cover image Prospect: The Journal of an Artist

Prospect: The Journal of an Artist

Anne Truitt. Scribner Book Company, $21.5 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-81835-1

""I feel a certain urge to tell what it is like to be an artist in this culture,"" explains noted sculptor Truitt (Daybook). Here she explores the various currents in her own life, particularly the personal relationships that have both contributed to and impeded her artistic output. Ostensibly a record of one year in Truitt's life (from the spring of 1991, when she turned 70, to the spring of 1992), this memoir ultimately becomes a more comprehensive autobiography, as Truitt traces the evolution of her artistic vision and her sense of self. Her account of her own artistic career becomes an illuminating study of a complex symbiosis between life and art, while her generous assessments of the work of colleagues celebrate the richness and diversity of contemporary American art. Truitt's frank confrontation with her fears and her ambitions, her successes and her failures, and her frequent juxtapositions of the mundane and the profound make this a particularly compelling and insightful self-portrait. (Mar.)