Eva Hesse
gigatos | February 28, 2022
Summary
Eva Hesse (Düsseldorf, January 11, 1936 – New York, May 29, 1970) was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastic. She is one of the artists who inaugurated the postminimalist art movement in the 1960s.
Eva Hesse was born into an observant Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany, on January 11, 1936. When she was two years old, in December 1938, her parents, hoping to escape Nazi Germany, sent her and her older sister, Helen Hesse Charash, to Holland to escape Nazi Germany, aboard one of the last Kindertransport trains.
After nearly six months of separation, the reunited family moved to England and then, in 1939, emigrated to New York, where they settled in Washington Heights in Manhattan. In 1944, Hesse”s parents separated; her father remarried in 1945 and her mother committed suicide in 1946. In 1962 she met and married sculptor Tom Doyle (they divorced in 1966.
In October 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor and died on Friday, May 29, 1970. Her death, after three operations in one year, at the age of 34 ended a career of only 10 years.
At the age of 16, Hesse graduated from the School of Industrial Art in New York and in 1952 enrolled in the Pratt Institute of Art and Design. She did not retire until a year later. When she was 18 she joined Seventeen magazine as an intern. During this time he also took classes at the Art Students League. From 1954 to 1957 he studied at Cooper Union and in 1959 he graduated from Yale University. While at Yale, Hesse studied under Josef Albers and was strongly influenced by Abstract Expressionism.
After Yale, Hesse returned to New York, where she became friends with many other young minimalist artists, including Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama and others. Her close friendship with Sol LeWitt continued until the end of her life. The two often wrote to each other and in 1965 LeWitt advised a doubtful young Eva to “Quit Both Hesse and LeWitt became important artists and their friendship helped the artistic development of each of their works.
In 1962 Eva Hesse married sculptor Tom Doyle, and in 1965 the two moved to Germany so that Doyle could devote an artistic residency to German industrialist and collector Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. Hesse and Doyle, whose marriage was falling apart, lived and worked in an abandoned textile factory in the Ruhr region of Germany for about a year. Hesse was not happy to return to Germany, but she began working with materials that had been left behind in the abandoned factory. Their studio had been set up in a disused part of Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt”s textile factory in Kettwig near Essen. The building still contained parts of machines, tools, and materials from its former use, and the angular shapes of these disused machines and tools served as inspiration for Hesse”s mechanical drawings and paintings. Her first sculpture was a bas-relief titled Ring Around Arosie, featuring cloth-covered ropes, electrical wires and Masonite. This year in Germany marked a turning point in Hesse”s career. From then on she would continue to make sculptures, which became the main focus of her work. Returning to New York in 1965, she began working with and experimenting with the unconventional materials that would become characteristic of her work: latex, fiberglass, and plastic.
Hesse”s early work (1960-65) consisted of abstract drawings and paintings. She is well known for her sculptures and for this reason; her drawings are often considered preliminary steps to her later work. She created her drawings as a separate body of work. She stated, “They were related because they were mine, but they were unrelated in one complementing the other.”
Hesse”s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy. Keats states, “Immediacy may be one of the main reasons why Hesse was attracted to latex.” Hesse”s first two works with latex, Schema and Sequel (1967-68) use latex in a way the maker never imagined. “Industrial latex was meant for casting; Hesse treated it like house paint, skimming layer after layer to create a smooth but uneven surface, wrinkled at the edges like woven paper.”
Hesse”s work often employs multiple similarly shaped forms organized together in grid or cluster structures. Retaining some of the defining forms of minimalism, modularity, and unconventional materials, she created eccentric repetitive and laborious work. In a statement about her work, Hesse describes her piece titled Hang-Up, “It was the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came up…. The whole thing is absolutely rigid, a sharp cable around the whole thing….. It”s extreme and that”s why I like it and don”t like it….. It”s the most ridiculous structure I”ve ever made and that”s why it”s really good.”
Eva Hesse is associated with the postminimalist art movement; one of the first artists to move from minimalism to postminimalism. Arthur Danto distinguished postminimalism from minimalism for its “cheerfulness and irony” and “unmistakable whiff of eroticism,” its “non-mechanical repetition.”
She worked alongside and sometimes competed with her male counterparts in postminimalist art, a predominantly male-dominated movement. Many feminist art historians have noted that her work successfully brings women”s issues to light while avoiding any obvious political agenda. She reveals, in a letter to Ethelyn Honig (1965), that a woman is “disadvantaged from the start … She lacks the conviction that she has the ”right” to achievement and also lacks the conviction that her achievements are worthwhile.” She goes on to explain that “fantastic strength and courage is required, I will always insist on this, my determination and will are strong but I lack so much self-esteem so that I never seem to prevail.” She denied that her work was strictly feminist, defending it as feminine but with no feminist statements in mind. In an interview with Cindy Nemser for Women”s Art Journal (1970), she stated, “Excellence has no gender.”
