Untitled

For the American artist Anne Truitt, who rose to prominence in the 1960s alongside Color Field painters Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, drawing was a daily ritual. Though primarily known for her multi-colored sculpture, in which rectangular columns are rendered in hand-painted, candy-colored hues, Truitt created an exceptional body of drawings, two of which are included in the following selection, both dating to 1966. Unlike her male counterparts, such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre, who favored industrial, machine-made materials, Truitt deliberately welcomed the expressive potential of hand-made materials and hand-painted color. She accentuated the intrinsic properties of each hue, often pairing two dissimilar tones side-by-side. In her 1966 gouache on paper Untitled, Truitt creates a sweeping, elegant abstraction rendered in flat, geometric planes of color. Bold segments of tangerine are paired alongside bright yellow, creating a palpable three-dimensionality that propels Truitt’s form upward and out of the paper support. In a separate untitled work on paper, also from 1966 and rendered in white acrylic, Truitt depicts a highly potent recurring motif, the white picket fence. Evoking the vernacular architecture of Truitt’s suburban home in Easton, Maryland, the fence motif also dates to Truitt’s earliest sculpture, First (1961).