McKinnon

EVA Spectres HESSE 1960

EVA HESSE SpEctrES 1960

Dedicated to Eva's sister, Helen, and to the memory of Eva Hesse

EVA Spectres HESSE 1960

Edited by E. Luanne McKinnon

Yale University press, New Haven and London University of New Mexico Art Museum

contents
preface HELEN MOLESwOrtH Me, You, Us: Eva Hesses Early paintings E. LUANNE McKINNON Eva's Eva ELISABEtH BrONfEN the Spectral Bride and Her Uncanny Double LOUISE S. MILNE An Instrument in the Shape of a woman: the real Nonsense of Eva Hesse Notes Selected Biography Appreciation figures checklist 70 78 80 84 86 48 40 26 7 12

preface
The most gifted natures are perhaps also the most trembling. Andr Gide Eva Hesse, who today is renowned for the sculptural assemblages she made from the mid-1960s until 1970, moved to a new studio in New York in 1960 as a determined young painter, after graduating from Yale. By that year, advanced American painting had already been dynamically redefined by constructions such as robert rauschenbergs Bed, 1955, Jasper Johnss collage painting Target with Four Faces, 1955, and frank Stellas series of Black paintings, 195860, which along with other progressive works of art had overturned the burden of Abstract Expressionism for a new generation of artists. Nevertheless, Hesse remained attentive to the tour de force hand of willem de Kooning and other select masters of line and abstract form, whose influence on her is apparent in her early paintings and drawings. Although she was often confused and maddened by the irreconcilable stances (read: all-out battle at her studio critiques) of Josef Albers and rico Lebrun, her two main professors at Yale, Hesse railed in a journal entry written just weeks before her May 1959 graduation and imminent departure to Manhattan: the hell with them all. paint yourself out, through and through, it will come by you alone. You must come to terms with your own work not with any other being.1 As it has ever been for most aspirants in their first years as professional artists, perhaps especially in New York, Hesse searched for directional resolve. Her painting oscillated between working through the problems of abstraction and quasi-figuration, resulting in, as Max Kozloff has observed, exasperated, irrational, searching pictures which almost desperately want to turn away from what had been achieved in recent history but are not yet released from its gravitational field.2 In 1960 Hesse painted approximately four dozen canvases or works on Masonite that record her aesthetic peregrinations. Yet in the course of that years work, twenty-one of those paintings stand out as being closely related to one another, as a group of sorts, exemplifying her charge to herself to paint yourself out. that chargeliterally, to paint her self outdefined Hesses struggle and true goal: to commence with her position as an artist and to come to terms with self, through form and material, which was nothing less than an existential challenge. Add to that the fact that painting was on the outs among many vanguard artistswho were morphing painting with sculpture, thus 7

