Lawrence Markey Inc.

Anne Truitt

by Kate Green
Published: March 1, 2009

www.modernpainters.com

"Sumi Drawings, 1966" at Lawrence Markey Gallery (San Antonio) Nov. 17 – Dec. 19, 2008

Few people know that Clement Greenberg considered Anne Truitt’s monochromatic, handpainted, columnlike sculptures from the 1960s (she continued making them until her death in 2004) key to the development of Minimalism. Even fewer have had the opportunity to see her works on paper from the same decade, which support Greenberg’s claim. The show’s 10 Sumi Drawings from 1966 are both expressive and restrained, demonstrating why Truitt, though reluctant to claim a spot in the crowded, male-dominated artworld or in any movement associated with it, was nonetheless aligned with Color Field painters such as her friend Kenneth Noland and Minimalists such as Donald Judd. The drawings are intimate, brushy counterparts to Truitt’s body-size vertical sculptures. Made when the Washington, DC-based artist and writer was living in Japan with her journalist husband and children, each features two adjacent taupe stripes of Japanese sumi ink stretching top to bottom and several inches across an otherwise pristine piece of thick handmade paper. While for the most part these small works—all approximately two feet tall and one foot wide—are rigidly composed and tightly restrained, they also bear expressive marks. For example, some have ragged edges, patches of unevenly absorbed ink, and traces of an erased signature. They reveal a profoundly confident, skilled artist who was aware of the potential to link her work to bona fide schools of art, yet diligently pursued her own idiosyncratic path. It is probably this resistance to easy categorization that contributed both to Truitt’s being long overlooked and to her current embrace by those of us tired of quick flash, starved for slower substance, and interested in a more egalitarian version of art history.