Books Issue: Yield

Anne Truitt’s final journal offers profound reflections on art and aging.

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A lifetime ago, I picked up a slim paperback at a gallery bookstore. Quickly entranced, I sipped it like a glass of fine red wine, savouring the author’s introspective musings about her life as an artist. Anne Truitt, known for minimalist wooden columns that she painted in layer upon layer of sublime colour, felt like a friend so personal were her reflections. And that paperback, Daybook: The Journal of an Artist, published in 1982, continues to linger in some corner of my psyche.

Thus, it was thrilling to discover another book by Truitt had been published this year. It turns out that Yield: The Journal of an Artist is the fourth and final volume in the series, after Turn, published in 1986, and Prospect, in 1996. Edited posthumously by Truitt’s daughter, Alexandra, Yield comprises entries from Jan. 14, 2001, to March 30, 2002, when Truitt was in her early 80s. Still making art, albeit at a more measured pace, she ponders mortality, assesses her life and displays remarkable creative and intellectual curiosity, even as the last sands winnow through her hourglass.

“Much that happens to me now seems to move on the glassy surface of a lake beneath which I, alone, wonder at the architecture of my life,” she writes in one entry. Or: “Just this morning I suddenly stopped on my way downstairs: Who is this woman holding a glass in one hand and the railing in the other? I scarcely recognize her.” Truitt beautifully captures the drift and slip of the aging mind, one moment crisply in the present, the next cast by some subtle cue to a time decades before, the two experiences layered one upon the other. Pentimenti, she calls these moments of return, borrowing an art historical term that refers to traces of earlier work visible beneath a painting’s surface. 

As she writes her daily entries, Truitt continues to paint pillars in her home studio in Washington, D.C., distilling different emotions and life experience into the precise hues she chooses for each work. She notes their relationship to time, how they shift, as do we, as materials age. “We – they and I – are individually on our way to disintegration,” she writes. “I am different in that I have the privilege of consciousness of myself relinquishing my own individuality.”

While little of tremendous substance happens – Jan. 26, 2021, for instance, is evoked in a single line: “A perfectly quiet day, alone.” – there is something powerful about the slow unfolding of a closely examined life. Truitt bakes oatmeal cookies, runs errands, chats with visitors, enjoys a grandchild, bids farewell to a friend who is dying. There are trips to see the latest shows. In the fall, she spends time at Yaddo, an artist retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., that she first visited in 1974.

She writes about books that interest her, her own art and the art she has seen. Manet is a “master of a precise territory between recognition and revelation” she writes after seeing his work at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Vermeer’s View of Delft is summed up as as “so perfect a painting that it defines perfection.”

The news of the day is also a source of reflection, most significantly her experience of 9/11. That day she writes: “I hear the beat of helicopters and the high pitch of military aircraft. Otherwise, silence.” Two days later, the grief: “I cannot draw a deep, free breath, and take in shallow draughts the suffering of the thousands of people who two days ago endured terror and flame.” Then days later, fearing an outbreak of global war, she bemoans that patriotism is “exploding around us into jingoism.”

As time has unfolded for Truitt, so too it has for me. No longer the young naïf I was at our first encounter, I notice this time her considerable privilege: a private education at the elite Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania; a subsequent marriage to James Truitt, a prominent American journalist (a union that ended in divorce, leaving her with three children and precarious finances); and her friendships with leading artists and critics. All this balanced, of course, against the reality that, particularly for her generation, women’s contributions to the arts were often disregarded.

While Truitt is clearly of her generation, something timeless also shrouds her. The frankness of her fluidly intelligent prose and her undeniably acute visual sensitivity keep her final writings relevant. “Like all attentive lives, the life of an artist is worth living,” Truitt wrote some two years before her death in 2004. “I think that for me it started with specific things in the world around me that caught me when I was very young and have held me ever since.” ■

Yield: The Journal of an Artist by Anne Truitt: Yale University Press, 2022.

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