Jottings along the way

In 1982, the sculptor Anne Truitt published Daybook, an informal account of her work and life during a period of seven years, from 1974 through 1980. Truitt, who’s now sixty-six years old, described her marriage and her divorce, her three grown kids, her house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., her money worries, teaching jobs, and days in the studio, where she makes the slender, luxuriantly colored, four-sided columns which have been exhibited at the André Emmerich Gallery in New York and in one-person shows at the Whitney Museum and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington. To judge from Daybook, Truitt has led a more conventionally middle-class American life than most artists who have “serious” New York reputations; but then the interest of Daybook, which had a succès d’estime and meant something special to many artists, lies in...