In a 1970 interview with the art historian Cindy Nemser, Eva Hesse succinctly described her position as an artist.“I don’t mind being miles from everybody else,” she said confidently, just months before she died. “The best artists are those who have stood alone and who can be separated.”This self-assurance was not something that came easy for Hesse. Throughout her diaries, which will be published by Yale University Press in May, she is constantly wrestling with her own feelings about her work. “In painting I get so close then change, destroy alter — whether it is just a particular painting — or a whole idea,” she wrote, in typically staccato prose, in 1964. “It is never quite seen through to the end. I get distrustful of myself and renege, cancel out. To be able to finish one, a series and stand ground — this is me this is what I want to say.”In the same diary entry, Hesse explicitly links her work and life. “In personal relationship too in one form or another I would destroy or take my respite. Boredom dissatisfaction with other person were defense mechanisms — they made anything real prohibitive.”It’s easy to understand why Hesse would be prone to prohibiting the real. Born in Hamburg in 1936, at the age of 2 she was sent, along with her older sister, to the Netherlands via Kindertransport in an attempt to flee Nazi Germany. Six months passed and then the two girls were reunited with their parents — the family eventually immigrated to New York City in 1939. In 1944, her parents separated; a year later, Hesse’s mother killed herself by jumping off the roof of a building. After attending Pratt, the Cooper Union, and later Yale (where she studied with Josef Albers), with a stint working for Seventeen magazine in between, Hesse met the artist Tom Doyle, with whom she fell in love. A year later they were married, and four years later they were divorced — the same year her father died.But despite it all, Hesse kept working. “She never let anything stop her,” said Karen Shapiro, the producer of “Eva Hesse,” a documentary about the artist’s life that opened at Film Forum in New York this week. “Everything was there to stop her, at every stage in her life, and she didn’t let that happen. She kept going.” The film mainly focuses on Hesse’s most active period, the decade between 1960 and 1970, when she was in New York. Using excerpts from Hesse’s dairies both sonically (read by the actor Selma Blair) and visually, the film takes an intimate approach to telling the artist’s story. Additional interviews with artist friends from the period (including Robert and Sylvia Mangold, Mike Todd, Richard Serra, and Dan Graham), collectors, curators, and family provide context for her work and personal relationships, which were often intertwined.“Her life had plenty of drama,” Marcie Begleiter, the film’s director, said. “But we’re talking about this person because of the great art, how it’s still vital today. The uniqueness and newness of what she did. That’s why we look at the life.”In fact, the year Hesse was divorced and her father died was the same year her career was launched. In 1966, her work was included in two major group shows, “Abstract Inflationism and Stuffed Expressionism” at the Graham Gallery and “Eccentric Abstraction” at the Fischbach Gallery. The latter, curated by the critic Lucy Lippard, a friend of Hesse who appears in the film, featured some of her best-known work, such as “Ingeminate,” 1965, “Several,” 1965, and “Metronomic Irregularity II,” 1966. Begleiter first became aware of Hesse through reproductions of these now canonical works in books while in grad school for studio art. “I was so compelled by the hardness and softness, the rational and the absurd irrational,” she said. “They are serious and they are humorous. They combine — that’s what good art does, it doesn’t stay in one place. It moves.” Later, after reading Lippard’s 1976 book about Hesse, which quoted from the artist’s diaries, Begleiter became interested in Hesse’s life and realized there was a link between it and her work.After studying Hesse’s papers, which are housed at Oberlin, Begleiter wrote a play, “Meditations: Eva Hesse,” which was staged in 2010. That project brought Begleiter and Shapiro together, and they decided to make a film about Hesse’s life. “We knew that we were both passionate about it, that the work and the woman were really compelling,” Begleiter said. “But we were surprised in talking to all the people who knew Eva how much she was still a part of their lives.”“They would talk in an interview and it felt like Eva was in the other room,” Shapiro added. “That’s how present she is in their lives.”Hesse’s most important relationship, and maybe the most complicated, was with the artist Sol LeWitt. He is often mentioned in her diaries, and their letters, which are prominently featured in the film (the voice of LeWitt is performed by the actor Patrick Kennedy). “Even though [the relationship] was complicated on some level, it was not on another level,” Shapiro said. “They were dear friends. That’s what made it so special. They could say anything to each other.” In many of the letters, LeWitt actively pushes Hesse, encouraging her not to stop, to keep working. “We didn’t have the opportunity to interview Sol for the film, but we needed his presence there,” Shapiro said. (LeWitt died in 2007.)Compiling all this information into what Begleiter refers to as a “portrait” of Hesse took almost four years. “There were times during the process where Karen and I looked at each other not sure how we would move forward,” Begleiter said. But they only had to look to their subject for inspiration. “It was thinking about Eva — we were committed to finishing the film for her. But also, with everything she dealt with — it was tougher stuff than this.”
↧