{"id":29786,"date":"2018-08-24T03:36:03","date_gmt":"2018-08-24T10:36:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=29786"},"modified":"2018-08-22T14:16:02","modified_gmt":"2018-08-22T21:16:02","slug":"hesse-driven-to-be-an-artist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2018\/08\/24\/hesse-driven-to-be-an-artist\/","title":{"rendered":"Hesse driven to be an artist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eva Hesse is the subject of an Aug. 31 episode of PBS\u2019s American Masters<\/em> series. (photo by Herman Landshoff)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Eva Hesse\u2019s childhood was a rollercoaster of displacement, reunion, destabilization and trauma. In the journals she kept as a teenager and adult, the German-born, New York-based artist recognized the source of her chronic insecurity. Yet, paradoxically, and remarkably, her work evinces no anguish or suffering, and no need to expose or extinguish demons from the past. From her early, brightly coloured drawings and paintings, through the textured, abstract sculptures and installations that made her reputation, her art comprises a series of experiments in forward-looking forms of expression.<\/p>\n

Eva Hesse <\/em>screens Aug. 31 (check local listings) in PBS\u2019s American Masters<\/em> series. A palpable labour of love, Marcie Begleiter\u2019s densely detailed 2016 documentary is a soup-to-nuts portrait that encompasses the artist\u2019s personal life and times \u2013 New York in the 1960s \u2013 along with her professional development and impact.<\/p>\n

Begleiter\u2019s diligence notwithstanding, Eva Hesse<\/em> never delivers the aha moment, where the person and her work snap together, and we understand exactly how Hesse\u2019s defining childhood experiences informed her work. I\u2019ll venture, though, that Holocaust survivors, and children of survivors, will identify with Hesse\u2019s internalized struggles, and read between the lines of her journals and the recollections of her older sister, Helen.<\/p>\n

In 1962, the art-school grad fell in love with and married a hard-partying Irish-American sculptor named Tom Doyle. Because her father insisted that she marry a Jew, Doyle willingly converted to Judaism.<\/p>\n

Doyle, who was the more advanced and accomplished artist at the time, was offered a residency in Germany a couple years later, and the couple ended up living there for more than a year. Their relationship fractured abroad, in part because of his drinking and flirting, but Hesse made a major leap in her art practice from painting to sculpture.<\/p>\n

Eva Hesse<\/em>, which generally unfolds chronologically, uses this period to flash back to Hesse\u2019s chaotic childhood. Born in Hamburg in 1936, she and Helen were sent on a Kindertransport to the Netherlands in 1938. When their parents left Germany several months later, the family reunited and fled Europe for England and, in short order, New York. They were the only members of the family to escape the Holocaust.<\/p>\n

When Hesse\u2019s mother, who suffered from depression and mental illness, learned in 1946 that her parents had died in the camps, she jumped from a roof to her death. (Hesse\u2019s father had separated and remarried by this time.)<\/p>\n

While the documentary is continually interested in its subject\u2019s mental state, neither the filmmaker nor Hesse\u2019s devoted artist friends are especially keen to psychoanalyze her. Perhaps she was scarred by the abandonment of her parents as a toddler, though one could also understand her self-doubt, given the establishment of male gallery owners, museum curators and critics.<\/p>\n

Which brings us to another fundamental paradox of Hesse, namely that the insecurities she voiced in her journals, and in letters to artist, mentor and close friend Sol LeWitt, were matched by an unwavering drive to be an artist, an adherence to her muse (wherever it took her) and the awareness that she was pretty darn good at her work.<\/p>\n

In fact, Hesse was an extrovert and a lot of fun, by most accounts. From the outset, Eva Hesse<\/em> is plainly not a study of a tortured artist. Nor was she unrecognized and unappreciated in her own lifetime, for she had a major solo show and made the cover of Artforum<\/em> before she died of a brain tumour in 1970. She was 34 years old.<\/p>\n

Michael Fox<\/strong> is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eva Hesse is the subject of an Aug. 31 episode of PBS\u2019s American Masters series. (photo by Herman Landshoff) Eva Hesse\u2019s childhood was a rollercoaster of displacement, reunion, destabilization and trauma. In the journals she kept as a teenager and adult, the German-born, New York-based artist recognized the source of her chronic insecurity. Yet, paradoxically, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":29763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[2466,8320,53,8321],"class_list":["post-29786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-art","tag-eva-hesse","tag-holocaust","tag-pbs"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}