A vision in the extreme

New York —  ASSESSMENTS of Eva Hesse’s work don’t always start with a retelling of her tragically compelling story, but they invariably get there. Biography inflects our experience of her work. It reveals, but it also inhibits.

The amount of pain and loss packed into Hesse’s 34 years (bookended by a childhood flight from Nazi Germany and a fatal brain tumor and in between the separation of her parents, mental illness and death of her mother, and her own failed marriage) informs her work’s absences and rawness, its acts of negation. Hesse’s life story evinces hushed reverence, and that aura of awe seeps onto the work. The sober tone, however, fits uneasily. It muffles Hesse’s often flagrant humor, her love for absurd, ridiculous forms. But who can laugh at a life like this?

For that matter, who can criticize? Not every scrap of paper that Hesse (1936-70) touched carries significance, but curators and admirers find that aura of awe hard to dispel. Respect for Hesse’s passion and fearlessness devolves into a kind of fetishizing of both the woman and her art.

Two exhibitions of Hesse’s work running concurrently in New York grapple with (and in part succumb to) these rich challenges embedded in art historical scholarship. The shows, at the Jewish Museum and the Drawing Center, are a bit of an event for the city where Hesse lived most of her life. (Born in Hamburg, she and her sister were put on a transport for Jewish children to the Netherlands in 1938, reunited with their parents a few months later, awaited visas for several months in London and finally reached New York in mid-1939.)

New York hasn’t had this much Hesse on view since a memorial exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 1972. A 2002 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was originally conceived for the Whitney, but both its curator and slot on the exhibition schedule were sacrificed during former director Maxwell Anderson’s controversial tenure.

The current shows don’t add up to a retrospective, but they do present, with some depth, the fascinating extremity of Hesse’s vision. She strove, she said, to make “non art, non connotive [sic], non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non nothing....” The works on view in the Jewish Museum’s “Eva Hesse: Sculpture” take shape on the floor, the wall, and hang from the ceiling, but always in defiance of conventional precepts of beauty, order, proportion.

Short open cylinders of sallow fiberglass and polyester resin cluster casually on the floor like rumpled loiterers in “Repetition Nineteen III” (1968). In “Sans II,” from the same year, a rectangular box form also in fiberglass and resin, mounted on the wall, repeats in two long rows spanning more than 35 feet. The boxes open out like empty carapaces, crusty and brittle. In both works, deviant idiosyncrasy overrides industrial modularity.

The Jewish Museum show revolves around the body of work Hesse exhibited in 1968 at the Fischbach Gallery in New York. It was her only solo exhibition of sculptures during her lifetime, though her work appeared in several notable group shows in the mid- to late ‘60s with others (like Richard Serra, Richard Tuttle and Alan Saret) who were also using minimalism’s seriality, repetition and intellectual order as a springboard toward forms more contingent and viscerally commanding.

An untitled piece left unfinished at the time of Hesse’s death closes the show with a profound gasp. Like Robert Morris and Barry Le Va, who were working at the time with heaps and scatters of felt, Hesse had been incorporating chance and gravity more and more in her last years. Both factor prominently in this hanging web of latex-dipped rope. Twisted, knotted and tangled, the piece is a glimpse into golden-hued chaos, an umbilical thicket of mesmerizing, abject beauty.

Curators Elisabeth Sussman of the Whitney Museum of American Art and Fred Wasserman of the Jewish Museum wisely segregated the rich trove of biographical material in the show in a separate gallery. The most poignant and relevant of its contents are the “Tagebucher” (diaries) that Hesse’s father kept, chronicling the first 10 years of his daughters’ lives.

Hesse lived much of her internal and artistic life on paper. She shared her father’s predilection for keeping detailed accounts. Among more than 150 works in “Eva Hesse Drawing,” at the Drawing Center, are lists of sculpture titles with their meanings, notations regarding measurement and materials, and more. Much is instructive, since process was integral to the meaning of Hesse’s work, but a bit of editing (by curators Sussman and former Drawing Center director Catherine de Zegher) would have tightened the show’s focus.

The exhibition (which will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in August) traces the entirety of Hesse’s compressed 10-year career and also dips to the mid-’50s when she was a student at Cooper Union and then Yale. In the 1960s, Hesse shifted from automatic drawing -- pictographic, biomorphic, infused with the energy of Abstract Expressionism -- to a cooler, more austere approach dominated by the grid, concentric rectangles and circles, realized in monochrome. There are whiffs of Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb early on and Agnes Martin in the later years.

The Drawing Center show also contains several sculptures -- weird, invigorating things with dangling extrusions and wrapped bulges. “Ingeminate” (1965), a kinky charmer, links two exaggerated phalluses (actually balloons wrapped in painted cord) with a sinuous rubber hose.

When Hesse veered from the minimalist straight and narrow, it was toward the bodily and sexual, the ungainly, bereft and ludicrous. She thrived on contradiction -- using sophisticated industrial materials to make works of frumpy humility, for instance. In keeping with her own embrace of the messy and absurd, these shows (and their hefty catalogs) serve up a hearty melange of the banal and the wondrous, the tragic and the comic.