‘Spring Dryad’ – Anne Truitt

Client: Phillips

New York Auction May, 2022

Signed, titled and dated “Truitt “SPRING DRYAD” Feb. ’75” on the underside
acrylic on wood
76 1/2 x 13 x 8 in. (194.3 x 33 x 20.3 cm)
Executed in February 1975

“… by virtue of their titles, the Dryads invite us to see the pillar’s volume… as a concentration or intensification of Nature… They are a tree. The simplicity of the upright cedes to the changing seasons of the imagined forest, and an all-too-human romance with the ‘magic of nature’ stands waiting in the wings.” —Anne Wagner
Anne Truitt “walked up and down the dark corridors between [her sculptures’] massive forms” on a spring evening in 1974 before the opening of her mid-career retrospective at Washington, D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery. Her pillar-like sculptures, including Summer Dryad of 1971, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D. C., “stood in their own space, in their own time, and [she] was glad in their presence.” But Anne Truitt’s work was not complete; this retrospective occurred at a juncture point in her career, just after she had produced the first of four Dryad sculptures. There would be one for each season, with the present work, Spring Dryad, concluding the series in 1975. Two Dryads now stand in museum collections: Summer Dryad at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and Winter Dryad at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. A radiant pink pillar topped by a thin band of green, Spring Dryad embodies the raw, gentle beauty of its associated season and represents the culmination of a series that magnificently illustrates Anne Truitt’s sculptural practice.