While I was trying to find Kenneth Noland’s big Olitski painting, the horribly lit one he hung behind his sectional sofa, I surfed across some other works from his collection. [update: Thanks to art historian Alex Grimley, who identifies this Olitski—one of several Noland owned—as Lavender Liner (1967).]
One was Morning Moon (1969), a delicately colored column sculpture by Anne Truitt. Truitt and Noland were close friends in DC earlier in the 1950s and 1960s. She’d taken a life drawing class from him in the 50s, and when Noland left town in 1962 Truitt took over his studio, where she made much of her earliest breakthrough work. I don’t know what their relationship was like in 1969, though, or if it’s relevant that Noland appears to have bought Morning Moon, new, from Andre Emmerich, Truitt’s NY dealer. [Truitt had separated from her husband, and bought a house in which to raise her three kids, so maybe in 1969 she was not in a position to be giving large sculptures away.]
In 2001, just as Truitt’s importance in the history of 1960s art and Minimalism was gaining renewed attention, Noland donated Morning Moon to Bennington, where he (and Olitski, for that matter) long taught. Bennington didn’t seem to show it, though, until long after Truitt’s significance was fixed; and then they promptly sold it and a bunch of other art to fund some arts programming.
That same 2019 sale at Christie’s happened to include another work from Noland’s collection: his own. Noland left this popping 1965 painting to his last wife, Paige Rense, the editor of Architectural Digest. I can’t help but imagine an intense but balanced color combination like this appearing on a Truitt column.
Morning Choice, from 1968, was one of the first column works Truitt made after returning to DC from Japan. Maybe the 60s really did just look like that, but these artists who’d worked alongside each other earlier seemed to still make work later in a way that still resonated. If we can ever unlock the Mary Pinchot Meyer vaults, it feels like between her, Truitt, and Noland, there’s a whole other Washington Color School story to be told.