, 37, 40, 69, 73; and life of the artist, 16, 18, 110; and sensuous perception, 18, 78; and social critique, 34; and subjectivity, 7; in translation, 16, 18; writing style, 6–​7, 34 psychiatric nursing, 36 Quakers, 24 Rauschenberg, Robert, 37, 69, 86 Reinhardt, Ad, 15, 56, 64, 66 Richman, Robert, 30 Ricoeur, Paul, 4, 28–​29, 33 Rivers, Larry, 77–​78, 77, 80; sexuality of, 80; Washington Crossing the Delaware (1953), 77–​78, 77, 80 Romney, Governor George, 81 Roppongi (Tokyo district), 84 Rosenquist, James, 78 Rothko, Mark, 55, 67, 86 saltbox (architecture), 24 San Francisco, CA, 46 Saturday Evening Post, 31 Schapiro, Meyer, 81 sculptural columns, 12, 72–​73, 81, 105, 108 sculpture: as abstract, 13, 40, 43; aluminum, 12; analogized to Proust’s literature, 6–​7; and architecture, 39; and embodiment, 39, 40–​43, 56–​60, 97; experience of, 7; and memory, 5, 7, 15, 19–​20, 28, 34, 44, 50, 56, 66, 100; and minimalism, 32, 34, 40–​41, 56–​58, 64, 79; and modernism, 11, 55; and phenomenology, 5; and representation, 13–​1 4, 25, 38; response to painting, 13, 16, 19, 31–​32, 55–​56, 66, 80; and scale, 39, 42, 58–​60, 65, 83–​84, 90, 94, 97–​98, 104; three-dimensionality of, 14, 20, 34, 43, 48, 67, 84, 94–​95, 97, 100, 108; and time, 7; titles of, 9, 11, 109 sculptures, by other artists: Bladen, Rockers (1965), 98, 98; Bochner, Untitled (Fence

Piece) (1966), 32, 33; Chamberlain, Dolores James (1962), 50; Chamberlain, Gramm (1960), 50; Chamberlain, Toy (1961), 50, 50; LeWitt, Serial Project, I (ABCD) (1966), 95–​96, 96; Millett, Oksamma (1963), 87; Morris, Untitled (Box for Standing) (1961), 42–​43, 43; Morris, Untitled (Mirrored Cubes) (1966), 95; Olitski, Bunga 45 (1967), 56–​57, 57, 95; Serra, One-Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969), 41, 41; David Smith, Cubi XXVII (1965), 94, 94; Tony Smith, Die (1962/1968), 58–​60, 58 sculptures, by Truitt: Back (1964), 83, 95, 102–​3, 108, pl. 19; Bolt (1965), 100, pl. 22; Carson (1963), 64, pl. 10; Catawba (1962), 1, 58, 64, 111, pl. 9; First (1961), 11–​16, 19–​22, 24–​28, 31–​40, 48, 58, 64, 66, 76–​7 7, 81, 108–​9, pl. 1, pl. 2; Gloucester (1963), 64; Green: Five (1962), 24, pl. 5; Hardcastle (1962), 11, 39–​46, 48, 50, 55–​60, 63, 64, 66, 77, 109, 121n27, pl. 6, pl. 7; Here (1964), 83; Insurrection (1962), 66, 72, 108, pl. 12; Late Snow (1964), 108; Mignon (1962), 14, 24; Morning Walk (1964), 83; Muir (1962), 14, 24; New England Legacy (1963), 64; One (1962), 14, 24, pl. 3; Out (1964), 83, 95, pl. 18; Platte (1962), 63, 72, pl. 13; Return (1967), 12, 108–​9, pl. 25; Sandcastle (1963), 94, pl. 14; Sea Garden (1964), 83, 88; ShipLap (1962), 63, 82; Signal (1965), 100, pl. 21; Southern Elegy (1962), 56, 108, pl. 8; Spanish Main (1963), 64; Summer Run (1964), 83, 83; Sweet Wind (1965), 85; Thirtieth (1962), 63, 82; Tribute (1962), 63, 82; Untitled (1959), 16, pl. 4; untitled sculpture in Color and Space (1966), 83, 102; Valley Forge (1963), 12, 64–​66, 70, 72–​76, 78, 80, 84, 90, 109,

