Eva Hesse

The long-awaited publication of the personal diaries of pioneering American artist Eva Hesse Eva Hesse (1936-1970) is known for her sculptures that made innovative use of industrial and everyday materials. Her diaries and journals, which she kept for the entirety of her life, convey her anxieties, her feelings about family and friends, her quest to be an artist, and the complexities of living in the world. Hesse's biography is well known: her family fled Nazi Germany, her mother committed suicide when Hesse was ten years old, her marriage ended in divorce, and she died at the age of thirty-four from a brain tumor. The diaries featured in this publication begin in 1955 and describe Hesse's time at Yale University, followed by a sojourn in Germany with her husband, Tom Doyle, and her return to New York and a circle of friends that included Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Ryman, Mike Todd, and Paul Thek. Poignant, personal, and full of emotion, these diaries convey Hesse's struggle with the quotidian while striving to become an artist.

Diaries

Barry Rosen

Tamara Bloomberg

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Elisabeth Sussman

Museum Wiesbaden

Indlæg af: Elisabeth Sussman, Renate Petzinger, James Meyer, Briony Fer, Gioia Timpanelli, Julian Bryan-Wilson, Robin Clark, Scott Rothkopf, Michelle Barger og Jill Sterrett

Eva Hesse: Transformationen : die Zeit in Deutschland 1964/65

Sunday, June 21, 1964 "Studio--To date have again done mainly drawings. Coming along. Sometimes I feel they’re good, often I get discouraged. Staying at studio gets a little easier + more pleasant. I usually take break + come home. Tom stays.”---Eva Hesse In 1964--65, Eva Hesse lived with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, in Kettwig-on-the-Ruhr, Germany, at the invitation of a European art collector. During this time, as she did throughout most of her life, Hesse kept diaries and made extensive notations in datebook calendars. These two datebooks, published for the first time as facsimile editions, are accompanied by a third volume that includes an essay on their significance in the artist’s career as well as full transcriptions and annotations. The 1964/65 datebooks impart astonishingly rich personal details about the artist’s life: whom she met and where she traveled, which books she read, and which films and exhibitions she saw and what impression they made on her. Hesse’s notations also reveal invaluable insights into the German art scene of the mid-1960s, her transition from a painter to a sculptor and her often conflicted artistic ambitions, the stresses of her marriage, and the difficulties of returning to Germany, the country that in 1938 she fled with her family to escape Nazi persecution.

Datebooks, 1964/65

Circles and Grids : Published on the Occasion of the Exhibition Eva Hesse Drawing, The Drawing Center, May 6, 2006-July 15, 2006

New Approaches to Ezra Pound

von Sinn u. Wahnsinn

Ezra Pound

Englische und amerikanische Dichtung

Hamburger Kunsthalle

Eva Hesse’s later works are fascinating—not least because of her unusual materials Eva Hesse (1936–1970) is one of the foremost artists of the twentieth century. Born in Hamburg, she immigrated to New York via the Netherlands in 1938. Even though Hesse died of a brain tumor at the age of just thirty-four, she left behind a fascinating, highly individual body of work. In the mid-sixties she began experimenting with new materials that had never before been used to produce art objects, such as polyester, fiberglass, and latex. Hesse’s sculptures, which are now included in the collections of major museums around the world, are unique combinations of complex and occasionally contradictory qualities, such as hard and soft, fragile and substantial, abstract and figuratively evocative. This lavishly illustrated book concentrates on sculptures and drawings from the years 1966 to 1970, the last phase of the American artist’s work. -- Publisher’s description.

One More Than One

Eva Hesse

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