Accession III, 1967-68
Stiftung Ludwig 1976, Museum Köln
The
concept of the absurd played a central role in Eva Hesse’s work and fate.
Born in 1936 in Hamburg as the daughter of a Jewish defense attorney, she
was sent to a Dutch children’s home at the age of two together with her
sister following the pogroms of the Reichskristallnacht while the parents
went underground in Germany. The family finally emigrated via England to
New York, where they arrived in 1939, the only survivors among their
relations, all of whom perished in the concentration camps. Their first
apartment was on 86th Street facing, of all things, the headquarters of
the American Nazis. The parents’ marriage finally fell apart completely.
Hesse’s mother suffered from depression; following their divorce in 1946,
she committed suicide. The father remarried, and according to Hesse’s own
description, the stepmother was a "bitch."
Untitled, 1960
Deutsche Bank
Collection
Untitled, 1960
Deutsche Bank
Collection
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After visiting
Pratt Institute in the early fifties, she matriculated in 1957 at the
Yale School of Art and Architecture, where one of her teachers was
Joseph Albers, a former Bauhaus member who encouraged the young artist,
previously influenced mainly by
Willem de Kooning and
Abstract Expressionism, towards a systematic investigation of form and
color. Later, when she returned to New York, Hesse quickly became a part
of the vital art scene. Throughout the early sixties she made ink drawings
in grey, black, and reddish hues that seem to anticipate her later move to
sculpture: irregular rectangles, spheres, asymmetrical circles, black
forms filled in, white forms left blank as negative space. During this
time she met Claes
Oldenburg,
Walter de Maria, and
Sol LeWitt. She moved into a loft on the Bowery together with the sculptor
Tom Doyle, whom she married in 1963. Her neighbors included the painters
Robert and
Sylvia Mangold and the art critic
Lucy Lippard, who was to later publish seminal articles and books on
Hesse’s work. In April 1964, only a few months after her first one-person
show of drawings in New York, Hesse embarked with Doyle on a 15-month
working sojourn in Germany at the invitation of the industrial magnate
couple Isabel and Arnhard Scheidt, where she also attempted to track down
the traces of her family.
H + H, 1965
©Courtesy Collection
Hauser & Wirth, Switzerland
Photo: Abby Robinson New York, Barbora Gerny-Vojtêchov
In Kettwig an der Ruhr, a period of reorientation began that ultimately led to
a dramatic break from her husband, who was in those days more successful
with his art. At the same time, Hesse’s gradual departure from painting
began to make itself felt. Dusseldorf was nearby, a center for Fluxus,
performance, and happenings; throughout the mid-sixties, it developed into
an important European art metropolis through artists such as
Joseph Beuys ,
Günth er Uecker, and the Zero Group. Inspired by numerous trips,
encounters, and visits to exhibitions, Hesse began experimenting with new
forms of expression and materials such as plaster and string, which she
integrated into reliefs. Discarded machine parts as well as found objects
from her studio in a disused cloth factory inspired her to create a series
of biomorphic machine images bursting with erotic allusions. While her
early paintings were free and flowing and she later varied the body theme
in her work with box-like forms, the newer drawings began combining order
and chaos, corporeality and emptiness, "clean, clear but crazy like
machines, forms larger, bolder, articulately described (…)." - "(…) So it
is weird," Hesse remarks in a letter to Sol LeWitt, "they become real
nonsense."
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