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Hollis Taggart
Eva Hesse
Landscape Forms
30 x 24 in. (76.2 x 61 cm)
description
This early rare work, Landscape Forms, was executed in 1959, the year Eva Hesse graduated from Yale School of Art, where she had studied abstraction with Josef Albers. Albers considered the young Hesse a gifted colorist, discerning true precocity. By 1961, Hesse was painting ambitiously large-scale abstractions, some over eight feet in width. (1) In 1959, the year she created this work, Hesse elaborated her artistic philosophy in an essay submitted at Yale: “The Abstract Expressionist attempts to define a deeply-rooted bond between himself and nature and to evoke this kind of union between himself and his painting.” In Landscape Forms, we witness Hesse attempting to work out this “union,” as she filters a landscape through an abstract language, or what she calls, in the same essay, a “subjective expression of feeling.” The expressionist streak characterizing her later sculptures is first perceivable in her early abstract paintings such as this present work. The work, which appears as an early entry in the Catalogue Raisonné, is also documented in Hesse's papers on deposit at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College.
Best known for her highly original sculptural installations that engage soft materials such as latex and textiles, German-born American artist Eva Hesse (1936-1970) was one of the most influential artists of the 1960s. Her artistic trajectory began at Cooper Union and Yale University in the late 1950s, where Hesse identified strongly with Abstract Expressionist modes of painting, particularly the works of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. (2)
Hesse’s death at age 34 cut short a promising, radical career that transformed the art world in the span of only a decade. Lending psychological valences to the Minimalist tenets of simplified shapes, primacy of line, and limited color palette, Hesse’s works often incorporated unstable, ephemeral elements, and helped spawn the Postminialist style in the 1960s. Hesse's work can be found in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Tate Gallery; Jewish Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
1. Kirsten Swenson, “Eva Hesse, Abstract Expressionist Painter,” Journal of Art History 83:2 (April 2014).
2. Ibid.
Best known for her highly original sculptural installations that engage soft materials such as latex and textiles, German-born American artist Eva Hesse (1936-1970) was one of the most influential artists of the 1960s. Her artistic trajectory began at Cooper Union and Yale University in the late 1950s, where Hesse identified strongly with Abstract Expressionist modes of painting, particularly the works of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning. (2)
Hesse’s death at age 34 cut short a promising, radical career that transformed the art world in the span of only a decade. Lending psychological valences to the Minimalist tenets of simplified shapes, primacy of line, and limited color palette, Hesse’s works often incorporated unstable, ephemeral elements, and helped spawn the Postminialist style in the 1960s. Hesse's work can be found in numerous collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Tate Gallery; Jewish Museum; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.
1. Kirsten Swenson, “Eva Hesse, Abstract Expressionist Painter,” Journal of Art History 83:2 (April 2014).
2. Ibid.
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