Eva Hesse

• Born: January 11, 1936
• Birthplace: Hamburg, Germany
• Died: May 29, 1970
• Place of death: New York, New York

German-born artist

Hesse’s sculptural works were constructed from nontraditional materials. She was a pioneer in efforts to have artwork by women receive recognition.

Area of achievement: Art

Early Life

Eva Hesse (EE-vuh hehs) was born in 1936 in Hamburg, Germany, as the Nazi regime reached the height of its power. In 1938, Hesse’s parents sent her and her sister, born in 1933, to the Netherlands. Her father’s brother and the brother’s wife in Amsterdam were not able to help. After a few months apart, the family was reunited and left for England. In 1939, they immigrated to the United States, sponsored by cousins in New York. Hesse’s Dutch aunt and uncle were deported to concentration camps. None of the family that stayed in Europe survived.

Hesse’s father had been an attorney of criminal law, and he had two doctoral degrees. Her mother, a great beauty who suffered from manic depression, had been an art student. The Hesses’ first apartment in New York was across the street from Nazi headquarters.

In New York, Hesse’s father studied to become an insurance broker. Her mother was in and out of hospitals, eventually leaving the family to live with her doctor and his wife. As a child, Hesse was always frightened and lonely. Her mother committed suicide when Hesse was ten years old.

Hesse attended New York’s School of Industrial Art until 1952; then, at age sixteen, she entered New York’s Pratt Institute. She was younger than other students and unhappy because Pratt did not emphasize painting. She quit midyear in 1953. When her father remarried, Hesse’s stepmother insisted Hesse get a job. She found a job at Seventeen magazine, she went to films and the Museum of Modern Art, and she studied painting from live models. After a long illness, her father died. Hesse attended New York’s Cooper Union from 1954 to 1957. She enjoyed her studies there and excelled.

Hesse attended the Yale School of Art and Architecture from 1957 to 1959, studied under Josef Albers, gained artist friends, and received a bachelor of fine arts degree. In 1961, she met and married sculptor Tom Doyle.

Life’s Work

Hesse showed her work at the John Heller Gallery in 1961, and she had a solo show of her works on paper in 1963 at the Allan Stone Gallery. In 1964 and 1965, she and Doyle lived in a nonworking textile mill in Germany’s Ruhr region. Her husband had received financial support to live and work there; she was not happy to be in Germany.

Although their marriage dissolved at this time, Hesse found a new direction for her work in that mill. She began to use abandoned industrial material for sculpture, first in relief and later free-standing or hanging work.

She worked with electrical cords, cloth-covered cord, masonite, using detritus to create relatively small sculptures with satirical names. When she returned to New York, the pieces grew larger, and she began working with the materials most associated with her: various plastic items, fiberglass, and latex.

Her work established her presence in a movement away from minimalism to postminimalism. Her work was in the notable postminimalist exhibits of 1966, Eccentric Abstraction and Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism. Hesse asserted herself as a feminist artist, aware of the obstacles to advancement in a world dominated by male artists, curators, writers, and gallery and museum directors.

In 1968, she began teaching in New York at the School of Visual Arts. Her show, Chain Polymers, at the Fischbach Gallery, in November, 1968, was the only one-person show of her sculptures in her lifetime. The Whitney Museum included a large, major work, Expanded Expansion, in its show, Anti-Illusion: Process/Materials, in 1969.

In 1969, Hesse discovered she had a brain tumor, and she died in 1970. Her illness came at a time when she and her work were receiving wide attention in the art world. Her work received many posthumous exhibitions, both in the United States and abroad. Among these were the Guggenheim Museum in 1972, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2002, and New York City’s Jewish Museum of Art in 2006.

Hesse’s work has continued to attract interest from artists and scholars. Her favorite materials, such as latex and plastics, do not age well. Their changing qualities change the works’ appearance over time. However, observers have found their altered states witty and sensual, holding a fascination for the onlooker. Hesse’s personality engaged the admiration and affection of many.

She insisted that art and life should be one and that her work, though it might appear entirely abstract to some, was truly inseparable from her interior life. An exhibition in 1994, In the Lineage of Eva Hesse, at Larry Aldrich Gallery, New York, demonstrated the art world’s acknowledgment of her ongoing influence on generations of artists and art lovers.

Bibliography

Danto, Arthur C. “All About Eva.” The Nation (July 17/24, 2006): 30-34. A sensitive appreciation of Hesse’s work.

Lippard, Lucy R. Eva Hesse. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 1992. A book-length biography by an art historian with special expertise in the feminist movement in art.

Nixon, Mignon, ed. Eva Hesse. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002. Essays and interviews by Cindy Nemser, Rosalind Krauss, Mel Bochner, Briony Fer, Anne M. Wagner, and Mignon Nixon. The interviews with Hesse are informative. There has been controversy over Nemser’s interview article for selective editing.