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

(3.) Eva Hesse, in a letter of March 1965, quoted in Robin Clark, "Contained Forms: Gridded Works on Paper and Canvas," in Sussman, Eva Hesse, p. 149.

(4.) Hesse quoted in Anne Middleton Wagner, "Another Hesse," in Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O'Keeffe, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1996, p. 263.

(5.) Ibid., p. 264. No mention is made in the exhibition of the possible mournful content of the late window drawings.

(6.) Hesse's friend Gioia Timpanelli, who was present at the creation of these works in 1969, writes a touching personal account of the artist's activity that summer in "Woodstock Paintings," in Sussman, Eva Hesse, pp. 97-106.

(7.) Depending on the occasion, a menorah may have seven or eight branches; sometimes, an additional (eighth or ninth) candleholder is included for the shammes, the taper used to light all the others. Hesse's "menorah" now belongs to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, a gift of the artist's sister, Helen Hesse Charash.

(8.) Hesse quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse, New York University Press, 1976, p. 56.

(9.) Ibid., p. 165.

(10.) James Meyer, "Non, Nothing, Everything: Hesse's Abstraction," in Sussman, Eva Hesse, p. 72.

(11.) Interpreting Hesse's use of the blank wall psychologically, Briony Fer cites an essay by Melanie Klein (1929) in which the analyst vividly describes the way the infant's experience of loss is reactivated in adult life in depression through the metaphor of "blank space." See Fer, "Bordering on the Blank: Eva Hesse and Minimalism," On Abstract Art, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1997, p. 120.

(12.) As Lippard reports, Accession had to be refabricated in 1968 after it was shown in Chicago, where "people got inside the box and wrecked it," Eva Hesse, p. 103.

(13.) Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" (1967), in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, New York, E.P. Dutton, 1968, p. 129.

(14.) The phallic, bound, and shiny Ingeminate perfectly embodies what Donald Kuspit has identified as the modern fetish, "a special property of artistic play ... evoking primary identification and union with the mother." Such an object often provides comfort at conflict-filled moments in an artist's career. See Kuspit, "The Modern Fetish," in Signs of Psyche in Modern and Postmodern Art, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 151-52.

(15.) Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 109.

(16.) Scott Rothkopf, "Sans," in Sussman, Eva Hesse, p. 239.

(17.) Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 179. Lippard's comparison seems especially apposite in light of Laurie Wilson's recent speculations about how Giacometti's frail figures were inspired by postwar newsreels of the death camps. See Wilson, "Giacometti's Thin Figures: Dead Men Walking," Art in America, May 2002, esp. pp. 137-38.

(18.) Hesse in a Life magazine interview of Feb. 27, 1970, quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, p. 172.

(19.) For an exemplary psychobiographical treatment, see Anna Chave's sensitive "Eva Hesse: A `Girl Being a Sculpture,'" in Helen Cooper, ed., Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, exh. cat., New Haven, Yale University Press, 1992, pp. 99-117.