Grand allusion: James Meyer talks with Anne Truitt - Interview

ArtForum, May, 2002 by James Meyer

JM: That essay and the one he wrote about you the next year, "Changer: Anne Truitt," marked you as "Greenberg's Minimalist." He characterizes your work as a welcome antidote to that of Judd, Morris, and Andre. He praises the handmade quality of your sculpture and its intuitive color and attacks the industrial look of "orthodox" Minimalism. But you've also said that you later felt Greenberg was disappointed in you.

AT: He was not supportive all the way through; he was polite. I think he was disappointed--angry in a way--maybe because I didn't do what he thought I should do. Perhaps he thought that I should pay attention to him and ask him what to do. I'm not quite sure what he wanted. But he didn't want what I did--which was never to ask him any questions at all, never to ask his opinion, and to go my own way. Maybe what Clem wanted me to do was to stay safe within the language of sculpture, to retain sculptural checks and balances. Actually I just lost interest in that language after 1961. And now my sculptures pivot on the invisible line of gravity that holds them to the ground. I just got simpler.

JM: More "minimal," which he didn't like. He said that your work hovered on the look of "non-art," like Judd's.

AT: No, he didn't entirely like it. Maybe he thought I should use color in a Cubist fashion, should fit my work into that art-historical imperative.

JM: Like David Smith or Anthony Caro, whose welding and balancing of parts he traced straight to Picasso: a perfect modernist narrative.

AT: I said to myself, I'm not going to do it. And I just stayed down here in Washington and kept on working.

JM: You decided not to show First (your "fence") or Southern Elegy, which resembles a tombstone, at Emmerich. That decision presented you as a "pure" abstract artist in your first show. The figurative origins of your work--its allusive nature--were repressed. How was that decision made?

AT: I think it must have been made by Ken and Clem. They were sort of guiding me along. Ken was busy telling me the folk knowledge of what it was like to be an artist. He was as generous as he could be.

JM: You've described the first show as a success. How so?

AT: I guess in terms of comment. At that time Clem was really dominating things, and Ken was powerful. Helen Frankenthaler came to see my work and traded. There were all these people in this world around Andre Emmerich.

JM: And they were all at their height.

AT: It was the apogee for them. February '63, that was it, you know. There was nobody else around.

JM: Pop was just taking off, yet Greenberg was still calling the shots.

AT: Even I could see that I was at the center of a power game.

JM: Greenberg made you one of "his" artists. What was it like to put up a show with him? I ask because Judd, as you'll recall, criticized the Emmerich installation in a review. He described the arrangement as "thoughtless," implying that you didn't care about how the works were placed.

AT: Let me go back to February 1963, with these three men--Bill Rubin, Clem, and Ken--arranging the stuff in Andre's gallery. I was completely floored. I had never thought of the works together. I had simply thought of them as individual sculptures. I was astonished to see how they considered them in relation to one another. And they put two of them in the back room because they didn't "fit."