BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH by WALTER HOPPS

From: Anne Truitt Sculpture and Drawings 1961 - 1973. April 21 - June 2, 1974. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. © Estate of Walter Hopps, 2006. Reproduced with permission.

Anne Dean Truitt was born March 16, 1921 in Baltimore, Maryland. The family home was Easton, Maryland on Maryland's Eastern Shore where her parents, New Englanders, had chosen to settle in semi-retirement. She was taught at home by a governess and attended public school in the quiet rural remove of Easton. Her mother's literary tastes and interests were part of her earliest experience.

High school years, 1934-1937, for Anne Truitt were spent at St. Anne's School, Charlottesville, Virginia, and St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines in Asheville, North Carolina. In 1938 she entered Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and graduated in 1943 with a B.A. in psychology.

In 1943 Anne Truitt moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where she began her first professional work at Massachusetts General Hospital in psychological research. Her own time was taken up with night work as a nurse's aid and reading and her writing of poetry and stories. Around 1945 while still with the hospital she spontaneously enrolled in a night class to study sculpture. This was her first formal training in the visual arts. She recalls the ease with which she made a standing female figure in plasticine and the pleasure it gave her. What might have led to a career in clinical psychology ended in 1946 when she chose to leave Massachusetts General. Truitt states that following a specific incident with a patient she suddenly felt a sense of her emotional limits in trying to help another person. She spent the following year mostly with her own writing.

In the fall of 1947 she married James Truitt, then with the State Department in Washington, D.C. During part of 1948 they lived in New York City where James worked as a reporter for Life magazine. By the end of the year they had returned to Washington, D.C. where Mr. Truitt was to pursue his journalistic career with Time Inc. and The Washington Post.

In September of 1948 Anne Truitt enrolled at Washington's former Institute of Contemporary Art. This institution played a vital and germinal role in the art life of Washington following the Second World War. Truitt studied sculpture with Alexander Giampietro. Her work, mostly in modeled clay, was figurative of a very simplistic and stylized nature, although an overtone of emotional theme or content was found in the work. At the Institute she met Kenneth Noland who was studying and teaching painting. Their close and continuing friendship began. (Although Noland had been born and raised in Asheville, North Carolina, he and Truitt did not meet during the three years she lived there.) Truitt's first work publicly exhibited was in an exhibition of students and faculty of the Institute of Contemporary Art presented in Washington at a no longer existing public market in 1949.

Between early 1950 and February 1969 when they were separated, Anne and James Truitt lived in five cities, their moves following the dictates of James Truitt's career as a journalist. Three children were born: Alexandra in 1955, Mary in 1958 and Samuel in 1960. Wherever she lived Truitt continued her writing and pursued her professional career in art (in sculpture, drawing, and some painting as well).

While living in Dallas, Texas in 1950 she studied at the Museum School with Octavio Medillin. She established her own studio and worked mainly in plaster. During 1951, again living in New York City, she studied drawing with Peter Lipman-Wulf.

Returning to Washington, D.C. in October 1951 she established a studio in Georgetown in the same building with the artist Mary Orwen and worked in stone, clay, cement casting, welding and other media. Continuing part-time art studies, she worked variously with Noland at Catholic University, Peter Blanc at American University and with her artist-friend V. V. Rankine, who had been a fellow student with Noland at North Carolina's famous Black Mountain College during the late 1940's. Important to Truitt during the '50s was the example of Pietro Larrari's work in colored cast cement. But her conceptual foundation of art was beaten out during a series of dialogues with Kenneth Noland, who generously shared with her his own highly intelligent and intuitive understanding of an artist's involvement with his life and work.

From July 1957 to May 1960 the Truitts lived in the San Francisco Bay area. She was particularly fond of the Big Sur area to the south, and her experience of space and light there held particular importance. At the studio Truitt maintained in San Francisco she made sculpture of clay. Their configuration involved a kind of architectural geometry related to Mayan and other ancient Mexican styles she recalled from an earlier visit to Mexico. One important piece of this sculpture, a 1958 work, still exists. In addition, during these years Truitt created a large number of works on paper.

In May 1960 the Truitts returned to Washington. From then until 1964 she maintained studios on 30th Street and Twining Court near 22nd and P Streets, N.W., Washington. Smaller work was undertaken in the 30th Street studio and larger pieces at Twining Court, which she rented from Ken Noland who left Washington for New York City in 1961. This building, a large carriage house, no longer exists. This time can be seen as one of the most, if not the most, important periods of her career. Her friendship with Kenneth Noland was renewed; she met the critic Clement Greenberg; was introduced to Morris Louis, some of whose work she had previously seen; came to know and admire, both as a man and sculptor, David Smith; met the art historian William Rubin who gave her professional advice. Generally she did not preoccupy herself with the art scene in Washington and this remains true to the present.

Truitt's career took a major turn at the end of 1961. In November she and her close friend, the late artist Mary Meyer, visited New York City. At the Guggenheim Museum certain works in the exhibition American Abstract Expressionists and Imagists had profound affect upon her, particularly Barnett Newman's vast painting of 1953, Ornament VI, and to a lesser extent a "black" painting by Ad Reinhardt. These works and others in the exhibition were totally new to her. Heretofore her interest had centered on certain historical examples (Giotto, Piero della Francesco, etc.) and those of a few close contemporaries. She suddenly felt free and confident about her work, able to continue doing exactly what she wanted. Back in Washington she made the fence-like sculpture FIRST (see catalogue entry 1.). In an incredible outpouring of work during 1962 she made a large number of important drawings and 32 pieces of sculpture. In February 1963, four months after Morris Louis' death in Washington, she held her first exhibition in New York City at the Andre Emmerich Gallery.

Her husband's work took the family to Tokyo in March 1964 where they remained until June 1967. Her response to Japan was contradictory. Feelings of great regard for Japanese esthetics vied with a tremendous sense of dislocation and loneliness. Her sculpture during this period was of painted aluminum; her thought was that it would transport back to the United States more conveniently than her painted wooden forms. [In 1971, after much thought, she concluded that the colors of this work in many instances had gone awry. This seemed due to a great difference between the light in Tokyo and that she experienced in Washington. She destroyed all Tokyo work that remained in her possession. See Catalogue section.]

During 1969 Truitt was awarded studio space and subsequent grants through the Artist Fellowship Program originated by the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. In 1969 she shared this program's Calvert Street Workshop, a building affording multiple studio space, with the photographers John Gossage and Joe Cameron, the architectural designer James O'Hara, and the painter and art critic, Andrew Hudson.

Since 1969 Truitt has maintained a home for herself and three children in Washington behind which she had constructed a small, sunny studio designed to resemble the fishermen's cottages of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

From: Anne Truitt Sculpture and Drawings 1961 - 1973. April 21 Ð June 2, 1974. The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. © Estate of Walter Hopps, 2006. Reproduced with permission.