Eva Hesse: A Retrospective

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Eva Hesse has long been recognized by artists and critics as a sculptor of exceptional talent and prodigious influence. The public has rarely seen her work, however, because its fragility has made it difficult to exhibit. This richly illustrated and critically interpretive book enables a wide audience to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement and the legacy of her art. Hesse was an expressionist in an age of minimalism. Against the predominantly impersonal visual modes of the sixties, she insisted on the subjective qualities of her art. She opened up new frontiers in sculpture--in form, content, and material--and helped to change the way artists, critics, and viewers look at art. Hesse's career also coincided with the incubation period of modern feminism, and her art stands as a courageous and complex effort to articulate a female identity. The book includes essays by five noted authorities: Linda Norden discusses Hesse's early career in New York following her years as a student of Josef Albers; Maria Kreutzer writes on Hesse's work in Germany in the mid-sixties, when she moved from two to three dimensions; Robert Storr places Hesse in relation to the central American artistic concerns of the 1960s, focusing on her links to such artists as Jasper Johns, Sol LeWitt, and Claes Oldenburg; Anna Chave analyzes Hesse's mature work in light of contemporary feminist theory on authorship and subjectivity; and Maurice Berger examines Hesse's radical and personal approach to the sculptural object following her rejection of painting. In addition, Helen Cooper draws on the artist's extensive diaries, notebooks, and correspondence for a chronology detailed as much as possible in Hesse's own words. This beautiful book, which brings together Hesse's most important sculptures, reliefs, and her rarely seen drawings and early paintings, is the catalogue for an exhibition of Hesse's work that opens at the Yale University Art Gallery in April 1992 and travels to th