Hesse, Eva

Eva Hesse, (born January 11, 1936, Hamburg, Germany—died May 29, 1970, New York, New York, U.S.), German-born American painter and sculptor known for using unusual materials such as rubber tubing, fibreglass, synthetic resins, cord, cloth, and wire. Hesse had a prolific yet short career, and her influence since her death at age 34 has been widespread.

Born into a German Jewish family, Hesse was about three years old when her parents left their extended family behind and fled the Nazi regime, arriving in New York City in 1939. Her parents divorced in 1945, and her mother committed suicide a year later. Despite her traumatic and tragic early life, Hesse was an accomplished student. As an adolescent, she already wanted to pursue art, and she attended the School of Industrial Art (now the High School of Art and Design). She went on to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (from September 1952 to December 1953), Cooper Union (1954–57), and the School of Art and Architecture at Yale University (B.F.A., 1959), where she studied with artist Josef Albers. After she graduated, Hesse returned to New York City and supported her art by working as a pattern designer for a textile company. In 1961 Hesse exhibited her work for the first time in a show titled “Drawings: Three Young Americans” at the John Heller Gallery. She met and married sculptor Tom Doyle that year. Hesse’s first solo exhibition, a show of her drawings, was held in 1963 at the Allan Stone Gallery in New York City.

Hesse, Eva: Vertiginous Detour

In 1964 she moved with Doyle to Germany for 15 months and began to experiment with sculpture, developing a style that featured sensuous shapes and unconventional materials. Using tempera paint, gouache, metal, mesh, wire, string, cord, and other found materials (her studio was in an abandoned textile factory), she began to employ an amalgam of two- and three-dimensional representation. Those early “reliefs” consisted of futuristic machinelike imagery (e.g., Ringaround Arosie and Legs of a Walking Ball, both 1965), probably inspired by the out-of-use machinery in her studio.

Hesse, Eva: Repetition Nineteen III

When she and Doyle returned to New York in late 1965, their marriage began to falter, and they separated in early 1966. Hesse’s career, however, took off. She continued creating hybrid works and was included in two important exhibitions in 1966, “Eccentric Abstraction” and “Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism.” That year Hesse also began making stand-alone sculptures and incorporating materials like cheesecloth, fibreglass, and latex, which she bought in liquid form. A well-received solo exhibition of those and other works by Hesse was held in 1968 at the Fischbach Gallery in New York City.

In her final few years Hesse exhibited throughout the U.S. and achieved critical acclaim. By 1969, museums such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art had acquired her work for their permanent collections. That same year, however, she was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and, over the course of the next year, she underwent three unsuccessful operations. Since her death she has been the subject of many publications and numerous solo exhibitions, many of them traveling shows, including a memorial retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum in 1972, as well as more recent exhibitions at the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut (1992), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2002), the Drawing Center and the Jewish Museum (both in New York City; 2006), the Menil Collection in Houston (2006), and the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque (2010), among others.

The latex and fibreglass Hesse used in her works (e.g., Contingent, 1969) have degraded (yellowed, hardened, and become brittle) over the years, becoming too fragile to travel or exhibit. She reportedly chose to work with those materials because they were ephemeral and would show the passage of time. In an interview conducted during the year of her death, Hesse, when considering the problematic nature of her materials, is quoted as saying: “Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last. It doesn’t matter.”