ART-ICLE.FR, the website of Léon Mychkine (Doppelgänger), writer, Doctor of Philosophy, independent researcher, theoretical art critic, member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA-France).     

Anne Truitt was a great artist, and a pioneer of the purest art, but, unfortunately, it was handmade, and what’s worse, made by a woman! She was supported by Clement Greenberg in the early 1960s, but apparently, according to the story, Greenberg was disappointed by her subsequent career… What a pity. But this did not prevent Truitt from continuing to produce a major body of work, surprisingly too little known. Nevertheless, Anne Truitt inaugurated a new way of making art, sometimes labelled as ‘minimal’, but this is not the point, since Truitt doesn’t seem to have  recognised herself in this label, any more than in that of ‘conceptual’. From the early 1960s onwards, she turned away from figuration, destroying all her earlier works, to take a radical turn — or, shall we say, anthropomorphism — towards almost pure abstraction (for a lack of a — momentarily —, better word, for I’m not sure it either fits). The new works Truitt produced from the 1960s onwards were not machined, as Judd’s and Sol LeWitt’s would soon be.   

Once it had occurred to me that I could use color metaphorically for content, I realized that I could go ahead with new freedom. What I was doing dawned on me as the works got bigger: strange-looking objects that just stood there in the studio for almost a year, where no one came but me. (“Grand allusion: James Meyer talks with Anne Truitt”, November 19, 2017 – April 1, 2018).  

MS. TRUITT: And in 1962, I destroyed all the work I did from ’49 to ’62, except for a couple of pieces — one stone head and one clay head, two clay heads.

MS. BAYLY: That’s remarkable.

MS. TRUITT: I destroyed it all. And it’s perfectly all right art. There was nothing wrong with it, it just was bad art. It was what I call bad art.

MS. BAYLY: Yes.

MS. TRUITT: And then in 1974 when I had the retrospective at the Whitney, I destroyed all the sculpture I made in Japan from ’64 to ’67 because that was intelligent work. Intelligent art is extremely boring, and I looked at it and I could see that it was intelligent art. That was it, though. That’s all it was, so I destroyed it all. (“Oral history interview with Ann Truitt”, 2002, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Insitution). 

How can we understand the resolute courage that led to the decision to physically destroy 13 years of artistic production? To realise that, for 13 years, you’ve been producing bad art, and, instead of coming to terms with it, to annihilate it all and start again; in other words, to radically change your approach, to start again from scratch. It’s very impressive, because Truitt admits that it was ‘perfectly good art’, but ‘bad art’ nonetheless. It’s a real lesson that Truitt has taught herself, and one that would be good for many other artists to hear, some of whom are too sure of themselves and too quickly satisfied with what they produce. But that’s another subject, and a very delicate one, because these things should not be said any more, since everyone is potentially endowed with so much talent that it is inconceivable to doubt the slightest piece. But not anyone is Anne Truitt… So, what happened is that Truitt has produced art that was both exceptional and new; art that is more than remarkable, beautiful, solid, and questioning, like ‘Green: Five’ ↑, which is reminiscent of his groundbreaking first piece, aptly named “First”:

It looks like a piece of fence. Except that it isn’t. Even though Truitt calls it a ‘fence of perfectly straight posts’. First of all, a fence is more important than three posts, each of which is different in width, and therefore in spikes. What’s more, you don’t put three posts on a plinth… Therefore it’s not a fence, it’s a sculpture. It is quite clear that in the early 1960s, in the United States, a kind of ‘Denkollektive’ (to use Ludwik Fleck’s expression, which is translated into English as ‘Tought colllective’, or in French as ‘esprit collectif’) began to take hold, tending to de-psychologizing art in general and sculpture in particular, leading to a kind of de-individualisation: ‘the social context infects even the distinctly mental characteristics of mental attributions’ (Tyler Burge, philosopher). Burge’s remark is pertinent because, as we know, certain ideas appear according to the social context, the social epistemology, and sometimes disappear once the context has radically changed, but not necessarily either. Another way of putting the question is as follow: “Who owns an idea?” If we think of Tony Smith’s sculptures, such as ‘Cigarette’, ‘For Marjorie’, ‘Light Box’, ‘Marriage’, all from 1961, added to those by Truitt, Judd, Flavin, for example, and soon Robert Morris, it is clear that this de-individualist movement was gaining momentum.  

Returning to ‘First’, even if we immediately catch the notion of the object (i.e., a fence), there’s a modulo, namely, the difference in width between the three posts and the base. But what happens a year later? The poles came closer together and merged, leaving traces of their union in the grooves. And the sculpture is titled ‘Green: Five’, because it’s green and has five merged poles, plus the fact that the spikes have disappeared, aligning the top. It doesn’t look like a fence at all, but something (almost) solemn, (almost) monumental.

