Fragile Work, Fragile Life

“Life doesn’t last,” Eva Hesse told an interviewer toward the end of her brief life. “Art doesn’t last. It doesn’t matter.”

That was 1970, and Hesse was only 34 years old. She had been working as an artist for a decade and was finally beginning to hit her stride. An innovator influenced by Minimalism, Surrealism and Conceptualism, she became known for her sculpture, molding latex into drapery-like sheets and three-dimensional shapes, dipping aluminum-screen armatures into fiberglass resin, pioneering new materials and processes in a search for “non-art” art.

Hesse had reason for her fatalism. It was part artistic stance and part unflinching personal honesty. She knew that at least some of the innovative materials she used would have a limited shelf life, but she still prized her experiments. “At this point,” she told the interviewer, “I feel a little guilty about when people want to buy it.... [But] if I need [latex] ... that is more important.”

She was also seriously ill, undergoing treatment for a brain tumor.

Within months, Hesse died. But her work, and her legacy, would live on.

She would be lionized by women artists and feminist art historians. Her drawings and sculptures would continue to appear in galleries and museumsin the U.S. and Europe. A major 1992 retrospective at Yale University, her alma mater, would solidify her influence. And throughout the ‘90s, the price of her artworks would steadily rise. In 1997, the San Francisco Museum of Art would pay $2.2 million for “Untitled or Not Yet.”

On Feb. 2, “Eva Hesse,” the most comprehensive retrospective of her work yet, opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Organized by Elisabeth Sussman, former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and Renate Petzinger, of the Museum Wiesbaden in Germany, the show includes some 150 works borrowed from more than two dozen lenders. The curators have paid particular attention to combining her early works with her late, experimental works, which proved to be a substantial challenge. As Hesse predicted, some of the later works have disintegrated; many are fragile in the extreme.

For Sussman, however, seeing the breadth of the work is crucial to the mission of the exhibition, which is meant to yield a balanced picture of Hesse as an artist. “I wanted to look closely at work, process, evolution, [not] her anxieties, traumas, etc.,” Sussman said.

Lynn Zelevansky, head of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s department of modern and contemporary art, is a champion of the San Francisco exhibition: It’s “one of the most important shows I can imagine presenting,” she says, “and probably the last opportunity to see her works in a comprehensive way. These pieces are so fragile and so highly valued that this is probably it.”

The SF MOMA exhibition fills the fourth floor of the museum, the works displayed against subdued background colors. Arranged chronologically, it opens with drawings and washes on paper. On a walk-through, Sussman points out that Helen Hesse Charash, Eva’s sister, believes that two of the ink paintings are self-portraits--one could be seen as a family grouping of four (mother, father, the two sisters) and one a lone figure, with no details of face or dress.

The works are from 1960. “It’s the same time she’s in psychotherapy,” Sussman says, “and she’s really working through her very loaded past.”

Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, to an Orthodox Jewish family, Hesse was separated from her parents for several months when she was sent away to Holland at age 2. Her parents, seeing the Nazi threat, eventually collected their two daughters and emigrated to the United States in 1939. Six years later, her parents divorced, and a year after that, her mother committed suicide.

Sussman finds elements in the monochromatic paintings that foreshadow Hesse’s later work. “These are very prophetic,” she says, “because they have no color and the washes are very layered--which is like the [latex] work later on--and then they have these figurative elements which become very abstract.”

In 1964, European arts patron F. Arnhard Scheidt offered Hesse’s husband, Tom Doyle, a sculptor, a year of studio space in an old textile mill in Kettwig-am-Ruhr, Germany. Hesse went along and set up her own work space. She began a series of diagrammatic line drawings that were “hybrids of body parts and machines,” as Sussman writes in her essay in the exhibition catalog. Then, apparently at Doyle’s urging, she began to use industrial materials found in the building to make her first break from flat surfaces.

“There were miles of that string there,” he told art historian Lucy Lippard. “The string was really what got her going.”

On Dec. 4, 1964, Hesse wrote in her journal: “Started sculpture, lead wire through a huge screen. Shortage of wire forced change to plaster.”

That piece is lost, but 14 other assemblages made during this breakthrough period remain--they were shown at Dusseldorf Kunsthalle in August 1995--and 11 of them have been reunited for the San Francisco show.

Working on Masonite, Hesse built up surfaces with papier-mache and other materials, attached found objects (wires and a light socket, for example), then painted the results. Many of these works use rope or cord, which would become an enduring Hesse fascination. She sometimes glued it into rows or circles (“Ringaround Arosie,” “2 in 1”), wound it around protruding rods (“Oomamaboomba”) or just let it dangle (“An Ear in a Pond”). Many observers have noted sexual imagery in these works--”Ringaround Arosie,” in which wound cord makes two circles, could be interpreted as breasts, with the “nipple” of one painted pink.

Hesse’s diaries reveal her excitement about her work and her increasing unhappiness in her personal life. She resented living in Doyle’s shadow, and doing double duty as artist and housekeeper, when he could focus only on his art. In January 1964, she wrote, “I cannot be so many things. I cannot be something for everyone.... Woman, beautiful, artist, wife, housekeeper, cook, saleslady all these things. I cannot even be myself, nor know what I am.”

