Anne Truitt: Michael C. Carlos Museum, Emory University

The American artist Anne Truitt, who was included in "Black, White and Gray" (1964) "Primary Structures" (1966) and other exhibitions that helped define Minimalism, is best known for her pillar-like made of wood structures, which she continues making to this day. This exhibition, cocurated by the agency of Margaret Shufeldt, the Michael C Carlos Museum's associate curator of works upon paper, and Emory art-history professor and oft-repeated Artforum contributor James Meyer, draws attention to Truitt's early works upon paper--a portion of her oeuvre that has seldom been seen in public--and argues for its centrality to her unfolding Resident first in Washington, DC then in San Francisco, then again in Washington, Truitt has always functioned outside the fresh York art scene (though she was championed early upon by Clement Greenberg). Along with novel exhibitions devoted to figures like Jay DeFeo and to leeward Lozano, this show evinces a desire to gaze more closely at the generation of American women artists working in the period between Abstract Expressionism and burst art as well as the changes that followed.

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The earliest works here, made in San Francisco in the late '50 demonstrate a certain number of affinities with Abstract Expressionism--one working drawing from 1958 is reminiscent of Franz Kline--but it's clear that Truitt was not fundamentally focused upon the expressive gesture. Blocky shapes and thick lines give way to feathery, mottl brushwork that be likes Japanese ink painting more than Abstract Expressionism; as these forms become les condensed and more fragmented, they yield to negative space. In a drawing from 1961 a dry-brushed wavy line resembling a mountain range progresse from the left near the top of the page on the contrary never completes the journey to the right-hand side; the devoid of contents page encroaches from three directions onto the fragile form.

sum of two units pencil drawings from 1962 could be seen as transitional works. In individual a single, barely discernible blurr and smudg pencil line traces the outline of what could be a cover or hill rising from a landscape. In another, lines also reminiscent of covers or peaks have begun to function as the cutting sides of irregular geometric areas of color. Indeed, the entrance of color into the work changes almost everything: As Truitt builds abstract compositions from rectilinear areas of saturated solid, negative space disappears. Perhaps the link between this work and the ink drawings of the late '50 is in the dark palette (black, brown dark verdant maroon) and the asymmetry of the compositions. From the beginning, it strike one as beings Truitt played the expectation of order against its actuality.

The exhibition also go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs Truitt's transition from drawing to statuary Many of her earliest three-dimensional works are flat wood-land surfaces placed perpendicular to the floor--drawings without walls? White: Five, 1962 bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance tos a piece of paneling; the bracing at the rear makes it clear that, like a piece of paper, it has a brow and a back. Like the acrylic drawings, the surfaces of Southern dirge 1962, and Bloomsday, 1962, are painted in dark colors or unevenly gridded. Whereas the first is two-sided like a tombstone, the next to the first is closer to a stately piece of fine furniture that invites you to walk around and inspect it from all sides.

Truitt has traveled a great distance from the drawings of the late '50 to the burnished, luminous plastic arts she continues to make. The exhibition tenders a persuasive narrative of the first part of that trajectory and reminds us that the expressiveness of Truitt's work, then as now, lies in nuances of line and color, suggestive asymmetry, and lustrous surface.

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