Eva Hesse

Renowned sculptor Eva Hesse professionally trained as an abstract painter and commercial designer, embodies the essence of a postwar American artist. Despite her relatively brief career of just over a decade, Hesse's work has maintained enduring popularity and immense influence.

Biography of Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse was born into a German-Jewish family in Hamburg during the tumultuous rise of the Nazi regime. Life for the Hesses was challenging under Nazi rule. Her father, Wilhelm, faced restrictions in his law practice, and her mother, Ruth, battled frequent bouts of depression. In the wake of the November 1938 pogrom ("Kristallnacht"), which made life even more perilous for Jews, Eva Hesse and her sister Helen were sent to a Dutch children's home, possibly an internment camp. The family was later reunited in England before immigrating to the United States.

Upon arriving in New York, the family found support within the German-Jewish community of Washington Heights. However, Hesse's mother's depression deepened, leading to her separation from the family in 1944. Tragically, her mother took her own life shortly after her father remarried. Eva Hesse was just 10 years old at the time.

Eva Hesse was a sensitive child deeply attached to her parents and her mother's tragic death had a profound impact on her. Despite this, she excelled academically and was popular among her peers at New York's School of Industrial Art, which is now known as the High School of Art and Design. Described as "insecure" by those close to her (her sister Helen has publicly mentioned her struggles with "separation anxiety"), Eva held a strong belief in her artistic abilities.

At 18 years old, while interning at Seventeen magazine, Hesse was featured in an article where she unequivocally expressed her artistic calling.

During her time at Seventeen magazine, Eva Hesse also attended classes at the Art Students League. After a brief period at Pratt Institute, she earned a design certificate from Cooper Union. Subsequently, she enrolled in the School of Architecture at Yale University, where she studied under Josef Albers. Upon receiving her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1959, Hesse worked selling jewelry while also holding a part-time position as a textile designer. Inspired by her childhood idol, Willem de Kooning, she aimed to paint in an Abstract Expressionist style.

Hesse's initially academically executed landscapes gradually evolved into figure sketches and self-portraits characterized by intense colors and heavy strokes from the palette knife. These experiments in painting and drawing marked the beginning of her compartmented images, a compositional format that may have been influenced by her extensive design training. The influential "Sixteen Americans" exhibition curated by Dorothy Miller at MoMA in 1959, featuring artists like Louise Nevelson, Jasper Johns, and Ellsworth Kelly, may have further stimulated this aspect of Hesse's work. However, by the end of the decade, she was already independently maturing as an artist.

In 1961, Eva Hesse displayed drawings and watercolors in her first exhibitions at the John Heller Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. In April of the same year, she met sculptor Tom Doyle. The couple married six months later. Like many female artists of her time, Hesse's artistic output decreased in the years following her marriage, but her professional development continued to advance. During this period, some of her most significant drawings and paintings featured her distinctive box works, hinting at a developing fascination with the grid. The use of repeated units in her work echoes the influence of her friend and informal mentor, Sol LeWitt, whose studio was conveniently located near Hesse and Doyle's downtown Manhattan apartment.

In 1965, Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle departed New York for Düsseldorf after Doyle received an offer from the Kunstverein, a prestigious art association dedicated to contemporary art. Hesse delved into the German art scene, which heavily featured abstract sculpture. During that winter, in a converted studio factory, she began to work with plaster and string, exploring the use of found materials. Concurrently, she continued to create variations of the grid in her paintings and drawings.

During this time, a playful eroticism emerged in Hesse's work, possibly influenced by French artists Marcel Duchamp and Jean Tinguely. Her experimentation led to the creation of "Ringaround Arosie" in 1965, which she described as representing a breast and a penis. A selection of Hesse's reliefs and paintings was exhibited at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in the final month of 1965, marking the conclusion of the couple's year-long stay in Germany.

After returning to New York in 1966, Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle divorced. Hesse maintained her studio on the Bowery, where she rekindled her friendship with Sol LeWitt and developed close relationships with Robert Smithson and Mel Bochner. These connections sparked a fruitful exchange of ideas that significantly influenced Hesse's subsequent work.

In 1966, Hesse made a significant shift from painting to sculpting, notably with "Hang Up" (1966), a blank canvas with a cloth-wrapped frame and an exceedingly extended steel rod protruding from its surface. This work, related to Minimalism, gained a distinctive "absurd" quality due to the elongated metal rod, as noted by Hesse herself. Her participation in the pivotal exhibition "Eccentric Abstraction" in 1966, organized by Lucy Lippard for the Fischbach Gallery, argued for a convergence between the prominent artistic movements of the era.

Hesse's inclusion in this influential exhibition, however, reflected the ambivalent reception her work received from critics and the public at that time. Nevertheless, Lippard's show was instrumental in securing Hesse's official representation by the Fischbach Gallery starting in 1967. 

As Eva Hesse focused entirely on sculpture, her artistic evolution accelerated rapidly. The "Accession" series from the late 1960s marked her initial explorations into working with metal. Simultaneously, Hesse began experimenting with latex, drawn to its flexibility and ability to lend an organic quality to her objects. In 1968, she was introduced to fiberglass, which became the primary material for her "Repetition Nineteen" series.  

In late 1968, Fischbach Gallery showcased Hesse's latex and fiberglass works in an exhibition titled "Chain Polymers," named after Hesse's own description of the series. This exhibition, her first and only solo sculpture exhibition, garnered positive reviews from critics. Following this success, Hesse's work was featured in group shows organized by Robert Morris for Leo Castelli, the prestigious "Annual Exhibition" at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the influential "When Attitudes Become Form" exhibition (1969) organized by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern. Her growing acclaim was underscored by articles in Life and Artforum magazines, along with MoMA acquiring two works from the "Repetition" series.

Despite these professional triumphs, Hesse faced personal tragedy as she underwent surgery for a brain tumor three times between 1969 and 1970. Sadly, she passed away in May 1970 at the age of 34, arguably at the peak of her artistic career.

Eva Hesse's Art Style

Eva Hesse's art was deeply embedded in a distinctive and uncertain era when artists sought new forms of expression in the wake of Abstract Expressionism. Her work reflects this era in a unique way, blending oblique references to the human body with a revived interest in Surrealist currents from the pre-World War II period. In doing so, she offered a postwar generation a method of distilling emotions and conceptual ideas into essential forms and contours. 

Much of Hesse's art can be likened to a poetic, three-dimensional montage—a fusion of disparate elements gathered from various sources and arranged in ways that evoke moments of quiet contemplation of the world around us.

In the 1960s, Hesse emerged as one of the pioneering artists to explore the fluid contours of the natural organic world alongside the simplest artistic gestures. Some observers detect in her works subtle, proto-feminist allusions to the female body, while others perceive her languid forms as expressions of wit, whimsy, and spontaneous invention using everyday materials. These interpretations highlight the diverse approaches within Post-Minimalist practice, showcasing Hesse's ability to infuse her art with layers of meaning and depth.