Anne Truitt
White: Four1962

On view:

Broad Contemporary Art Museum, floor 3

Artist or Maker: Anne Truitt
United States, 1921-2004
Title: White: Four
Date Made: 1962
Medium: Acrylic on wood
Dimensions: 87 3/4 × 19 7/8 × 7 in. (222.89 × 50.48 × 17.78 cm)
Credit Line: Gift of the 2019 Collectors Committee, with additional funds provided by the Ducommun and Gross Endowment Acquisition Fund
Accession Number: M.2019.251
Classification: Sculpture
Collecting Area: Modern Art
Curatorial Notes: Anne Truitt began her practice in the early 1960s, when women artists had a difficult time achieving critical and financial success. White: Four is related to a series of early sculptures made of wood slats that suggest a fragment of a fence, a form that may allude to notions of domesticity or imprisonment.Truitt carefully incised lines into the surface of the sculpture, modulating its face into four equal seg- ments, and then applied multiple coats of acrylic to the wooden shape. Her use of hand painted color and compositional techniques were at odds with the primarily male minimalists who eschewed personal surface marks in favor of outsourced and machine made forms.

In addition to making art, Truitt chronicled her life as an artist, a woman, and a mother in her writings, which have become a lodestar for subsequent generations of artists, particularly feminists.

Wall label, 2021.