28 Apr 2018

In the Tower: Anne Truitt

National Gallery of Art

Reviewed by John Pyper

Sometimes you see a photo of an artwork and you know the whole story, which is not the case with Anne Truitt. Seeing a cluster of her work extracts more than the parvenu minimalism and Washington Color School abstraction that one associates with her. "In the Tower: Anne Truitt" at the National Gallery is like a movie rather than a single frame. With more than one work, we find human touch, architecture, studio life, and friends. The reductive motif is quashed when we discover receding space and open windows.

Any individual example of Truitt's work expresses itself so clearly that it can conceal her range. The NGA did not fumble this opportunity. It captures her working life down to the locations of her studios and memories of childhood on the Maryland shore. It adds to our experience and keys us into crucial details that open up these obscure aesthetic puzzles. From early drawings, to paintings, to sculptural paintings, her post-1961 output is here in full form.