Artist

Anne Truitt

born Baltimore, MD 1921-died Washington, DC 2004
Also known as
  • Anne Dean Truitt
Born
Baltimore, Maryland, United States
Died
Washington, District of Columbia, United States
Nationalities
  • American
Biography

Anne Truitt was a psychology major at Bryn Mawr College, received her BA degree in 1943 and subsequently worked as a psychologist in Boston. After moving to Washington, DC, in 1948, she studied at the Institute of Contemporary Art for two years, and by 1950 was committed to being a full-time artist. In 1963 she had her first solo exhibition in New York of the reductive painted wood sculptures that have defined her aesthetic vision.

A teacher for many years at the University of Maryland, Truitt has also published three volumes of her journals that eloquently document her life in art. In a 1974 entry from Daybook, she wrote: "As I worked along, making the sculptures as they appeared in the mind's eye, I slowly came to realize that what I was actually trying to do was to take paintings off the wall, to set color free in three dimensions for its own sake."

National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)

Exhibitions

Media - 1999.17 - SAAM-1999.17_1 - 67483
Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum
November 1, 2008December 15, 2011
Modern Masters from the Smithsonian American Art Museum features forty-three key paintings and sculptures by thirty-one of the most celebrated artists who came to maturity in the 1950s.