Tyler Green writes:
As I walked through the Corcoran’s new permanent collection installation, I bumped into an old friend. Up on the second floor I found Anne Truitt, twice. One was magnificent: 1962’s Insurrection, a vertical plank, painted red on one vertical half and pink on the other.
Like all the best Truitts its beauty was a product of its subtlety. When Truitt entered her mature period in the 1960s, such subtlety was out and had been for a while. Abstract expressionism? (Glug glug.) Pop art? (Bam!) Subtlety was not something admired at the Cedar Bar.
That’s part of the genius of Truitt. She is the slow food of art; you have to stand in front of her painted sculptures, for a minute, maybe two, to feel what there is to see.
Anne is on my list of Caretakers of the Subtle. Of course there are many others. Truitt was insistent in her desire to not be positioned as a minimalist.
“I have never allowed myself, in my own hearing,” she told the Washington Post in 1987, “to be called a minimalist.”
I make things by hand, she’d say, a key difference between minimalism’s sleek absence of human touch and a pursuit of hand wrought subtlety.