Prospect: The Journal of an Artist - Hardcover

Truitt, Anne

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684818353 ISBN 13: 9780684818351

Publisher: Scribner, 1996

Synopsis

Based upon journals she wrote at the age of seventy, the author's reflections on her life as an artist, mother, grandmother, and teacher provide a poignant recollection of home, friends, and the things that inspired her as an artist. 10,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Anne Truitt [1921-2004] had her first solo exhibition at the Andre Emmerich Gallery in New York in 1963. Her work is in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC; the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The recipient of many grants, she was the director of the artists colony Yaddo for several years in the early 1990s. Today the Estate of Anne Truitt is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery.

From Kirkus Reviews:

The sculptor's third meditation on life and art (after Daybook, 1982; Turn, 1986) triumphs in its clearheadedness but fails to satisfy in its paths of resolution. As in Turn, Truitt explores the end of the life cycle, this time structuring her work around her 70th year, when she is regaled for decades of achievement with a major retrospective in New York yet penalized with mandatory retirement at the University of Maryland. The gravity of the events is unsettling; she calls herself ``officially old.'' Although she muses briefly throughout the memoir on the physical manifestations of aging- -diminished energy and the need for improved safety measures in the house--she concentrates on how her mind refines itself with age. This means engaging in the ``interplay [between past and present] that is making aging the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me.'' Such interplay involves central elements of her life--her children, her artistic career, the artists' colony Yaddo (for which she had been acting director), historical figures who embody her personal truths, the natural world around her. Her observations are wise in their understanding of limits and psychology, and true to her lifelong admiration for the Stoic philosophers, but the effect by book's end is somewhat cramped and final. Appreciated are her patches of animation, which show up in her analyses of her artworks and the work of critics, particularly those who attempt the ``invidious'' practice of ascribing motive to an artist's work. Also welcome are the quirky anecdotes, like that of the pilgrimage to one of her grade-school teachers, who informed her that--despite Truitt's view of herself as a youthful rebel--she had not been an interesting child. Though at times enervating in its stoicism and sureness, this invites thought about the intellectual flavor of life's final years. It is an honorable goal; if only this particular trip had been more involving for those acompanying Truitt. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0684818353
• ISBN 13: 9780684818351
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224