copyright 2009, The Washington Post WASHINGTON -- Anne Truitt's sculptures are sociable. They keep you company. Over there is Big Dave Stanford, dressed in a showy red suit, maybe, but with the awkward manner of a tall man not at ease with his height. Here is Martha Cunningham, a matron clad in forest green but with a stripe of scarlet at her hem to show she's still got spunk. There are the Updike girls, modish in tight-fitting lime and pumpkin and pink. And there's that absurd Mrs. Snyder: She's paired a perfectly nice linen suit with shoes in red and black patent leather. Visit the new Truitt retrospective at the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum, the first show to survey the art of this recently deceased hero of the Washington art scene, and, despite her work's right angles and pure forms, you'll be able to pick out each of these characters. If Truitt's abstract art were 'serious,' according to the standard measures of such things, it wouldn't encourage such play. By traditional measures, it's clear she got almost everything wrong. But it's that 'failure' that makes Truitt's sculpture, and this exhibition, so absolutely right. Truitt's art is in a class of its own, the best place art can be. From the start of Truitt's career in the early 1960s to her death in 2004, she challenged all the verities of the serious art she was trained in. Serious art was supposed to be either abstract or representational: Her sculptures bridged the two without obeying the rules of either. Serious art was supposed to be either sober and weighty or clever and arch: Truitt's sculptures can instead seem full of a delicate comedy. (It's the same comedy that makes the films of Chaplin and Keaton great.) When Truitt came of age as an artist, important art was supposed to be legible, clear, pointed; hers is all about illegibility and beating around the bush, even being flustered and unsure. You could say it was gloriously passive-aggressive, at a time when most of its competition was stolidly bold and direct. At first sight, Truitt's sculptures do mostly read as abstract. Many of them are nothing more than plain, perfectly carpentered uprights, maybe averaging a foot wide per side by six feet or so tall, though with lots of variation from that mean. They are about the size of the box a floor lamp might come in, depending on the size of the lamp. That simplicity has often led Truitt to be seen -- or denigrated -- as someone on the fringes or coattails of the 'official' minimalist movement of the likes of Donald Judd and Robert Morris, one of the most influential art trends of her time. She was, after all, shown in the exhibition that gave that movement legs, the 'Primary Structures' show at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966. And yet, by the terms of the minimalist movement, Truitt once again turns out to have gotten things wrong. 'Real' minimalism was supposed to be absolutely legible and 'whole,' so you could know a sculpture's essence almost at one glance. At the very least, you were supposed to get a clear 'gestalt' of any minimalist sculpture just by walking all around it. Truitt's sculptures often mess that up, by striping each side of an upright in very different colors. In 'First Requiem,' from 1977, one side's harmony of aqua edged in gray gives way to a peculiar mix of gray and rose and black on another, then on to rose and black alone and then to clashing stripes of rose and mustard and scarlet and gray. As you walk around one of her uprights it unfolds as a constantly surprising, shifting tableau. It's a painted tableau, yes, but one that, unlike almost any normal painting, can't be grasped at once, just by looking. Take in any single side of a Truitt structure, and you'd never guess the others until you come to them. Even the simple act of reversing the direction of your circumambulation fundamentally changes the 'narrative' (Truitt's word) you read out of her work. By 'decorating' her objects' surfaces Truitt also broke down the distinction between sculpture and painting -- a miscegenation that abstraction's purists would not tolerate. All these years later, however, it seems precisely what we want to celebrate in Truitt. She had the courage to go wrong. In her time, and well into our own, the most 'significant' abstraction was either bold and heroic, in macho colors like red, black and midnight blue, or subject to such rarefaction that it vanished into grays and white. Truitt's best sculptures, even at their most soberly geometrical, tend to 'girlish' pastels or fashion brights -- or worse, she mixes the two. Her very first mature work came in 1961, and is appropriately named 'First.' (You wonder whether she knew right away that she'd started something, or fixed on the title later.) 'First' looks like an abstract sculpture trying to pass itself off as three slats from a plain white picket fence. Looking at it from in front, where it's at its most fencelike, I can't think of any other work quite like it. Where Jasper Johns and others had found the abstract in the ordinary, Truitt seems to find the everyday in the abstract -- a much stranger thing to do. From behind, the piece gets even odder. Truitt has stuck on a kind of armature of uprights and crossbars that look as though they're there for support but clearly serve no true structural function. It's almost as though a constructivist sculpture is hiding in someone's front yard, all ready to leap out. In a work titled 'Southern Elegy,' from 1962, it looks like it's a color-field painter who's been hiding, in a cemetery. The perfect tombstone shape of the piece has been painted shades of sober green and black. In the pop-art moment that coincided with Truitt's arrival as an artist, figuration was most often sly and ironic (Warhol, Lichtenstein) or slightly retrograde in its reaction against abstraction (Freud and Hockney and the whole English school). The bits and pieces of the world that creep into Truitt's geometries don't belong to either camp: They seem both heartfelt and forward-looking. Where did Truitt get the courage to boldly go where no man had gone before? It could be that she was helped by being a woman, and by being based in small-town Washington. Both left her just enough out of the swing of things to act, at least, as though she didn't know the rules of the boy's club in New York. 'Provincialism,' social and geographical, may have its occasional upsides. 