Biography as Destiny: Eva Hesse at the Jewish Museum

Is biography destiny? “Eva Hesse:Sculpture,” a starkly dramatic exhibition showing at the Jewish Museum through September 13, unabashedly claims that it is, as Hesse’s Jewish biography allows the curators to take her and her oeuvre and sculpt her into a Jewish artist. The inclusion of a vast amount of family memorabilia, much of it documenting a traditional Jewish life into adulthood, constitutes both a large part of the exhibition and the justification for showing works at the Jewish museum that have neither Jewish subject nor obvious Jewish content.

Hesse died at the age of 34 in 1970, leaving behind diaries, photographs and interviews, and having just produced some of her most astonishing sculptural works during the period in which she was battling brain cancer. The thoughts and words of the artist herself provide the clues as to how, and why, she came to be an innovative sculptor of innovative materials and works that challenged conventional artistic norms. Her experiences – as Jew, immigrant, refugee, and survivor of family trauma – each in its own way affected Hesse’s world view and artistic goals. Hesse’s early exploration of new modes of sculptural expression through the use of mundane materials – latex and other rubber, surgical hose, fiberglass – whose resulting forms were deliberately unpredictable, is consonant with a persona developed out of as her sense of displacement. The narrative texts that accompany the exhibition emphasize the artist’s belief that “her art and her life were interconnected.”

Hesse was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1936, the second of two daughters of a middle class couple already feeling the effects of Nazi laws against the Jews. While her mother Ruth came from a non-religious family in Hameln, her father, Wilhelm (later William), a lawyer, was committed to the Orthodox way of life and was involved with the religious community in Hamburg. In 1938, as a result of the increased Nazi threat, Eva and her sister Helen were sent on a Kindertransport to Holland and lodged in a Catholic school. They were reunited with their parents after a relatively short, but nevertheless traumatic, separation. The family eventually made their way to New York City, settling in the growing German Jewish neighborhood of Washington Heights. Helen Hesse Charash, the artist’s sister, emphasizes in materials included in the exhibition how much their environment was suffused with Jewish ritual and community.

Hesse’s Jewishness is further emphasized in the detailed Tagebucher (diaristic photo-albums) William Hesse made for his daughters, which show the family’s observance of Jewish holidays and Eva’s attendance at afternoon Hebrew schools and at an Orthodox summer camp where this writer met her in the summer of 1949. I recall a dark-eyed melancholy girl whose sorrowful history made her seem to her bunk-mates like a fairy- tale victim, evil stepmother and all. (At that time and age, we were hardly knowledgeable about the extent of the Holocaust or about the traumas of those who managed to escape.) She was recognizably different from the rest of her carefree American-born bunk-mates, which could account for her early feelings of being an outsider.

As I followed her career during her lifetime and the exhibitions of her work since her death (including a major retrospective at the Tate Gallery in London in 2002) I was often provoked to think how little we really know our friends or can envision their potential. Of course, much of Hesse’s intense pain and stress was due to the difficulties encountered by many refugees. But in her case the trauma was aggravated by her mother Ruth’s manic-depressive illness that had already been manifest in Germany and was now intensified by their new living conditions and concern over the fate of family members left behind in Germany. Ultimately Ruth moved out of the home, the parents divorced, her father remarried, and soon after — shortly before Eva’s 10th birthday in January 1946 — her mother committed suicide. Eva Hesse’s own emotional stability would be a life-long concern. Despite emotional support from her father and early recognition of her talent by fellow artists and critics, Hesse suffered from panic attacks, insecurities over her abilities, anxieties over her status as a woman, woman artist and wife. In a lengthy 1970 interview with Cindy Nemser when she was already quite ill ( published in Art Talk), Hesse stated “…in my life – maybe because my life has been so traumatic, so absurd –there hasn’t been one normal, happy thing. I’m the easiest person to make happy and the easiest person to make sad because I’ve gone through so much.” Her personal depictions invite a psychoanalytic gloss, which critics and curators have been happy to provide.

To me, however, the attempts by art historians and critics to link Hesse’s art to her experience of the Holocaust seem stretched. Indeed, over and above her artistic production, Hesse’s written and verbal legacy affirms that she was concerned with intellectual and philosophical aspects of the act of creation — not with psychological catharsis. Nimser quotes Hesse as saying “when I work, it’s only the abstract qualities that I’m working with, which is to say the material, the form it’s going to take, the size, the scale, the positioning ….I don’t value the totality of the image on these abstract or esthetic points. For me it’s a total image that has to do with me and life.”

