5 Fast Facts: Eva Hesse

Blog Category:  5 Fast Facts
A cluttered table is strewn with various objects including books, fruit, and a potted plant. The lines are dark and smeared with intense areas of light and shadow.
September 28, 2022
9/28/22

Impress your friends with five fast facts about Eva Hesse (1936–1970), whose work is represented in NMWA’s collection. The museum recently acquired a third work by Hesse, Still Life (1957).

A cluttered table is strewn with various objects including books, fruit, and a potted plant. The lines are dark and smeared with intense areas of light and shadow.
Eva Hesse, Still Life, 1957; Lithograph on woven paper, 18 x 21 3/4 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; Photo by Lee Stalsworth

1. Early Challenges

Born in 1936 to an Orthodox Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany, Eva Hesse escaped Nazi Germany at age two with her older sister, aboard a Kindertransport train to the Netherlands. She reunited with her family in England before emigrating to New York City in 1939.

2. Quoted in Seventeen Magazine

At 18, Hesse worked as a part-time staffer at Seventeen magazine. Its September 1954 issue printed her thoughts on art: “For me, being an artist means to see, to observe, to investigate. […] I paint what I see and feel to express life in all its reality and movement.”

A white cube is seen at an angle, roughly painted on a white background. The cube has a speckled surface, with neutral colors including blue, yellow, and gray outlining and appearing within the white surface.
Eva Hesse, Accession, 1967; Gouache and pencil on paper, 15 3/8 x 11 1/8 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; © The Estate of Eva Hesse, Hauser & Wirth Zürich London; Photo by Lee Stalsworth

3. Industrial Inspiration

In 1965, Hesse and her then-husband Tom Doyle (1928–2016) moved to Germany for an artist residency with industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt. Working in Scheidt’s abandoned textile factory, Hesse became inspired by the machinery and industrial materials left behind, such as glass, string, rubber, and fiberglass. 

Short, knotted cords, arranged in a symmetrical 9-by-9 grid, emerge from a square panel and hang down. Thick, matte paint in a silvery gray color coats the entire piece, adding rough texture to the panel and stiffening the cords into positions that cast irregular shadows across the work’s surface.
Eva Hesse, Study for Sculpture, 1967; Varnish, liquitex, Sculp-metal, and cord on Masonite, 10 x 10 x 1 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of Wallace and Wilhelmina Holladay; © The Estate of Eva Hesse, Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

4. A Matter of Time

The materials Hesse used in her sculptures didn’t always last. Her latex sculpture Sans III can no longer be displayed due to deterioration. For Hesse, using her desired medium was more important than the longevity of the artworks. She once said, “Life doesn’t last; art doesn’t last.”      

5. Untimely Death and Legacy

Hesse died in 1970 of cancer. Though her career was short, she left a lasting legacy. While she never called herself a feminist artist, she advocated for and inspired women artists including Petah Coyne (b. 1963), whose work is also represented in NMWA’s collection.

See Study for Sculpture (1967) while it’s on loan at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., through August 2023. 

About the Author

—Michelle Koppl is the education assistant and Adrienne L. Gayoso is the senior educator at the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

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