Published in 2022
216 pages
The artist Anne Truitt was born in Baltimore in 1921 and spent her childhood in Easton. She lived in a house on South Street, just a block from the Academy Art Museum. She travelled extensively before eventually settling in Washington, DC. Her paintings and sculpture are noted for their simple linear qualities and investigation of color relationships.
Critics have often associated her with both Minimalism and the Washington Color Field artists, although like many artists she rejected reductive classifications. She had a successful career showing her work extensively in New York City and across the country. Along with her art, Truitt was noted as a teacher and as an author of memoirs: Daybook (1982), Turn (1986), and Prospect (1996). She died in Washington in 2004.
What is this book about?
Named by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2022, this posthumously published work serves as the fourth and final volume in Anne Truitt’s remarkable series of journals
“Impressive. . . . Truitt lyrically looks back on 80 years of life. . . . [T]hese daily entries . . . offer a version of Truitt free of artifice as she meditates on the sacred and mundane. . . . This sparks with intelligence.”—Publishers Weekly
“Truitt wrote as she sculpted, returning to the past again and again to find fresh truths. . . . A model of discipline and open-ended inquiry and a welcome counterweight to the kind of anxieties that so often accompany a creative practice.”—Megan O’Grady, New Yorker
“In its stripped-down intimacy, Yield shows Truitt at her most eloquent in demonstrating, as her sculptures do, that all revelation in art is self-revelation.”—Donna Rifkind, Wall Street Journal
In the spring of 1974, the artist Anne Truitt (1921–2004) committed herself to keeping a journal for a year. She would continue the practice, sometimes intermittently, over the next six years, writing in spiral-bound notebooks and setting no guidelines other than to “let the artist speak.” These writings were published as Daybook: The Journal of an Artist (1982). Two other journal volumes followed: Turn (1986) and Prospect (1996). This book, the final volume, comprises journals the artist kept from the winter of 2001 to the spring of 2002, two years before her death.
In Yield, Truitt’s unflinching honesty is on display as she contemplates her place in the world and comes to terms with the intellectual, practical, emotional, and spiritual issues that an artist faces when reconciling her art with her life, even as that life approaches its end. Truitt illuminates a life and career in which the demands, responsibilities, and rewards of family, friends, motherhood, and grandmotherhood are ultimately accepted, together with those of a working artist.
