The Brooklyn Rail

Anne Truitt was sixty-two years old when she visited Piero della Francesca’s frescos in the Basilica di San Francesco in Arezzo, Italy, and came to an epiphany about her own work as an artist. “I humbly recognized in a background view of Jerusalem in Legend of the True Cross the direct line between Piero and my debt to him: towers of color,” Truitt wrote. “I saw them first in a lecture on Italian painting at Bryn Mawr. They must have stamped themselves into my eye and imagination, to emerge years later, each isolated as I myself had been isolated, thrusting up in a different air in a different place, rising from a different motivation, but out of a sensitivity aligned to Piero’s.” This passage—taken from Turn: The Journal of an Artist, Truitt’s second of four published diaries—is emblematic of the introspection and insightfulness that mark her writing. Nothing is ever just about Truitt’s art, or the history of art, or her friends and family, or her job, but rather how those elements coalesce to complicate and enrich her life.

Always Reaching: The Selected Writings of Anne Truitt is a collection of journal entries, yes, but also interviews, statements, letters, lectures, and book and exhibition reviews that Truitt wrote about such artists as Suzanne Valadon, Berthe Morisot, and Isamu Noguchi. These writings span fifty-seven years of the artist’s life from 1946–2003 and are presented roughly chronologically in a minimally designed volume that is punctuated by intimately-scaled photographs of her and her work. Thoughtfully compiled by the artist’s daughter, Alexandra Truitt, who runs her mother’s estate, the book acts as a fascinating counterpoint to the cohesive prose of Truitt’s journals, which were published in 1982, 1986, 1996, and posthumously in 2022. The perceptible changes in her interests, opinions, and tone throughout Always Reaching offer readers fresh insights into her art, writing, and life.

This evolution comes through most powerfully in key moments, inspirations, and individuals that recur in her words and writings. Piero della Francesca, for example, comes up a handful of times. In one instance, Truitt explained her first exposure to his work as a college student in a 1973 interview with Walter Hopps, the curator of her retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art that year. Looking at his work, she realized, “you could use form and color, and that the structure—let’s see if I can get it into words—the structure itself had meaning and power and emotion, and that the color could not be applied to it but show forth the meaning of the structure.” While Truitt’s words aren’t as polished as her description of Piero’s frescos thirteen years later in Turn, her colloquial language offers the reader a more intimate connection to her thought process.

Truitt’s columnar sculptures, which she saw echoed in the towers of Piero’s Legend of the True Cross (1447–66) in Arezzo, benefit from extended viewing and are therefore easily misunderstood. Simple in form and often monochromatic, each sculpture appeared fully realized in Truitt’s brain. She then meticulously applied multiple coats of paint, sanded between each layer, to wooden armatures. This process gives the sculptures an otherworldly aura, which the artist exacerbated by using hidden bases to make them appear to hover just above the ground. After spending time with one of Truitt’s works, the meaning that she perceived in Piero’s structures becomes more and more vivid.

Truitt maintained that the emotions imbued in each piece are highly specific and evoked in the titles that she purposefully and thoughtfully bestowed. “When you get into the area of titles, you’re moving into an area of great privacy and great intimacy, and I always notice that when titles come up I feel uncomfortable because it’s too close to my bone,” she told Howard Fox in a 1975 interview that appears in Always Reaching. “And I really would prefer not to talk about it, except to say that they are very, very, very important to me.” This tantalizing tidbit is rewarded later in the book by an excerpt from a series of previously unpublished conversations between Truitt and her daughter Alexandra that are referred to as “The Title Tapes.” In these discussions from 1997–98 about the origins of each of the artist’s major works, Truitt’s tone is more casual and unguarded than in other interviews. While the purpose is to provide essential context for archival purposes, the unstudied clarity of her words evokes an easy intimacy between mother and daughter.

The excerpt from “The Title Tapes” is the crux of Always Reaching, filled with stories and insights that are as readable as they are revealing. It also highlights Alexandra Truitt as the guardian of her mother’s legacy, whose impulses led to these recordings, and this shrewdly assembled volume. Near the end of this conversation, Truitt describes the origins of her sculpture Watauga (1962), chronicling a tragic story of the “complete and total breakdown” of her family when she was thirteen years old. It culminates, somewhat incidentally, at a boarding house on Watauga Street in Asheville, North Carolina. “So that’s Watauga,” Truitt tells Alexandra. “I got a lot into the sculpture, didn’t I?”