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Vessels and vacancies: in a career that lasted barely 10 years, Eva Hesse moved with remarkable speed from the brooding self-portraits of 1960, through biomorphic drawings and collages, into the tragic, absurd and strikingly original sculptures for which she is now best known. A touring retrospective opening in London this month traces this explosive growth - Eva Hesse
Art in America, Nov, 2002 by Sue Taylor
"I have been a giant in my strength," Eva Hesse stated in 1970, "and my work has been strong and my whole character has been inside it." (1) Hesse's assertion, made in a last interview with Cindy Nemser, is powerfully affirmed in the current retrospective of 156 of her paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures, organized by Elisabeth Sussman and Renate Petzinger. In sculpture especially, from the time Hesse discovered it as her true metier in 1965, her originality is impressively on display in this survey. Emerging in the context of Pop art and Minimalism, her wall-mounted reliefs, biomorphic abstractions and eccentric serial pieces are infused with a distinctive mix of humor, intelligence and feeling. Compressed as it was, moreover, into five short years before her untimely death (she succumbed to brain cancer four months after Nemser's interview), Hesse's sculptural output seems nothing short of remarkable.
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The inclusion of early paintings and drawings, produced shortly after her graduation from Yale in 1959, provides a sense of her beginnings as a young artist in awe of Abstract Expressionism and the primitivism of Jean Dubuffet. Though Hesse herself was famously beautiful, three untitled self-portraits from 1960 are not: thick and muddy, childlike in their schematic rendering of the head, they revel in the materiality of paint. In one, a gift to her psychiatrist at the time, the figure seems distressed, a touch of orange lipstick the only bright spot on the dull gray face with its sagging left eye, and we're reminded that the confidence Hesse exuded at the end was hard-won. Her figure is haunted by a white, ghostlike image, a pregnant female form that impinges on her from the left. The apparition suggests anxieties externalized, concerns for her own (pro)creative future, or recollections of the lost maternal body.
The early drawings are similarly mysterious and brooding, in somber tones of black, gray and brown. Here are the themes that would preoccupy the artist for the remainder of her career: figures, always cursory, alone or in small groups; windows giving onto vague scenes or empty spaces; and ambiguous, abstract forms evoking balloons on strings or big heads on stick bodies. In a spooky little ink drawing from 1961, the recurring circle-and-stem motif is inscribed with a face with big black eyes and an aura of frantic black crayon scribbles. The immediacy and apparent spontaneity of the image is played off against the ink-wash frame Hesse has drawn around it, creating the effect of a figure at a window or a picture within a picture. Signature and date appear prominently at the lower left, inside the inky border. Clearly, Hesse is not simply emoting in these intimate studies, but self-consciously presenting her ghosts as material for art.
Arranged chronologically at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition is the most comprehensive to date--a momentous achievement considering it may be the last time the sculptures, many of them exceedingly fragile or altogether disintegrating, may ever be brought together. (2) Still, there seemed a few too many of the groping, experimental drawings and collages from 1962 through 1964, the year Hesse traveled to Germany with her then husband, sculptor Tom Doyle. In these dozen or so mixed-medium exercises, Hesse abandons her formerly funereal palette for vibrant passages of bright yellow, pink, purple, orange and lime green. She dubbed these "wild space" pictures with "crazy forms." Mainly abstract, the forms include fences, lips, boxes, arrows and fish, material for a Freudian field day yet always resisting any coherent reading. Some drawings resemble bird's-eye views of domestic interiors, telling, perhaps, of the artist's efforts to adapt to married life. For all their vitality and visual appeal, these quasi-automatist works remain transitional and make one eager for future developments.
Biomorphic Surrealism informs the paintings that followed in 1964 and 1965; here Hesse organized her "crazy forms" into compartments, in the manner of Adolph Gottlieb's pictographs of the 1940s. These partitioned fields seem lighthearted and wacky, like comic book panels, and indeed Hesse explained in a letter to Sol LeWitt that the images are contained "as if to tell a story." "So it is weird," she continued, "they become real nonsense." (3) They embody the absurd, an overriding principle in Hesse's art, which encompassed the ridiculous but also the irrational, the existential, the terrible aspects of life. It is fascinating to see her select one absurd motif from an untitled painting (1964-65) and repeat it, quite precisely, in a drawing carefully dated January 1965. This figure, with a podlike middle, radiant blue head and red doughnut indicating female genitalia, straddles the central cell in both works, arms and legs akimbo. What is the "story" told here? An anxious one, to be sure: each January brought not only Hesse's own birthday but the anniversary, or yahrzeit, of her mother's death. Next to the female icon in Hesse's painting appears a surprising memento mori, another compartment containing two wristwatches without hands. "I am just like my mother," the artist worried in her journals, "and will die as she did. I always felt this." (4)
