Born in Germany, Eva Hesse is associated with the postminimalist movement. The interpretation of her work has often been influenced by her early and tragic end. Today however, it is centred on her formal innovations and the historically innovative aspects of her work. Her childhood was marked by two linked events: her family’s exile to the United States in 1939 and the suicide of her mother in 1946. Her art studies began in 1952 at the Pratt Institute, followed by the Cooper Union, and lastly at Yale University where she studied the course on colour given by Josef Albers. Linda Norden chose to see her earliest works – ghostly representations – as a series of “introspective portraits” (2003). In parallel, Hesse produced abstract work and a steady graphical œuvre, which she continued until her death. During her married life (1961–66) with sculptor Tom Doyle, she found it hard to combine her personal artistic development with her role as an artist’s wife in a predominantly male environment. In 1964–65, during a stay in Germany, she began to work in three dimensions. Weary of being unable to materialize her intuitions in the pictorial domain, she used ropes found in her disused factory studio as an extension of the lines she used to draw on paper: this marked the start of her mature works (1965–70). Her sculptures are closely related to minimal art, of which she adopted certain conventions like the repetition of forms and their addition, and the human scale. However, to a greater degree than her minimalist colleagues, she introduced psychology and the expression of the individuality of the artist into her works. Hesse also restored themes like memory and sexuality into the art of the domains abandoned by minimalism, and incorporated her strong awareness of the absurd as well as promoting ambiguity and paradox. It is in relation to this that Yve-Alain Bois points up the dual derivation of Hesse’s art: minimalism, to be sure, but also neo-surrealism (2006). The use of flexible materials also encouraged a parallel with Robert Morris’s Anti Form. Three periods in her sculpted work can be discerned: the years 1965–66 marked explicit references to the body, often with a sexual connotation. Coloured reliefs gave way to mysterious objects made of papier mâché and string, such as Ingeminate (1965), in which twin phallic forms are each wrapped and bound together with a strange cord. In 1967–68 she worked on graphical matrices whose apparent precision is contradicted by the irregularity of the motifs. This investigation of the grid included the third dimension with the series Accession, featuring minimalist cubical boxes whose interior is woven with an organic mass of rubber tubes. Lucy Lippard* argued that this paradoxical combination was one of the characteristics of the practice of this artist: hardness-softness, precision-chance, geometry-free forms, and force-fragility are some of Hesse’s principles of construction. This period was also one of concentrated experimentation on unconventional materials, such as latex (as from 1966) and fibreglass (from 1968). Like a paradoxical response to the sickness that would cause her death two years later, her sculptures became monumental, though without losing their apparent fragility. Her key work at this time was Contingent (1969): it measures 3.5 metres tall by 6.3 metres deep and comprises 8 vertical elements made of cheesecloth and latex set in a field of fibreglass. It was made with the help of assistants. Also reflecting Hesse’s love of chance, the sculpture retains the irregularities that resulted from the long realization process carried out by a number of different people. During her lifetime, her work was included in important exhibitions, such as Harald Szeemann’s When Attitudes Become Forms in 1969. It was rediscovered during the 1980s by a generation of artists aware of the psychological transformation of space and the exploration of alternative propositions to the militant feminism of the 1970s.
Carole BENAITEAU
