Sculptor Anne Truitt Dies

For 40 years, Anne Truitt was a major figure in American art, famous for her graceful, richly painted minimalist sculptures of vertical blocks of wood. The blocks, standing 5 to 7 feet high, with coat after coat of acrylic paint, acquired a mesmerising, translucent visual intensity. Her rectangular sculptures were painted in subtle, precisely shaded colors set on slightly recessed bases and appear to hover just above the floor.

Her eyesight as a child was so poor when that until she got glasses, she didn't realize trees had individual leaves. She saw them as large masses of color and form. "I've struggled all my life to get maximum meaning in the simplest possible form" she once wrote.
Truitt is in the permanent collections of many leading museums, including the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art in New York.