In 1961, Hesse spent 15 months in Germany with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle (they would divorce as soon as they returned to New York). This was the turning point for Hesse. Doyle suggested to her that she try her hand at sculpture using the materials (“junk”) that were lying around in the unused factory that they were using as studios. Electrical cord, plaster, string, wire, steel – all became the elements of her works and eventually expanded to include rubber, fiberglass, plexiglass, and latex as well as other industrial materials. Hesse employed papier mâché techniques to create her sculptural pieces, all of which had specific placement in space in the artist’s mind. She was also rather obsessive about titles and purchased a thesaurus to play with conceptual words: “Accession”, “Accretion”, “Repetition”, “Schema”, “Sequel” “Connection” “Several”, “Compass” hint at Hesse’s interest in movement, change, and ephemerality.

Each of the works in the exhibition demonstrates different aspects of the artist’s interests in materials. “Ringaround Arosie,” an early piece, uses raised forms of papier-maché wound cloth-covered electrical wire. “Accretion” consists of fifty tubes made of fiberglass and coated in resin. A complicated wrapping of paper tubes that are propped against a wall manage to seem both identical and individualized at the same time. “Schema” (shown here) is composed of 144 Spalding rubber balls covered in latex on a grid that relates to a rigid minimalist idiom. “Sequel” breaks the mold by giving the arrangement a randomness. At one point Hesse decided to hang her sculptures from the ceiling, as opposed to those deliberately grounded to emphasize their gravitational aspect.

Hesse’s statements at the time of her 1968 landmark exhibition entitled Chain Polymers (both latex and fiberglass are long-chain polymers – chemical compounds) at the Fischbach Gallery in New York sound almost Kabbalistic: “I would like the work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions.” Or, “It is the unknown quantity from which and where I want to go.” Or, “In its simplistic stand it achieves its own identity.” Or “It is something, it is nothing.”

Despite the curatorial attempts to make some durable sense of her work, it is the random, chaotic aspects that dominate — along with the sense of fragility. Critics have described some of her pieces as organic and anthropomorphic, but Hesse’s achievement lies less in their recognizable elements than in the confrontation with abstract, non representational forms that exist for her in a non-present universe. Seeing Hesse’s work today does not startle; when it was first exhibited it certainly did.

Still, the viewer today can still feel a sense of discovery in Hesse’s work, of seeing in imperfect forms and shaped objects daring feats of creativity in the imaginative fabrication of materials, use of scale and space. The pieces convey complexity and ingenuity, inspiring a contemplative interaction with the works.

There is, however, an atmosphere of memorial tribute in this exhibition: an homage to the artist that is somewhat oppressive. Because of the emphasis on her tragically short life and her personal misfortunes, the exhibit is less of a critical assessment of her art than an episode of "Behind the Sculpture." As for Hesse’s Jewishness, the artistic impulse of creatio ex nihilo may or may not have been consciously Jewish, but the sculptures in the current exhibition, beautifully installed in the museum’s comparatively limited space, continue to captivate, perhaps because of her particular Jewish experience — or perhaps regardless of it.

Of course, if Hesse’s biography is not her destiny, then this is an exhibition at a Jewish museum that is devoid of Jewish artistic content. By way of response to this critique, I offer this excerpt from the 1976 catalogue The Jewish Experience in the Art of the 20th Century, an exhibit which coincided with the United States Bicentennial Celebration. In the prefatory remarks that could have referred to Eva Hesse, philanthropist Joy G. Ungerleider, the curator, wrote: “Ambiguity in defining the Jewish experience raises numerous possibilities…. Jewish artists have been drawn to the mainstream of 20th century art. Some will regard this participation as representing alienation from their Jewish heritage – others will regard it as an affirmation. The Jewish Museum believes that this is an historical phenomenon worthy of documentation.”

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The exhibition will be at the Jewish Museum until September 17th. Exhibition Curators are Elizabeth Sussman and Fred Wasserman. The Jewish Museum is located at 1109 Fifth Avenue, corner 92nd Street in New York City. For the first time in its history the museum has Saturday hours (with no admission charge). For more information, please log onto www.thejewishmuseum.org or call 212 423-3200. To see the online gallery click here