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© Estate of Anne Truitt. Image courtesy Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
Untitled (5 Nov '62)
© Estate of Anne Truitt. Image courtesy Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
© Estate of Anne Truitt. Image courtesy Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
© Estate of Anne Truitt. Image courtesy Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University.
ClassificationsWorks of Art on Paper
Artist (American, 1921 - 2004)

Untitled (5 Nov '62)

Date1962
MediumAcrylic on paper
Credit LineGift of the Art History Department Fund
Dimensions22 in. (55.9 cm)
Object number2004.042.001
Label TextAnne Truitt's first one-person show in New York in 1963 established her as an innovator of Minimal art, one of the major sculpture developments of the last half century. In the years leading up to that exhibition Truitt produced a number of drawings in addition to her sculpture. These works on paper have only rarely been exhibited, and their importance in Truitt's development is little understood.

During the early 1960s, Truitt discovered a distinctive way of working, traversing the two media. Unlike much Minimal practice, Truitt suffuses her art with allusion. Her early works contain references to her childhood surroundings in Easton, Maryland. At once abstract and depictive, personal and objective, the drawings and sculpture evoke an irretrievable place and time, suggesting the constellation of historical and geographical circumstances that make up a life.

This is an early drawing made in the fall of 1962, a very fertile period for Truitt after her breakthrough realization in 1961 that "art could spring from concept." Truitt's drawings reveal the close connection in her thinking about formal elements in both two and three dimensions. The same dark, saturated, rectilinear shapes of the acrylic drawings are also found in her sculpture at this time. In both media, the colors and shapes, while simple and abstract, are yet grounded in her personal experience and allude to her perceptions and memories of the world around her.
Exhibition HistoryAnne Truitt, Early Drawings and Sculpture, 1958-1963, Michael C. Carlos Museum, January 31 - May 9, 2004
Renaissance to Contemporary: Recent Acquisitions in Works on Paper, Michael C. Carlos Museum, February 10 - May 27, 2007
ProvenancePurchased by Emory Art History Department from Danese, New York, New York.
InscribedNumbered WP266 at the rear.
MarkingsEmbossed circular watermark at lower proper right corner labeled Bainbridge studio Bristol.
Status
Not on view
Collections
  • Works of Art on Paper