But, we shouldn’t be too prompt to conclude that the pieces of which we’re talking about are “only” sculptures. It is also about painting. And we can give again this quote : 

Once it had occurred to me that I could use color metaphorically for content, I realized that I could go ahead with new freedom.

The very striking fact with the Truitt resolution — to build a new art — is that that it goes dyadically with sculpture and painting, added to the fact that, in the case of material such as wood, she doesn’t want to annihilate the visible origin of the matter, i.e, wood. And this is another reason for her disparagement; one artist, a woman, mind you, who, during the Sixties, continue to show a natural matter with a handmade painting! (We’re not far from heresy). Yet, despite the red flags, Greenberg wrote that Truitt “launched and anticipated minimal art”, a statement which did not please (to say the least) Donald Judd (“Complaints: Part I”, 1969):     

By now he’s [Greenberg] ignorant and hysterical. One instance is a laughable article in Vogue last May, ostensibly on Anne Truitt but mainly on the failings of “Minimal Art,” including me. This is the nadir of the failures:

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’s italics.)

Greenberg made a garbled attempt to give the invention of “Minimal Art,” though it was not worth inventing, to Anne Truitt:

But if any one artist started or anticipated Minimal Art, it was she, in the fence-like and then box-like objects of wood or aluminum she began making, the former in 1961 and the latter in 1962… Truitt’s first New York show, at the André Emmerich Gallery in February 1963, met incomprehension (from, among others, Donald Judd, today a Minimalist leader, who reviewed the show for Arts) . . . . Had they been monochrome, the “objects” in Truitt’s 1963 show would have qualified as first examples of orthodox Minimal Art.

The last sentence is in the category of “if the queen had balls, she would be king.” An opening sentence is:

It is hardly two years since Minimal Art first appeared as a coherent movement, and it is already more the rage among artists than Pop or Op ever was.

That chronology is either intentional falsification or ignorance. The statement about my derogatory review of Truitt’s show is also shady. Regardless of work never shown, Flavin, Morris, and I were in a group show at Green in January 1963 and later that year. […] The suggestion is like Greenberg’s that Morris and I picked up on Truitt’s work. It’s impossible chronologically. Neither do good artists develop substantially from other artists’ work.

Judd is pathetical a genred taxonomist (yet, it was the Sixties, not 2024), but yes, Judd is worse (“if the queen had balls”). It’s quite clear that it is no question for him to abandon his little kingdom to a woman, whether she’d be a very fine artist, and, in 1963, better than him, as this article wil confirm. 

Let us admit that if there was, in the early 1960s, a zeitgeist mentioned above (Denkollektive) that tended towards a de-individualisation of sculpture, then Judd, apart his sexism, was perhaps acting in good faith. In 1963, in his first (group) exhibition, he exhibited three pieces:

The same year, Truitt exhibited these:

Truitt’s work is imposing and coherent. Judd’s work, on the other hand, is heterogeneous, which is quite paradoxical for what will be later assertained as conceptual art. But not only this is heterogeneous, it also quite badly made. Have a look at ”n°3” (in color ↓):

Judd, who also had a prolific career as an art critic, wrote in Arts Magazine about Truitt’s 1963 exhibition that “the work seems serious without being serious”, which is a very stupid judgment. Curiously or not, this article is not reproduced in the complete edition of his Writings… Rather, Judd did not want to see an impeccable work whose “seriousness” could not be doubted even through a glance. In fact, when you compare Judd’s “Untitled” (above) with one of Truitt’s 1963 works, it’s really bricolage. This sort of iron pipe, set into the two panels, looks like a fragment of a wall, of a dwelling, a mock-up of an apartment, where the gas pipe runs. The color betrays a lack of taste, which is not so much surprising when we have a look at the old paintings of Judd. On the other hand, Truitt’s 1963 work raises the bar, as we can see with these four colored pictures:

It’s elegant, meticulous, perfectly realized and, above all, it’s unified, it doesn’t open onto the heterogeneous. If there is a “concept” to be found, it’s here (I don’t mean that Truitt considered herself as “conceptual”, of course not). What Truitt produces is coherence, a closed self-sufficient structure; autotelic, we might say, within the Aristotelian lexicon. It’s (quite) mysterious and intriguing. In contrast, and to compare with Judd 1963, and this time in color :

Again, it looks like a fragment of something, architecture, roofing, whatever. Hence, because of this lack of consistency, and mastering in the fabric, like the other Juddian pieces, this is more akin to a student work than to a professional artist, one reason to this being probably that, at this time (beginning of the 60’s, Judd doesn’t “know” where he is, whereas Truitt does. 

To be continued…