My attitude toward art is most open. It is totally unconservative - just freedom and willingness to work. I really walk on the edge... And if I'm not quite there yet, that's where I'm headed for... This is just the start...'. Eva Hesse said in an interview in 1970. That same year she died of cancer, aged thirty-four. The myth of Eva Hesse, the young artist who died tragically young, has crucially influenced the perception of her work, as indeed has the rapid publication of her diaries. In 1939, when she was three years old, she and her German-Jewish family had to flee the Nazis. They quit Hamburg for New York, where her parents separated and her mother committed suicide. Although constant fears, doubts and crises shaped her state of mind, Hesse nonetheless created a body of work of great power and individualism. To this day, it is an important source of inspiration for other artists.
She started out as a painter, but because she felt the results were unsatisfactory, she took up drawing. However, her breakthrough as an artist came only when she turned her hand to sculpture - the medium of her mature work She did so in 1964, when she was in Germany for over a year together with her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, who had received an invitation from a textile manufacturer to work in the Rhineland. Earlier than other American artists, she was able to examine contemporary European art: the work of Joseph Beuys, the punctured canvases of Lucio Fontana. Gunther Uecker's nail pieces Back in New York after 1965, she quickly made a name for herself with her objects. She adopted the geometrical permutations of Carl Andre's or Sol LeWitt's minimal art and combined them with oddly shaped structures and unusual materials that were not part of art's conventional repertory: flex, wire, latex, glass-fiber, cast resin or rubber tubing - everyday, 'nasty', unexceptional materials of indeterminate color and often of soft or elastic texture Her choice of material opened up new horizons for twentieth-century sculpture. Produced in 1967-68. Accession III is one of her best-known works, although Hesse herself later felt it to be too attractive, too linear and perfect. It is a cube of opaque fiberglass measuring 80-80 80 cm, and its sides are perforated with rows of holes. It is an object with an unambiguous shape, one that is severe and mathematically precise, much like a manufactured part. Confusion arises, however, when the viewer sees the inside of the cube that is open at the top. There can be no talk of geometric order here! Embedded in the cube's perforated walls are thousands of short pieces of tubing that project into its semi-dark interior, being elastic, they bend downwards and create an impression of something organic - such as tiny tentacles. Like many other works by Hesse, this one is decidedly ambiguous in its combination of hard and soft, rigidity and plasticity, geometric and organic forms. The cube is central to her work and represents her basic desire to achieve order and regularity, which, however, she offset with openness, incalculability and free form.
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In her book on Eva Hesse (New York 1976), critic Lucy lippard argued that the story of Hesse's life, from her flight from Nazi Germany as a child, to her early death, had taken precedence over serious appraisal of her work. Hesse's tragic history, and her diaries (Archives of American Art, Washington DC), have prompted such biographical readings. But Hesse saw herself as part of an artistic and intellectual trajectory; one of the authors she admired was Samuel Beckett. And, as Lippard points out, biographical interpretation often has a political function when applied to women's work, preventing exploration of its wider cultural significance. Hesse's diary certainly suggests that she found negotiating her role as a woman and artist difficult. She read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and posed the question, 'Do I have a right... to womanliness? Can I achieve an artistic endeavor and can they coincide?
Hesse trained as a painter at art schools in New York, and then at the Yale School of Art and Architecture under Josef Albers. Her early gestural abstract works showed her admiration for Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Hesse made a series of paintings in which her face is a warped mask, including Unfitted (i960, Museum of Modern Art, New York). These can be understood as encapsulating the artist's struggle with her medium (in her diaries she wrote about 'fighting to paint'), and also as in tune with the existentialism of the Abstract Expressionists. But Hesse's distortion of her features can also be read as picturing the collapse of fixed, essential identity that was to be explored in some feminist thought.
Although Hesse moved from painting to working in three dimensions, drawing remained a constant presence in her practice, as Ellen H. Johnson examined in the catalogue for the 1982 retrospective of graphic work held at Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College. Hesse had her first one-woman exhibition of drawings at the Allan Stone Gallery New York, when she was twenty-seven. She spent 1964-5 in Germany with the sculptor Tom Doyle, her husband for five years. This period proved a watershed in her graphic art. Drawings such as And He Sat in a Box (1964, Barbara Gross Galerie, Munich) take a square as a central motif, a shape with a multiplicity of associations. Hesse sometimes referred to it as a 'box' or 'window', and it could be interpreted as a vessel (suggestive of the female body) or as a frame for feelings and events. Her tutor, Josef Albers, had made the square the template for his experiments with color. And in the context of the art of her time, the freehand imperfection of Hesse's drawings was a departure from Minimalist work with the box. Within Minimalism the box could signify simple mass-produced objects, whose multiplicity subverted the monumentality and preciousness of sculpture, invoking instead the material and industrial world.
Hesse was mining the interface between hard-edged, abstract restraint and the organic, emotional, and irrational, drawing upon two different strands in art practice, the work of de Kooning, Pollock and Lee Bontecou on the one hand, and that of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Agnes Martin and Sol LeWitt on the other. Writing to LeWitt in 1965, she described 'drawings - dean, clear, but crazy like machines, forms larger, bolder, articulately described so it is weird - they become real nonsense'.'6 In her later graphic work Hesse focused on repetitious circles, as in the drawing Untitled (1967, Tate), a rectangle of tiny ink circles hovering in the centre of graph paper.
Sculpture occupied Hesse from the mid 1960s. She tried out her ideas in 'test pieces', referring to her finished works as 'objects'. Her sculptures are ambitious and unhesitant, but their lines are not clean; they often hang, lean, or huddle together, and they can be unstable pieces with hanging cords change their configuration with each new installation. Lippard wrote of the piece Repetition Nineteen 1 (1967, Museum of Modern Art, New York), made up of nineteen separate cylindrical vessels, that '[they] sit on the floor in aimless but congenial disorder'. The sculptures are constructed from an inventive mess of mixed (sometimes impermanent) materials. Tomorrow's Apples (5 in white) (1965, Tate) is painted concretion, enamel, gouache, varnish, cord-wrapped wire, and papier-mache on Masonite. Hesse wrote about the contradictory characteristics of her sculpture in catalogue notes for a 1969 group exhibition Art in Process /Vat Finch College Museum of Art, New York: textures coarse, rough, changing, see through, non see through, consistent, inconsistent, enclosed tightly by glass like encasement just hanging there. then more, others, will they hang there in the same way? try a continuous flowing one. try some random closely spaced, try some distant far spaced, they are tight and formal but very ethereal, sensitive, fragile."
The marriage of opposites In Hesse's art can be understood as a critical swathe cut through simplistic binary definitions; a move towards a fertile, but delicate freedom. Major retrospectives were held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York in 1972, Yale University Art Gallery in 1992, and Tate Modern in winter 2002-3. Writing in 1994. in the catalogue for the exhibition Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Lynn Zelevansky described Hesse as 'one of the first to offer an alternative to orthodox Minimalism', arguing that her 'emphatically hand made work', which explored 'disquieting psychological realms' and was preoccupied also with the body,' prefigured certain concerns of the Women's Movement as they would be manifested in the art world'. |
