Anne Truitt: Easton’s most prominent 20th century artist

Easton’s most prominent 20th century artist, Anne Truitt, was born in 1921 and lived her first 13 years in a three-story brick house on a tree-shaded street in Easton. She came to fame in the 1960’s, in an era when art was supposedly aloof from representation and illusion. But check out the condensed picket fence in “First” and the clean, clear blue and green of “View,” and you’ll see glimpses of her Easton roots.

Truitt’s sculptures don’t always grab you at first glance. Yet on a second look, the precisely chosen colors hand-painted on these simple geometric forms curiously open out into something that resembles a kind of narrative. They are like thoughts and memories honed to a balance of resonance and bracing dissonance.

Truitt, who died in 2004, was an articulate and engaging writer, as well as a sculptor, painter and teacher, and she set down many recollections and impressions of her childhood home in her three books.

In Daybook, The Journey of an Artist, she wrote, “The fields and trees and fences and boards and lattices of my childhood rushed across my inner eye as if swept 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.”

Decades before the first span of the Bay Bridge was built, Easton was still a quiet town where Truitt’s parents could safely leave her alone to play outside and later explore the town on her bicycle. Naturally curious and given to closely observing the details of her surroundings, Truitt made what she later termed a “mental map” of the town, studying its buildings and discovering the geometric plan of its streets.

There are only three upright white slats in “First” (now in the collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art), but that’s enough to suggest a picket fence. Oddly, however, the widths of the slats vary, and they stand at different heights. Their pointed tips seem a bit like rooftops, and some scholars have speculated that the asymmetric peak of the left-hand slat refers to the peak of Easton’s historic Third Haven Friends Meeting.

Created in 1961, “First” was the first of the many hand-painted wood sculptures that caught the attention of prominent critics, notably Clement Greenberg. Thanks to her habitual honing down of details to their absolute barest essentials, Truitt was often described as a Minimalist, a label she rejected. Far from embracing the stridently non-referential stance of artists such as Donald Judd and Sol LeWitt, Truitt believed art should have something to say. Although she steered clear of depicting specific memories or events, purposefully avoiding the trite or sentimental, her art always grew from her own experiences from childhood onward.

As her sculpture progressed, Truitt stripped her forms down even more, until most were simply narrow, square columns, usually human height or taller, painted with precise vertical bands of color. Color became so paramount in these works that Truitt, who lived in Washington for most of her adult life, is often associated with the Washington Color School.

Each of the four sides of her 1999 sculpture, “View,” is different: on one, a vertical stripe of sky blue is flanked on both sides by leaf green, the green wraps around the edge to meet a pale yellow bordered by a thin dark line that then turns the next corner to come up against a tint of gray so light it might just be a shadow of white. To view this sculpture, you must walk around it. Because only one or two sides are visible at a time, memory comes into play as you think back to the colors and shapes of the sides before. In this way, Truitt created art that is experienced over time, distilling sensations of memory and change.

In a 2002 interview with Anne Louise Bayly, for the Archives of American Art, Truitt talked about her childhood in Easton and the joy she found in exploring the town and the river’s edge. Years later, when she was living in Washington and struggling to make sense of the changes in her life, it occurred to her that she could make art that would unfold for the viewer just as her own exploration of thoughts, feelings and memories was continually unfolding.

She said, “I thought to myself, ‘If I make a sculpture, it will just stand up straight and the seasons will go around it and the light will go around it and it will record time.’”

To view some of Truitt’s works and read the interview:

https://annetruitt.org/

https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-anne-truitt-11857