by Sue Hubbard
What is the purpose and function of art? The work of Eva Hesse challenges us to ask this question. Her history has been well documented. Born in Hamburg, in 1936, to a family of observant Jews, she was, at the age of two, put on a Kindertransport arriving first in Holland, then England and, finally, in America in 1939. A sense of tenuousness and the impermanence of things colours her work. The balls of screwed paper, the bits of flimsy gauze, mesh and cloth are like whispers rather than assertions, thought processes made physical, rather than finished objects. Her life was short. At the age of 34, when living in New York, she was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour that cut short her career as a sculptor just as it was getting underway. The body of work she left was remarkable. Poetic, anxious and intense it made manifest her inner, often turbulent emotional life. A writer of diaries, autobiography was the base note of her work.
Like the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton the trauma of Hesse's early childhood strongly affected her emotional development, as did her parents' separation and divorce, and her mother's subsequent suicide in 1945. These events left her insecure and anxious, so that in 1954 she made a decision to enter therapy. Her subsequent analysis had a profound effect on her work as she began to examine herself more closely. “I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is an essence, a soul…. In my inner soul, art and life are inseparable.” It is, also, not implausible to consider that on some level she must also have been haunted by the ‘what might have beens’ that would surely have befallen her if she had failed to leave Hamburg in 1936 and faced the fate of many other Jews of her generation. The ghost of the holocaust, as well as her own family traumas, shadows her work.
Hesse's creative talent had been evident since childhood. At the age of 16 she graduated from the New York School of Industrial Arts, later attending the Pratt Institute of Design. But by December 1953 she had dropped out to study figure drawing at the Art Students’ League, whilst also working as a layout artist for Seventeen magazine. Then, in 1957, she graduated from Cooper Union in New York, going on to study at Yale with the assistance of a Norfolk Fellowship.
There she worked as a painter, studying colour theory under Joseph Albers. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism her work, during the five years from 1960 to 1965, was mostly small, and intensely personal. Her powerful drawings, with their circular and container like shapes, anticipated her later sculptural configurations; her interest in the metaphors of inside and outside, of what is contained and what is left open ended.