forcing the definition of a new hybrid fine-art objectHesses choice of the human figure as her subject might easily seem a retardataire point of view, especially in the environment of the male-dominated art world in New York during the early sixties. I had been puzzled for some years about the early paintings that comprise the exhibition Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 ; but, in 2006, after receiving an advance copy on cD-rOM of Eva Hesse: Catalogue Raisonn of Paintings, the task of considering this sui generis group of works was made altogether easier. It became apparent that the evident progression in Hesses compositions in 1960(from total abstraction to the eventual appearance of figures, where the biomorphic form was divided in a way akin to cellular division, or where the single unit split or individuated into twos and then threes and then into attenuated, dionysiacal figures)was interrupted by a wholly different set of works in which Hesse rendered semblances of herself and fictional selves in portrait form. the word spectre sprang to mind as a way of describing the conceptual, emotional, and physical bearing present in these paintings. Spectre or specter from the Latin word spectrum, literally means an image or apparition (from specere to look), which described what I felt was the matrix of Hesses thought: the real and unreal phantasms of the mind, threatening or terrifying in nature, or faint, imagined figures repeated in one form or another, the representation of which became a purposeful and perhaps unavoidable project for her. Not the least, spectre also suggests an aura that hovers about, as a memory or hallucination might. for Hesse, the act of looking, specere, was directed both at herself and at others, at her past and no doubt at her future. Looking inwardly and outwardly and with paint as her guide, she began to paint herself out and away and ahead. As I suggest in my essay in this volume, the procession of paintings under examination here represents a rupture that, once completed (not as a formal solution but rather as a psychological denouement), settled back into solving the problems presented in abstraction, eventually evolving into the constructions that Hesse is lauded for. these early paintings remained unknown to the public until the early 1990s, when six of them were included in the exhibition Eva Hesse: A Retrospective at Yale University Art Gallery (1992), which traveled to the Hirschhorn Museum in washington, D.c. (1993). Barry rosen, the guiding hand of the Eva Hesse Estate, made them available to Helen cooper at Yale and to Linda Norden, who were the first scholars to consider and write about a select few. following the New Haven exhibition, various pieces that this project includes were first shown in European and Japanese museums, and in 1996 at the robert Miller Gallery on fifty-seventh Street in New York. In 2002, two canvases were chosen for the second Hesse retrospective, Eva Hesse, at the San francisco Museum of Modern Art and thereafter were on view at the Museum wiesbaden in Germany and the tate Modern, London. By and large, however, the paintings included in Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 have been overlooked in the extensive studies on the artist. this exhibition and catalogue is the first examination of them as a wholethat is, as a consideration of their uniqueness and importance en masse, foretelling 8 Hesses desire to express and embody emotional states in abstract form that

she mastered in her mature work. My partners in this query are the gifted scholars Elisabeth Bronfen from Zurich, Louise S. Milne from Edinburgh, and Helen Molesworth from Boston, who have contributed new insights about these compelling early works. forty years have passed since the death of Eva Hesse (19361970). My deepest aspiration is to have known her, to have had a conversation in which to ask her about the paintings considered in this volume, to check our impulses as respectful readers of her work. As it is, we have gone with what they tell us, in silence, by themselves. E. Luanne McKinnon

Eva Hesse Spectres 1960

HELEN MOLESwOrtH

Me, You, Us: Eva Hesses Early paintings

(fig. 2) Eva Hesse, Legs of a Walking Ball, 1965

It makes sense that she would see Hesses exploration of the idiomatic necessity of post-Minimalisms eccentric abstraction as completely commensurate with Lippards own aesthetic, political, and personal trajectory from wife-of-Minimalistpainter, to critic, to feminist curator. what doesnt make sense was how thoroughly Lippard was to overlook the work produced before this moment, how drastically she seems to have wanted Hesse to have sprung Athena-like, with no history, from the New York of Donald Judd and carl Andre into the New York of Sol Lewitt and Mel Bochner. But hindsight is always twenty-twenty. Its easy, now, to think that Lippard was crazy to have ignored the extraordinary wall reliefs of 196465 that Hesse made during a sojourn in Germanyworks assembled in a studio fortuitously located in an old textile factory, filled with scraps of cool-looking industrial detritus strewn about the space. these objects must have looked ripe for the picking, especially since we know that Hesse had recently visited an exhibition of works by Marcel Duchamp in Bern. But this is to register my fantastical false start for Hesse. Ringaround Arosie (fig. 1) and Legs of a Walking Ball, (fig. 1) Eva Hesse, Ringaround Arosie, 1965 both 1965 (fig. 2), are where I begin my love affair with Hesse (and my quibble with Lippard). the wall reliefs are nothing short of joyful; their off-kilter palette and their loving and obsessive wrapping of things in colored cord, an activity what to do with the early work of an artist who died too young? the difficulty of the question is the result of a yawning absence: we dont know what Eva Hesse would have produced had she lived. Her death at the age of thirty-four in 1970 leaves us with a spectacularly closed oeuvre, parenthetically bracketed by a series of false starts and one preemptive finish. It was Lucy Lippard who declared the first false start in her once-definitive and still ground-breaking monograph on Hesse, stating emphatically that this artists mature work begins in the fall of 1965.1 I suppose, in retrospect, it makes sense that Lippard would be drawn to Hesses circles and xs on graph paper, and would respond to Hesses near simul12 taneous working through, and overthrowing of, the language of Minimalism. more reminiscent of summer-camp art projects than avant-garde strategies for expanding the language of sculpture, make a kind of joke of the distinctions between sculpture and drawing. when I discovered the wall reliefs, I felt like I had revealed the missing link between the playful slapstick quality of Duchamps readymades and the erotics of touch and tactility embodied by artists like Yayoi Kusama, Marcel Broodthaers, robert Gober, and rachel whiteread. It is curious to be offered still earlier works, and the nineteen in this exhibition take us back four or five years, to 1960, when Hesse was dutifully painting modest canvases in oil. these works, all produced in New York, were made a year after she completed her graduate studies at the Yale School of Art. She was twenty13

