“Eva Hesse” – Ever more [MOVIE REVIEW]
Eva Hesse with Joseph Albers, at Yale circa 1958. Photographer unknown. Eva Hesse. A film by Marcie Begleiter. A Zeitgeist Films release
I almost missed the fabulous new documentary “Eva Hesse” directed by Marcie Begleiter. It had been sent to me only recently and it was in the back of my mind as something to get around to until a fateful visit, just yesterday, to the new Hauser Wirth and Schimmel Gallery in the downtown LA arts district.
In a reconstructed abandoned flour mill, HWS has torn down walls and reconfigured the space into separate rooms, each little museum spaces unto themselves. For their inaugural show, “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947-2016” they deliver a comprehensive curated exhibit that introduces relatively unknown artists, artists who have slipped from consciousness as well as famous household names (or at least they are for dilettantes like me) like Louise Nevelson, Claire Falkenstein, Ruth Asawa and Louise Bourgeois.. Among the best is an artist undergoing a resurgence of interest, Eva Hesse. Bingo! The need to know more about this woman who died two years after creating the two fabulous pieces in this show, “Augment” and “Aught,” propelled me home to immerse myself in the documentary “Eva Hesse. ”
Another film that is more autobiography than biography was created by Marcie Begleiter who has spent her professional career as a story boardist in film and television. Begleiter understands how to present the art and create a framework so Eva, who died in 1970, can tell her own story through archival footage, personal diaries and interviews with her sister, friends and fellow artists, among whom are Richard Serra and Sol Lewitt.
A beauty with a haunted past, Eva was single-minded in her approach to life. She was driven to create and started early, learning the nuts and bolts of the craft of drawing at Pratt Institute before deciding, at the age of 17 to go her own way. Not entirely supportive of her goals, her father insisted that she find a paying job and the audacious teenager rode her bicycle to the offices of Seventeen and convinced them that they should hire her. She eventually acquiesced to further paternal pressure and enrolled at Yale where she had the great good fortune to study under Josef Albers, a former Bauhaus principal and, like Eva, a German refugee. His color theory was clearly as much an influence on her work, as it had been on other former students like Cy Twombly and Richard Rauschenberg.
Although talent was evident from the beginning, Eva did not emerge as a major independent voice in the male-dominated post-abstract impressionism world until she discovered new materials just gaining a foothold outside their industrial use – fiberglass, polymers and latex. Entranced with the dimensionality offered by sculpture, she began incorporating found objects into her water colors transforming their meaning and depth. Working with fiberglass layered over paper objects allowed her to experiment with shapes that appeared malleable but took on rigid form. Latex overlays on colored paper gave texture and movement to something that heretofore had been static. Eva was playing with the big boys and had the following to prove it. Her one-woman show at the Guggenheim in New York encompassed “all the rings” of that Frank Lloyd Wright spiral structure.
But Eva tells her own story best and the framework that Begleiter gives it is exceptionally interesting for she sets the scene with a beautiful teenager who wanted nothing more than to live and breathe art, constantly visiting museums and inhaling what she found within their walls. Once the viewer is immersed, and impressed, with the depth of Eva’s nascent talent, Begleiter then reveals the ghosts that informed her justifiable neuroses.
“Eva Hesse” is a beautiful film about a beautiful artist who died far before her time and yet is as contemporary and vital today as she was then. See it for the girl but stay for the art.
Opening Friday May 13 at the Laemmle Monica Film Center in Santa Monica.