When Hesse returned to New York at the end of 1965, her marriage collapsed. Amid the upheaval, she began to make free-standing sculpture, building on the work begun in Germany. She experimented with liquid latex and fiberglass--making process and chance important elements in her work, casting or pouring the materials, or dipping things into them. This was when, wrote Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times in 1992, she began “to invent sculptures of real originality and distinction.”

In November 1968, Hesse’s first one-woman sculpture show, at the Fischback Gallery in New York, included pieces that would become classics in her oeuvre, including “Accession II” (a steel cube pierced with short lengths of plastic tubing), “Sans II” (a grid of box-like shapes made of membrane-like fiberglass), “Aught” (latex-coated panels) and its companion, “Augment” (sheets of latex stacked on the floor). All except the last are in the San Francisco exhibition.

The critics were impressed but mystified. “Her works are questions rather than answers,” the Village Voice wrote. “They are bundles of eccentric contradictions.... Eva Hesse is an important new artist.”

Two months before the show, Hesse complained of depression and exhaustion. In April 1969, she collapsed. When a brain tumor was discovered, she had a series of operations and radiation and chemotherapy, but she continued working. In the last years of her life, her work was included in major museum shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and both MOMA and the Whitney purchased works.

When Sussman went to work at the Whitney in 1991, she was already aware of Hesse. A year later she saw the Yale retrospective and decided to begin her own research on the artist and create an even more comprehensive exhibition.

“I realized that they had avoided these radical [latex] pieces that she did at the end of her life,” Sussman says. “These are so hard to show because they’re in such bad shape. I decided that this show had to take on that issue.”

Sussman later joined forces with curator Petzinger, who was planning a Hesse show for the Museum Weisbaden. After San Francisco, where it runs through May 19, the exhibition will open in Germany in June. It was scheduled to open at the Whitney in November, but after Sept. 11, the Whitney canceled because of financial problems. Instead, at the end of this year, the show will move to Tate Modern in London.

By including Hesse’s lesser known pre-1965 works on paper and canvas with the more famous later works, the curators want to show the preliminaries in her rapidly evolving career. The mid-career works reveal how Hesse began to break out of the frame--and, in fact, “Hang Up” (1966) literally shows just that, with a long, loopy cable distended from two parts of an oversized frame.

Many signature pieces are included. There are the translucent cylindrical shapes of “Repetition Nineteen III” as well as the series of open fiberglass boxes mounted on the wall in “Sans II”--the five sections, each six boxes wide, are joined here, although they are from four collections. SF MOMA owns one unit.

One of the most fragile works in the exhibition is “Aught,” now owned by the Art Museum at UC Berkeley. “It was fortuitous that it was just across the bridge,” Sussman says. “[Berkeley museum officials] knew they could watch it, that if anything started happening, we would take it down--it’s all written into the loan agreement.” “Aught” will not travel beyond San Francisco. Each 6-foot-high piece is made of a sheet of cloth or plastic sandwiched between layers of latex. Hung from grommets in the upper corners, they were allowed to sag and fold according to gravitational pull. Today, they are in danger of cracking and breaking; to prevent tearing, back edges of the work have been reinforced.

To deal with conservation challenges such as “Aught,” Sussman and SF MOMA organized a round-table talk for 21 curators, conservators and Hesse experts. Latex was the focus of much of the discussion--which is excerpted in the exhibition catalog--because it hardens and softens in ways that are beyond control.

“We’ve found out that latex is a kind of alive thing,” Sussman says. “[One moment] it’s in a dormant period, then all of a sudden it starts to ooze.” There are other works Sussman sought unsuccessfully. A test piece for a hanging sheet of latex called “Contingent,” owned by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., was among them. Jay Krueger, National Gallery conservator, told the round table, “We said no for the reason that we felt it could not be safely packed and transported without incurring damage.”

Sussman’s view is that with care, the works should have a public viewing. “We were told by one latex expert that these things will deteriorate whether they’re in storage or being shown--so why not let everyone have a chance to see them?”

When the Whitney Museum decided at the end of last year that it didn’t have the funds to bring the Hesse show to New York City, it stirred the outrage of many in the art world.

“[The Whitney’s] refusal to do what’s necessary to bring the show to New York is an abject and utterly unforgivable failure of both museum leadership and artistic vision,” says Tony Ganz, a Los Angeles film producer and collector who loaned six works to the show. His parents, Victor and Sally Ganz, began acquiring Hesse’s work in the ‘60s. “It seems to me Eva Hesse was as great an artist as New York has ever produced.” What makes him so impassioned about the work?

“The sculpture in particular contains within it this marvelous tension--order and luminosity on one hand, chaos and decay on the other. She had such perfect pitch as an artist.”

Hesse might have liked the sentiment. She once said, “I would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites....”

In her art and in her life, she acknowledged contradiction and embraced change: “There isn’t a rule. I don’t want to keep any rules. That’s why my art might be so good, because I have no fear.”

*

“Eva Hesse,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., San Francisco, (415) 357-4000. Through May 19.

*

Scarlet Cheng is a frequent contributor to Calendar.