four years old. the difficulty inherent in (re)considering them is not only when to begin the full accounting of Hesses painfully truncated career, but also how to assess, with sensitivity and scale, the work of someone so young. It seems clear to me that one of the more fallible reasons this body of work has been so little studied is that during the late 1960s and through the 1970s painting fell into such ill repute. Exhibited in 2010, when painting is no longer discredited by the most advanced artists of the day, these pictures are available for a close second (or first) look. And what is it we find when we do so? All nineteen of them are intimately scaled, most are rectangular, they are either oil on canvas or oil on Masonite, and they all situate a figure or figures against an emphatically abstract ground. true to what we know of Hesses extraordinary ambition as an artist, at the tender age of twenty-four she seems to have set her sights on none other than willem de Kooning. choosing de Kooning as her primary interlocutor permitted Hesse to explore painting the figure with a strong calligraphic sensibility, reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti and Arshile Gorky as well as de Kooning, while simultaneously placing that drawn figure in the midst of lushly painted abstract ground (pl. I). Indeed, her creamy and sensuous application of paint reinforces my sense that Hesse was interested in the fact that de Kooning remained committed to the possibilities of figuration, and hence the body as both the subject and object of painting; and her thick impasto and her recurrent use of pinks and white flesh tones suggest that she was also riding slipstream on de Koonings making a kind of parity between paint and flesh. for Hesse, this vacillating movement between flesh and paint, line and abstraction, figure and ground produced a series of paintings that seem to stage a kind of existential dilemma. this is perhaps most demonstrable in plate II where we see two pink figures squeezed up against opposite edges of the picture plane, separated by a seemingly unbridgeable gulf, a space intensified by the two different triangles of off-white that make up the paintings background. the painting is much more invested in the space between the two figures than it is in any potentially perspectival space. while this might seem like a students acknowledgment of the flatness of the picture plane, we can also see it as a privileging of the relationship between persons over and above the relationship between people and the space they inhabit. the pink of the figures is surely indebted to de Koonings pervasive manipulation of this color for its bodily affects, and Hesse treats it here as a simultaneous repository of eroticism (look at those thighs!) and alienation (pink is the color used to establish the boundary between figure and space). what feels remarkable about this painting is how early she articulates the problematic of proximity and distancea problem she would continue to explore throughout her life. (for instance, the articulation of line and space in this painting reminds me of Hang Up, 1966 (fig. 3), the two figures sharing a structural similarity to the great ridiculous form suggested by the cord-wrapped steel cable that emerges from and then returns to the frame, creating a hollow void where we have grown to expect pictorial fullness.) I dont think Hesse was a mere formalist (although formal problems and their solutions seemed to occupy her greatly); so, for me, proximity and distance in 14 Hesses work is never merely a problem of foreground and background, or the I. No title, 1960, oil on canvas, 49 1/2 x 49 1/2 inches 15