Hesse, Eva (1936–1970)

German-American sculptor, often associated with the Minimalist movement, who is known for her abstract sculptures. Born in Hamburg, Germany, on January 11, 1936; died of a brain tumor in New York City on May 29, 1970; the younger of two daughters of Wilhelm Hesse (a lawyer) and Ruth (Marcus) Hesse; attended public schools in New York; graduated from the School of Industrial Arts, 1952; studied at the Pratt Institute, New York, 1952–53; the Art Students League, New York, 1953; Cooper Union, New York, 1954–57; received BFA degree from Yale University, 1959; married Tom Doyle (an artist), on November 21, 1961 (separated 1966); no children.

The short life of German-born sculptor Eva Hesse was marked by adversity, beginning with her early childhood in Nazi Germany, and including her parents' divorce, her mother's suicide, and her own failed marriage. However, between 1964 and 1970, the year of her death, Hesse created a body of work that stands as a monument to her enormous talent and artistic ingenuity. In an article about the artist for Ms. magazine, written on the occasion of a memorial exhibition of her work at the Guggenheim Museum, Kasha Linville Gula points out that Hesse's works are not easy to explain, either in content or execution. "They are so unusual," she writes, "that some art critics have retreated into an exegesis of her personal life through their inability to deal with her sculpture, in the hope one would explain away the other."

Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, Hesse was three when her family fled the Nazi regime and settled in Washington Heights, New York. Her father Wilhelm, a criminal lawyer, took up a new career selling insurance. He subsequently divorced his wife and remarried, after which Hesse went to live with him and her stepmother. Hesse's mother Ruth, who had lapsed into a serious depression, committed suicide in 1946. Eva attended public school and received her high school diploma from the School of Industrial Arts in 1952. She then attended Pratt Institute and the Art Students League before enrolling in Cooper Union, where she remained for three years. After spending a summer at the Yale-Norfolk art school on scholarship, she entered the Yale School of Art and Architecture, where she studied painting with Rico Lebrun, Bernard Chait, and Joseph Albers. Receiving her B.F.A. in 1959, Hesse returned to New York determined to succeed as an artist but lacking direction. During this period, she produced unexceptional drawings, although some were included in group exhibitions.

In 1961, Hesse married abstract sculptor Tom Doyle and immediately found herself locked in a struggle to keep her artistic identity from becoming lost in that of her husband's. For the next four years, languishing in Doyle's shadow, she made little artistic progress, although in March 1963 she did have her first one-woman show at the Allan Stone Gallery. In 1964, when Doyle received a commission to work in Germany for two years, Hesse had mixed feelings about returning to the country from which her family had been forced to flee, but she reluctantly went along. It was an unhappy time, during which she confronted her deteriorating marriage and her perceived lack of professional accomplishment. Working in a small section of an abandoned weaving factory which served as their temporary studio, Hesse began to create abstract collages and reliefs, using old cord she found in the factory.

Returning to New York in 1965, the year that marked the end of her marriage, Hesse began to refine her technique into the organically curving abstract sculptures for which she became known. After moving through a geometrical period which focused on serial order, grids, and spheres, she began to create her more imposing pieces. "Taking memory, sexuality, self-awareness, intuition, and humor as her inspiration," explains H.H. Arnason in History of Modern Art, "she allowed forms to emerge from the interaction of the process inherent in her materials—latex, rubber, fiberglass, rope, cloth—with such natural forces as gravitational pull. Thus her pieces stretch from ceiling to floor, suspend from pole to pole, sag and nod toward the floor, or tilt against the wall." Writes Kasha Gula: "Hesse made sculpture after 1967 that has a power akin to the visceral impact religious art had for the faithful during the height of Christianity, or that primitive art has for its peoples."

In 1968, Hesse had a one-woman sculpture show at the Fischback Gallery; in 1969, the Museum of Modern Art purchased her work, Repetition Nineteen. At the height of her success, she underwent the first of three operations for a brain tumor that was later diagnosed as malignant. During the last year of her life, despite operations, chemotherapy, and debilitating pain, Hesse worked with renewed intensity, often directing constructions from a wheelchair. Until the end of her life, she fought to evolve freely, without even the restraint of her own prescribed style or method. "There isn't a rule," she said in a interview shortly before her death. "I don't want to keep any rules. That's why my art might be so good, because I have no fear." The artist died in a New York hospital on May 29, 1970.

sources:

Arnason, H.H. History of Modern Art. 3rd ed. Revised and updated by Daniel Wheeler. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986.

Bailey, Brooke. The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Artists. Holbrook, MA: Bob Adams, 1994.

Gula, Kasha Linville. "Eva Hesse: No Explanation," in Ms. April 1973, pp. 39–42.

Heller, Nancy G. Women Artists. NY: Abbeville Press, 1987.

Naylor, Colin, ed. Contemporary Artists. Chicago and London: St. James Press, 1989.

Sicherman, Barbara, and Carol Hurd Green, eds. Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980.

Barbara Morgan , Melrose, Massachusetts