Memory work

Anne Truitt (b. 1921, d. 2004) is an American sculptor best associated with minimalism. Her studio was located in Washington, D.C. Since the 1950s, Truitt was deeply influenced by the narratives of Marcel Proust, which link sensation and place through the apparatus of memory. The artist's interest in geographically situated mnemonics specifically informed her turn from expressionist sculpture to minimal- type sculpture in 1961. This dissertation focuses on Truitt's early, minimal-type works, which interconnect two historical transitions: the first having to do with the broader phase change from modernist painting to a minimalist tendency in formation circa 1960; and the second having to do with the place of memory in history simultaneously undergoing a kind of hermeneutic revision. Though reference and abstraction are in fraught relation where it concerns the interpretation of midcentury art, this project investigates memory as the most salient feature of Truitt's early works, represented by the fences, gates, garden walls, and tombstones from the remembered landscapes of her childhood on Maryland's Eastern Shore. They provide an entrance into a whole range of mnemonic references that suggests something more than their formal art historical context can explain. Through a protracted study of how memory was imperative to her practice, this dissertation demonstrates how Truitt hypostatized the mutual connection between the essentially private experience mediated by modernist painting, and an open, public form of subjectivity that came increasingly to be associated with minimal sculpture. Each chapter in this dissertation organizes itself around a sculpture that represents a site of transit between contiguous tropes connected across history.

I center my attention on three: First (1961), Hardcastle (1962), and Valley Forge (1963), mapping out a trajectory from an essentially private experience of sculpture to its greater public and relational dimensions as the artist's practice grew in maturity.