In 1975, when he was 34 years old and had been showing in galleries for about a decade, Richard Turtle had a major exhibition at the Whitney Mu-seum of American Art. A big show at a New York City museum can be ca-reer making. Or it can play out the way his did. Tuttle was working with the humble materials he favors to this day-wire, string, bits of Styrofoam, matches, scraps of plywood and cardboard—which he lightly assembled into strange little delicacies. Some of the works in that show, like his "rope pieces"—three-inch lengths of clothesline, fluffed a bit at the edges and attached to the wall with three nails- seemed less like works than offhand gestures, the merest residues of an intuition. Years later, Turtle described another of them aS "some paint on the end of a coffee stirrer, placed on a 40-foot wall."
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