Eva Hesse

For German author, publisher, see Eva Hesse (author) (de) (born 1925)

Eva Hesse (January 11, 1936 - May 29, 1970), was a German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. An early and key figure of Postminimalism in the United States and one of the most influential artists of the postwar era, Eva Hesse created paintings, sculptures, and drawings that are striking for their poetic beauty and individuality. Building on the influences of Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptualism, and Minimalism with her own distinctiveness, Hesse challenged disciplinary boundaries of both form and function in the field of modern art.

Her work has come to be affiliated primarily with process art, a term originating in the 1960s that implies an emphasis on the physical properties of materials and the manner of applying them. However, more important than the external content of her work, is the inner turbulence it expresses concerning the life challenges she endured from escaping Nazi Germany to suffering an early death from a brain tumor.

Early life

Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany. When Hesse was two years old, her parents, hoping to flee from Nazi Germany, sent Eva and her older sister to the Netherlands on a children's train. She and her sister were separated from their parents for a few months before they were reunited. After living in England for a short while, the family emigrated to New York City in 1939 where they settled in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood.

After graduating from New York's School of Industrial Art in 1952, Hesse studied at New York's Pratt Institute (1952–1953) and Cooper Union (1954–1957), then at the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1957–1959), where she studied painting under Josef Albers and received a B.F.A..

Career

In 1961 Hesse was included in group exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum and the John Heller Gallery in New York City. That same year she met and married fellow sculptor Tom Doyle. In August 1962 the couple participated in an Allan Kaprow Happening at the Art Students League in Woodstock, New York. There Hesse made her first three dimensional piece: a costume made of chicken wire and soft jersey. In 1963 Eva Hesse had a one-person show of works on paper at the Allen Stone Gallery on New York's Upper East Side.

From 1964-1965 the couple lived and worked under the patronage of texile manufacturer and art collector, F. Arnhard Scheidt, in an abandoned textile mill in the Ruhr region of Germany. It was there that Hesse began sculpting with materials left behind in the abandoned factory: first relief sculptures made of cloth-covered cord, electrical wire, and masonite, then papier-mâché, tubing, dyed nets and dangling string.

Returning to New York City in 1965 she began working in the materials that would become characteristic of her work: latex, fiberglass, and plastics. Her and her husband separated that same year.

Hesse became associated with the mid-1960s "anti-form" trend in sculpture, participating in New York exhibits such as "Eccentric Abstraction" and "Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism" (both in 1966). In September 1968 Eva Hesse began teaching at the School of Visual Arts. Her only one-person show of sculpture in her lifetime was "Chain Polymers" at the Fischbach Gallery on W. 57th Street in New York in November 1968; Her large piece Expanded Expansion was shown at the Whitney Museum in the 1969 exhibit "Anti-Illusion: Process/Materials".

End of life

In 1969, at the age of 34, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. [1] Her death in 1970 ended a career spanning only ten years.

Many posthumous exhibitions of Hesse's work have been held in both the United States and Europe, including ones at the Guggenheim Museum (1972, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002), and the Jewish Museum of New York (2006).

Except for fiberglass, most of her favored materials age badly, so much of her work presents conservators with an enormous challenge. Arthur Danto, writing of the Jewish Museum's 2006 retrospective, refers to "the discolorations, the slackness in the membrane-like latex, the palpable aging of the material… Yet somehow the work does not feel tragic. Instead it is full of life, of eros, even of comedy… Each piece in the show vibrates with originality and mischief."

Legacy

Hesse's art is often viewed in light of her painful struggles in life including escaping the Nazis, her parents' divorce, the suicide of her mother when she was ten, her failed marriage and finally her illness. Her work reflects her experience of being a woman competing artistically in the male dominated world of Abstract art. She once commented, "The best way to beat discrimination in art is by art." She also said, 'Excellence has no sex," (From American Visions by Robert Hughes).

Leslie Dick says in "Eva Hesse: Random Notes,"

I think Eva Hesse’s sculpture resonates with these experiences, the experience of being a woman artist, of being persecuted, of being abandoned by her mother, the experience of illness, but I believe she was very careful to make sure that her work did not refer to these experiences directly. Her meanings are always tangential, oblique, and associative, as if meaning itself is as tenuous, as provisional, and as handmade as her sculptures. It would be wrong to make out that semi-spheres with dangling, pointless lines coming out of them do not invoke an absent or lost mother. But to insist that’s all they’re about would be equally obstructive. Eva Hesse’s work opens up possibilities, it doesn’t shut things down. Wrapping invokes bandaging, an act of reparation, but it’s also like a shroud, it’s what you do with a corpse. To choose one reading over another would be wrong headed.

[2]

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Eva Hesse. Da Capo Press, Inc. Lucy R. Lippard. illus. Trade Paper. (1992)
• Eva Hesse Sculpture. Timken Publishers, Inc. Bill Barrette. illus. Trade Paper. (1992)
• Eva Hesse Paintings, 1960-1964. Robert Miller Gallery. Max Kozloff. Edited by John Cheim and Nathan Kernan. illus. Trade Cloth. (1992)
• Four Artists: Robert Ryman, Eva Hesse, Bruce Nauman, Susan Rothenberg. Michael Blackwood Productions, Inc. Color VHS 45 min.
• Busch, Julia M., A decade of sculpture: the 1960s (The Art Alliance Press: Philadelphia; Associated University Presses: London, 1974) ISBN 0-87982-007-1

References

• Danto, Arthur C., "All About Eva," The Nation, July 17/24, 2006, p. 30–34. Posted online June 28, 2006.
• Hopkins, David, After Modern Art: 1945-2000, Oxford University Press, 2000. ISBN 0-19-284234-X
• Lippard Lucy R., EVA HESSE. 1992 Da Capo Press, Inc. illus. Trade Paper. 251p.
• SFMOMA | Exhibitions | Exhibition Overview | Eva Hesse (San Francisco Museum of Modern Art February 2, 2002 — May 19, 2002 exhibition). Accessed online 19 September 2006.

External links

• Dick, Leslie, X-TRA, 2002; "Eva Hesse: Random Notes", X-TRA, Retrieved July 24, 2007.
• "postminimalism.com" Retrieved July 27, 2007.

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