Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse was only thirty-four when brain cancer abruptly ended her lifes work. Yet her painting and sculpture have proved influential far beyond their initial impact on the art world of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lucy Lippards Eva Hesse combines biography and criticism, formal analysis and psychological readings, to present a complete portrait of the life and work of this complex and compelling artist. } As Lippard points out, Hesses use of obsessive repetition in her works served to increase and exaggerate the absurdity she saw in her life. In many ways, her works were psychic models, as Robert Smithson has said, of a very interior person. In pioneering the use of soft materials, her sculptures betrayed her awareness of the manner in which her experience as a woman altered her art and career. Although she died before feminism affected the art world to any great extent, her major works have since become talismans for succeeding generations of women artists. Eva Hesse was designed by Hesses friends and colleagues Sol LeWitt and Pat Stier; her sculptures, drawings, and paintings are reproduced and discussed; and the text includes numerous quotations from her diaries. First published in 1976 but long out-of-print, this classic text is both an insightful critical analysis and a tribute to an artist whose genius has become increasingly apparent with the passage of time. }