shinchintaisha, 88 Shinjuku (Tokyo borough), 84 Shinohara, Ushio, 86, 90 Simonides of Ceos, 2–​3 Smith, David, 94; Cubi XXVII (1965), 94, 94 Smith, Tony, 5, 32, 57–​60, 58; Die (1962/68), 58–​60, 58 Smithson, Robert, 5 soak-staining, 65, 79, 84 Society of Friends, 24 Sōgetsu Art Center, 86 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 15, 36, 64, 67, 73, 77 souvenir, 19, 22; as theory, 26–​27 space: and color, 12, 60, 66, 90, 103, 105, 106, 108; as cultural, 40, 47; as empty, 13, 31, 58; exclusionary divisions within, 28, 33, 34, 37; interior versus exterior, 22–​25; in memory, 18, 32, 36, 48, 55, 58, 109; in painting, 15, 67, 72–​73; around sculpture, 7, 14, 20, 34, 40, 42–​43, 56, 60, 73, 84, 91, 93–​98, 100, 104, 108; and shape, 95; and surface, 39, 95. See also “color-space” Spero, Nancy, 111 Stijl, de, 115n3, 124n10 studios, Truitt’s: Japan Art Center (Bijutsuka kaikan), 85, 127n7; Otowa, 85, 85, 104; Twining Court, 60–​62, 62 subjectivity: and Benjamin, 48; children’s, 35; and color, 65–​69, 78; and history, 80; and imagination, 3; individual, 3, 11, 48, 53, 68, 80, 96, 109; and memory, 4, 18; and perception, 5; and Proust, 4, 18, 24; in relationship to others, 2, 27, 53; relinquishing of, 54; repression of, 68; and resistance, 55; universal, 8, 68. See also mass subjectivity sublime, in art, 16, 19, 70 sumi ink drawings (Truitt), 105 Sweeney, James Johnson, 81

pl. 11; Watauga (1962), 64; Winter Solstice (1964), 83, 83 Segi, Shinichi, 86 Seidensticker, Edward, 81 sensuality, 18, 37–​38 Serra, Richard: One-Ton Prop (House of Cards)

Tamayo, Rufino, 29

(1969), 41, 41 sexism, 9, 86 sexuality, 2, 80 Sexual Politics (Millett), 86 Shimizu, Kusuo, 85, 105, 106

Tange, Kenzō, 88 Tapié, Michel: Art of Today’s World (exhibition), 86 Third Haven Friends Meetinghouse (Easton, MD), 24–​26, 25

tableaux d’histoire, 74. See also history painting Talbot County, MD, 22, 24, 44–​45

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time (concept), 3–​4 , 6–​8, 18, 26, 34–​35, 37, 40, 56, 66–​67, 69–​70, 108 titles: and semiotics, 11, 48; of Truitt’s art, 7, 11–​12, 64, 103, 109 Tokyo, 12, 80; arrival in, 84–​85; art world, 86–​87, 90; Bunkyō (borough), 85, 85, 104; damage after bombing raids, 84–​85; Ginza (district), 34, 103; Haibara (papeterie), 103; Imperial Hotel, 84, 103; minimalism in, 96; Olympic Games, 85, 90; Otowa (neighborhood), 85, 85, 104; Roppongi (district), 84; Shinjuku (borough), 84; James Truitt’s career in, 81; Truitt family’s guests in, 81; urban planning, 88; Wakamatsu-chō (neighborhood), 84–​85 Tōno, Yoshiaki, 86, 100, 102 Toonerville Folks, 46–​48, 47, 121n17 torii, 90–​91, 106 transcendentalism, 72 translation, 1, 6, 16, 18, 34, 47. See also Brée, Germaine transparency (concept), 41, 60, 80 Treaty of San Francisco, 88 Trilling, Lionel, 30–​31 Truitt, Alexandra, 29 Truitt, Anne: adulthood, 35; as alumna of Bryn Mawr College, 12, 16, 65, 77; as author, 9–​11, 109–​11; childhood, 35, 39, 44, 73; and color, 64, 66–​70, 78–​79, 90, 97, 99, 105–​6, 108; connection to color field painting, 7, 60–​64, 66, 79; current scholarship on, 2, 113n3; debut at André Emmerich Gallery, 61; debut at Minami Gallery, 85–​86; encounter with Newman’s Onement VI, 15–​16, 19, 64, 67, 73; and feminism, 9, 37, 110–​11; friendship with Andre, 1; friendship with Greenberg, 56, 79, 97, 98; friendship with Louis, 61, 65; friendship with Noland, 61, 65–​66; friendship with David Smith, 94; Fuji-TV interview, 87–​90; and gender, 8–​9, 14, 64, 79–​80, 83; and history (concept), 12, 64–​65, 74–​76; and Japanese contemporary art, 86; and memory, 4–​5, 7–​8, 11–​12, 20, 33–​34, 39, 40, 44–​45, 48, 50, 53, 58, 60, 77–​78, 95, 103, 109; as minimalist, 2, 72, 79, 100, 109; and modernism, 11, 13, 15, 20, 55, 66, 68, 79; and perception, 2, 7, 96; as professor at University of Maryland, 70;

