Assailing the Circle
Eva Hesse's "Repetition Nineteen III" (1968), an installation of 19 fiberglass and polyester, oval, ochre forms could easily represent Jewish ritual yarzheit candles memorializing the artist's sad life. At age three, Eva and her sister Helen boarded a children's train from their native Hamburg to escape Nazi pogroms. They later reunited with their parents and lived in Washington Heights, but Eva's mother committed suicide shortly after divorcing. Eva was only 10. Eva also died prematurely from a brain tumor at age 34.
Hesse's work is currently enjoying a posthumous revival. The Jewish Museum is exhibiting Hesse's sculpture, while the Drawing Center is showing her drawings. "No Title" (1966), a black ink wash and pencil drawing, typifies the Drawing Center inventory. The image shows circles-each of which contains smaller circles that seem to merge tree bark rings and hypnotic spirals-colored with variegated washes. In her catalog essay, exhibit co-curator Catherine de Zegher calls the circular forms endless. In her diaries, Hesse saw this endlessness as autobiographic. "I go in circles. Maybe therefore my drawings."
In artistic statements worthy of Beckett or Jarry, Hesse calls the circles' repetitiveness absurd. "If something is absurd, it's more absurd to repeat it."
As a Jewish, abstract, woman artist, Hesse has been everyone's poster child despite her insistence of her work's meaninglessness. But more than creating feminist drawing, Hesse's work strives for the visual Holy Grail that Picasso pursued: adult's child drawings. Just like a child's drawing is often incomprehensible to the literalist adult until the child explains the grand pictorial narrative, Hesse's images are perhaps best conceived as blueprints for something bigger.