November 1971 - Brief Article

Thirty years ago in Artforum, Robert Pincus-Witten turned to Eva Hesse's diaries and notebooks in an essay explaining the artist's aesthetic break-through. Senior editor ERIC C. BANKS looks back on the birth of the Hesse myth.

HOW WELL DO WE KNOW Eva Hesse? With a major retrospective of the artist's work taking shape in San Francisco this winter before heading to New York's Whitney Museum of American Art, we'll soon become reacquainted with the bristling open cube of Accession III, 1968; the absurd frame-and-tube construction Hang-Up, 1965-66; the papier-mache and string skeins of Ennead, 1966. And again we'll likely hear the tale of a glamorous woman doomed to youthful death, her prodigious career cut short by a brain tumor at thirty-four. For the story of a talented but troubled sculptor has been inseparable from Hesse's achievement almost from the moment she died, in New York on May 29, 1970.

That very month, the first stirrings of the Eva Hesse Story found their way into the characteristically reserved pages of Artforum, in the form of an interview with the artist by writer Cindy Nemser. But what really flicked the bio switch was Robert Pincus-Witten's "Eva Hesse: Post-Minimalism into Sublime," which appeared in the magazine thirty years ago this month. In that article, the Artforum associate editor trained his sights on a childhood spent in Manhatan's Washington Heights as an immigrant Jew who had fled Nazi Germany, and an adolescence marked by her parents' separation, father's remarriage, and mother's suicide. Indeed, it is only eight paragraphs into the piece (after bringing in the death of the artist's father and the erosion of her marriage) that Pincus-Witten utters the word Minimalism and touches on Hesse's relation to the "Bowery Boys"--Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, and Lucy Lippard. The source for much of Pincus-Witten's material is none other than Hesse herself, writing in the expansive diaries and notebooks she began keeping while a student at Yale. (As the Guggenheim's 1972-73 retrospective of Hesse's work neared, her final journal entries put in a verbatim appearance, like a black-box transcript, in "Last Words" [Artforum, Nov. '72].)

Given that Hesse's work had issued forth so fulsomely following the break with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle--virtually the entire production we recognize as quintessentially Hessian was realized in a fevered four-year foundry of sculptural ideas--it is hardly remarkable that a critic would focus on key moments in the artist's life as explanatory of her sudden florescence. Scanning the journals, Pincus-Witten writes, "The most painful notations record the central trauma of individuation provoked by the death of the artist's father in the summer of 1966 and the rupture with her husband which peaked at this time as well, events without which...Eva Hesse's art might have remained a derivative affair."

For better or worse, Pincus-Witten made nakedly public an artist's private life, in the process establishing a perseverant image of Hesse. Writing on that image in her Three Artists (Three Women)(1996), Anne Wagner notes that, with Hesse, "the case for collapsing the artist into her art, and vice versa, takes on special glamour and persuasiveness." (It's surprising that Hollywood has yet to mine the Hesse myth; hello Ed Harris?) In the immediate aftermath of her death, the picture of Hesse as a wounded neurotic elided with other portraits--most frequently, Sylvia Plath's--and threatened to conflate the woman who authored the journals with the meanings that might be drawn from the work.

In any case, Pincus-Witten's essay opened up a space for criticism of a different sort than the descriptive formalism that was then as recognizable an Art forum trademark as the magazine's square design. Today, he remembers the article as "a liberation for the magazine" in its reintroduction of the biographical into critical writing. While some colleagues reacted with indignation at his airing of private documents, he notes that the piece was warmly welcomed by the general readership-"particularly artists with whom I was friends at the time." Of course, it hardly needs pointing out today, when the celebrity artist has become a media cliche, that Pincus-Witten's essay did not create ab ovo the figure we've come to recognize so intimately as Eva Hesse. If anything, the fact that a popular image of Hesse could migrate so quickly from the art magazine to the dailies and newsweeklies that would disseminate the Hesse myth is a period rejoinder to the idea that art criticism is somehow autonomous in its mode of addr ess. Where Hesse is concerned, one hopes that the story of the female artist who died young will strike a truce with a sculptural oeuvre that continues to fuel curiosity, speculation, and debate about the relation of the art in front of us to the words behind it, even the relation of life to art (and vice versa). Here at least, familiarity need not breed contempt.

In this ongoing series, Artforum looks back on an essay of note from our pages ten, twenty, or thirty years ago to the month.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group