14 8   •   I n d e x

and Proust, 1–​2, 6, 16–​19, 24, 34, 37, 40, 73–​74, 78, 109–​10; social life in Tokyo, 81; social status in Washington, DC, 29–​30, 35–​37; student of Medellín, 73, 76; studio in Tokyo, 85, 85, 88; studio in Washington, DC, 61, 83; and subjectivity, 2, 24; in Tokyo, 12, 81–​109; as translator, 1, 5–​6, 16–​18, 34, 47 (see also Brée, Germaine); visit to Easton, MD, 22–​28 Truitt, James McConnell, 29–​30, 30, 36, 61, 85, 87, 110 Truitt, Mary, 29 Truitt, Sam (Samuel), 29 Turn: The Journal of an Artist (Truitt), 110, 116n14 Twining Court (studio), 60–​62, 62 Ukeles, Mierle Laderman, 111 University of Maryland, College Park, 70 Valley Forge, PA, 65, 70, 77–​78 vividness (concept), 2, 5, 6–​7, 18, 34, 38, 70, 75, 95, 110 Vogue magazine, 8, 79, 109, 110 Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT: Black, White, and Gray (1964), 82, 82 Wagstaff, Samuel, 32, 82 wainscoting, 24 Warhol, Andy, 37, 50–​55, 51, 52, 54, 78; Ambulance Disaster (1963–​64), 51–​52, 52; and color, 78; Death and Disaster (series), 50–​55; 5 Deaths (1963), 50–​51, 51; Five Deaths Seventeen Times in Black and White (1963), 51; Race Riot (c. 1963), 53–​54, 54 Washington, DC, 23, 29–​30, 36–​37, 39, 45–​46, 61, 64–​67, 71–​72, 79, 83, 110; art world, 29–​30, 36–​37, 61, 64–​67, 71–​72; Georgetown (neighborhood), 29, 36, 37, 46–​47, 61, 121n19; Twining Court (studio), 60–​62, 62 Washington, George, 65, 74–​78, 80 Washington Post, 30 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York: Anne Truitt: Sculpture and Drawings, 1961–​ 1973 (1973), 9, 22, 108, 110, 127n1 Williamsburg, VA, 23, 115n15 Wittig, Monique, 9

working drawings (Truitt), 92–​93, 92, 93, 95, 97, pl. 15 works on paper (Truitt), 12, 84, 91, 95–​96, 99–​100, 99, 102–​5, 107, 109; Rice Paper Drawing (1965), 104, pl. 23; Sumi Drawing (1966), 105, 107; Truitt ʼ64 (1964), 95, pl.

16; Truitt ʼ66 (1966), 99, pl. 20; 28 Sept.ʼ65 (1965), 105, pl. 24; Untitled (1966), 99, 99 World War I, 20, 116n18 World War II, 72, 84, 88, 120n14 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 84 writings by Truitt. See Daybook; Prospect; Turn

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Text: 9.5/14 Scala Pro Display: Scala Sans Pro Compositor: BookMatters, Berkeley Prepress: Embassy Graphics Printer/Binder: Maple Press