Tuttle's career rests on a sustained refusal to accept the conventional scales, materials, and authorities of postwar American sculpture — a half-century working through of the proposition that a small piece of dyed cloth pinned to a wall, a length of bent wire, or a few pencil marks on a folded paper can carry as much pictorial weight as the largest formal painting in the building.
Tuttle came to art through the New Jersey suburban culture of the postwar period and the broad humanistic education of an East Coast liberal-arts college. The combination of art, philosophy, and literary study at Trinity gave him an unusual intellectual breadth for a working sculptor, and the brief postgraduate periods at Cooper Union and in the Air Force preceded the move to New York that would define the rest of his life.
The years at Betty Parsons Gallery placed him at the centre of the New York art world at a particular moment. Parsons had been the dealer for Pollock, Rothko, Newman, and the leading first-generation Abstract Expressionists, and her gallery in the early 1960s remained one of the central venues for serious New York painting. Tuttle's work as an assistant exposed him to the highest level of postwar American art, and his first show at the gallery announced an artist already pursuing his own direction.
That direction was unlike anything else then being made in American art. Where the dominant Minimalist painters and sculptors of the period were producing large, industrially fabricated, geometrically rigorous objects, Tuttle was producing small, hand-made, intimate works in cloth, wire, paper, wood, and pencil. His insistence on calling them all "drawings" — sculptures, paintings, installations, and works in furniture-like form alike — placed pressure on the conventional categorical boundaries of postwar American art and shaped the broader move into post-Minimalism.
The 1975 Whitney exhibition was the decisive critical event of his early career. Tucker installed a large body of his deliberately understated work across the museum's galleries, and Kramer's review — including the line that has remained the defining critical response to the exhibition — helped to make the show a public scandal in the New York art world. Tucker eventually left the Whitney in the wake of the controversy and founded the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1977, in part to create the institutional space for the kind of work the larger museums of the time would not show. The exhibition is now widely regarded as a turning point in American post-Minimalism, and the work it presented as among the most original American sculpture of the period.
His later career has produced an extraordinary range of bodies of work — wall pieces, floor pieces, octagonal paintings, bent wood and folded paper, artist's books, and the very large public commissions of his recent decades. His major early-2000s retrospective consolidated his standing as one of the most important American artists of his generation, and his position today is settled at the highest level of contemporary American sculpture and drawing.