First Requiem

Anne Truitt, 1977 · Gallery 415 · Floor 4

Anne Truitt takes three baths that night. Still can't sleep. She's sitting in the middle of the bed, she later writes, "like a frog on a lily pad." All because of an afternoon looking at art. November 1961. She's forty, living in Washington, visiting New York with a friend. They go to the Guggenheim. Down near the bottom of the ramp, she comes around a corner and sees a painting by Barnett Newman. A great stretch of blue. And the word she remembers is "enough." Enough space. Enough color. She hadn't known a painting could give her that. Back in Washington, she goes to the lumber store. Orders some boards. Buys glue, clamps, white house paint. Puts together something that looks like a piece of picket fence. Calls it First. Soon she's making painted wooden boxes. By 1963, she's got a show in New York. Donald Judd, a sculptor who also writes reviews, pans it. A few years later, a critic says she beat the Minimalists to it. If only she'd painted each piece one color. Judd's reply: "If the queen had balls, she would be king." Truitt, meanwhile, is putting up to forty coats of paint on these things. Herself. Sanding between layers. A workshop builds the wooden shapes from her drawings. The surface is her job. All that work, and you can barely see how it was done. Now look at this one. First Requiem. 1977. Eight inches across. More than seven feet tall. Pink. Yellow. Dark red. Black. From here, maybe a very tall paint sample. But walk around it. The sides don't match. There's turquoise you couldn't see before. And down at the bottom, the base is tucked underneath. The column stops just short of the floor. She's worked out how it meets the room, right down to that little gap. Then there's the title. First Requiem. A requiem is music for the dead. Years later, she explained what had drawn her to sculpture in the first place. She'd been trying to write. Getting tangled up in how to deal with time. Then she thought: a sculpture could just stand there. The seasons could pass around it. The light could move around it. You just did.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 415