During a career lasting little more than a decade, ending in 1970 with her death from brain cancer at age 34, the German-born American artist Eva Hesse endowed contemporary sculpture with new forms, processes, and meanings. Though she began as a painter, she’s best known for her work in three dimensions: sculptures made from what were then unorthodox materials, such as latex, rubber, fiberglass, and rope. Their repeated yet idiosyncratic, often open-ended shapes (vessels, for example, or flows) transformed Minimalism’s austere, “heroic” monumentalism into a visual language at once abstract and highly personal, with works redolent of the body—its fragility, comic ungainliness, and yearnings.
Forms Larger and Bolder: Eva Hesse Drawings from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, a just-opened exhibition at Hauser & Wirth gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, focuses on the artist’s works on paper, a parallel practice that she continued throughout her career. “She drew her way through life,” scholar Briony Fer writes in the show’s catalog. Hesse’s was a life of often tragic extremes, wracked by insecurity but buttressed by her vitality and restless creative drive.
Born in 1936 to a Jewish family in Hamburg, Hesse was two years old when she and her older sister Helen boarded one of the last Kindertransport trains to get Jewish children out of Nazi Germany. Six months later the girls were reunited with their parents in England and the family emigrated to New York, settling in Washington Heights. Their parents later separated, and their mother committed suicide in 1946.
Hesse never addressed the Shoah or her turbulent personal history explicitly in her art. (Though she did once say in an interview that the grid sculptures of Carl André, her contemporary and an influence, reminded her of “concentration camps.”) But it’s hard to look at her poetic, black-and-white gouaches, watercolors, and ink drawings from the early 1960s and not see ghosts. A vegetal form strives upward, toward an unseen light; a mysterious, empty round butts against a smaller shape, their tight framing suggesting a lost intimacy. Hosts of loose, hectic graphite scribbles invoke armies of the dead.
The 70-odd works on paper in the current exhibition all come from the artist’s archive at Oberlin College, where the university’s Allen Memorial Art Museum once provided her with crucial early support. Arranged in (roughly) reverse chronological order, they include sensitive life-study drawings and lush floral watercolors made when Hesse was still a student at the Art Students League, Pratt, and Cooper Union, and collages and photograms that she produced while studying with the Bauhaus color theorist Josef Albers at Yale, where she graduated with a B.A. in 1959.
Afterward she moved to New York, absorbing influences of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, introducing bursts of riotous color, along with stars, arrows, checkerboard grids, spirals, and bits of writing, into works on paper that are painted, scrawled with colored pencil, and collaged, all of it animated by her visceral line and hovering on the edge of legibility. Arshile Gorky (an AbEx painter whose work she loved) comes to mind but also the Weimar collagist Kurt Schwitters, who created poetry from urban detritus. Other works invoke the surreal mechanics of a Jean Tinguely sculpture, like the large collaged gouache where a winged vehicle, yellow and chartreuse, seems caught in mid-flight. Later on, there are diagrammatic drawings that anticipate the energy and flow of the sculptures that would seal her art-world reputation.
Strangest of all, perhaps, is a series of cartoonlike “mechanical” drawings she made during her breakthrough year in 1965, when she accompanied her then husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle, on an artist’s residency to work in a disused wing of a textile factory near Essen. The marriage was failing and the return to Germany proved traumatic for Hesse, who found herself wracked with self-doubt. But the bits of discarded machinery lying about the factory, the ruins of post-industrial society in a country that, a mere two decades earlier, with the Shoah, had manufactured death on an industrial scale, proved weirdly inspiring. They were both comical and abject, their suction tubes and strange articulations reminiscent of a body’s interior plumbing. Soon they’d inspire her work in three dimensions. “I’ve done drawings, it seems like hundreds, clean, clear, but crazy like machines, larger and bolder, articulately described—real nonsense,” she wrote to her dear friend and confidant, the conceptual artist Sol LeWitt, who urged her to cast away her hesitations. “That sounds fine, wonderful,” he wrote back. “Real nonsense—do more!”