Hesse”s work often shows minimal physical manipulation of a material while simultaneously completely transforming the meaning it conveys. This simplicity and complexity has sparked controversy among art historians. The debate has focused which pieces are to be considered complete and finished works and which are studies, sketches, or models for future work. Hesse”s drawings have been observed as precursor drafts for later sculptures, but Hesse herself has disavowed any strong relationship. Her work is often described as Anti-Form, a term that describes resistance to uniformity. Her work encompasses elements of minimalism in its simple forms, delicate lines, and limited color palette. Barry Schwabsky described his work for the Camden Arts Centre in London: “Folded things, piled up things, twisted things, wounded and untied things, tangled things, blunt things to connect to, materials that look frozen, materials that look lost or discarded or abused, forms that look like they were made of flesh and forms, that look like they were made of flesh but shouldn”t have been-you can look at these things, these materials, these forms and feel the thrill of an unnameable nanosensation, or you can run your eye over them without reaction, maybe you can do both at once. ” All of his work, and particularly his drawings, are based on repetition and simple progressions.
Eva Hesse”s sculptures have been the subject of debate during attempts to understand how to preserve pieces that have deteriorated over time. Aside from fiberglass, most of her favorite materials age poorly, so much of her work presents art conservators with a huge challenge. Arthur Danto, writing the 2006 Jewish Museum retrospective, refers to “the discolorations, the loosening of the membrane-like latex, the palpable aging of the material … Yet somehow the work does not seem tragic, but is full of life, eros, even comedy … Each piece in the exhibition vibrates with originality and mischief.”
In some cases, his work is damaged beyond presentation. For example, Sans III can no longer be displayed to the public because the latex boxes have curved in on themselves and crumbled. Hesse”s close friend, Sol LeWitt advocated steps for active conservation, “She wanted her work to last…. She certainly didn”t have the attitude to just sit quietly and let it disintegrate before her eyes.” LeWitt”s response is supported by many of Hesse”s other friends and colleagues. However, Hesse”s dedication to the material and the process contradicts her intention for these works to achieve durability. Once when she discussed this topic with collectors she wrote, “At this point I feel a little guilty when people want to buy it, I think they know, but I want to write them a letter and say it won”t last. I”m not sure what my shelf life will really be. Part of me thinks it”s superfluous and if I need to use the eraser it”s because it”s more important. Life doesn”t last, art doesn”t last.”
His art is often seen in the context of the many struggles of his life. This includes escaping the Nazis, her parents” divorce, her mother”s suicide when she was 10, her failed marriage, and her father”s death. A 2016 documentary titled Eva Hesse, which premiered in New York, details her painful past. Directed by Marcie Begleiter, the film tells the story of Hesse”s “tragically shortened life.” “It focuses on those years of artistic emergence, a period of rapid development and furious productivity with few parallels in art history.”
While the experiences undoubtedly had profound impressions on Hesse, the real impact of her artwork was her formal and artistic invention. For example, her inventive uses of material, her contemporary response to the minimalist movement, and her ability to usher in the postmodern and postminimalist art movements. Arthur Dano connects the two by describing her as “wrestling with emotional chaos by reinventing sculpture through aesthetic insubordination, playing with worthless material among the industrial ruins of a defeated nation that, only two decades earlier, would have killed her without a second thought.”
Hesse was among the first artists of the 1960s to experiment with the fluid contours of the organic world of nature, as well as the simplest of artistic gestures. Some observers see in these qualities latent, proto-feminist references to the female body; others find in Hesse”s languid forms expressions of wit, imagination, and a sense of spontaneous invention with randomly found or “everyday” materials. One important artist who saw her as a primary influence is Japanese artist Eiji Sumi.
In 1961, Hesse”s gouache paintings were exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum”s 21st International Watercolor Biennial. At the same time she showed her drawings in the John Heller Gallery exhibition Drawings: Three Young Americans. In August 1962 she and Tom Doyle participated in an Allan Kaprow Happening at the Art Students League of New York in Woodstock, New York. In 1963 Hesse held a solo exhibition of works on paper at the Allan Stone Gallery on New York”s Upper East Side. Her first solo exhibition of sculpture was presented at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen, Düsseldorf, in 1965. In November 1968 he exhibited his large-scale sculptures at Fischbach Gallery, New York. The exhibition was titled Chain Polymers and was her only solo exhibition of sculpture during her lifetime in the United States. The exhibition was pivotal in Hesse”s career, securing her reputation at the time. Her large piece Expanded Expansion was shown at the Whitney Museum in the exhibition “Anti-Illusion: Process
There have been dozens of major posthumous exhibitions in the United States and Europe. One of the earliest was at the Guggenheim Museum (1972), while three different iterations of an Eva Hesse retrospective, entitled Eva Hesse: Sculpture, were held in 1979. These exhibitions took place at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London from May 4 to June 17, 1979, at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo from June 30 to August 5, 1979, and at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover from August 17 to September 23, 1979. One of the works shown in the exhibition was Aught, four latex sheets filled with polyethylene. Retrospective exhibitions were held in 1992 and 1993 in New Haven, Valencia, and Paris.
In the 21st century there were exhibitions in 2002 (jointly organized between the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, the Tate Modern and the Museum Wiesbaden The Drawing Center in New York (2006) and the Jewish Museum in New York (2006). In Europe, Hesse had a posthumous exhibition in 2010 at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. There was an exhibition from August to October 2009 at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.
More than 20 of her works are in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The largest collection of Hesse”s work outside the United States is in the Museum Wiesbaden, which began actively acquiring her work after the 1990 exhibition “Women Artists of the 20th Century.”
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