Eva Hesse Book order

The long-awaited publication of the personal diaries of pioneering American artist Eva Hesse Eva Hesse (1936-1970) is known for her sculptures that made innovative use of industrial and everyday materials. Her diaries and journals, which she kept for the entirety of her life, convey her anxieties, her feelings about family and friends, her quest to be an artist, and the complexities of living in the world. Hesse's biography is well known: her family fled Nazi Germany, her mother committed suicide when Hesse was ten years old, her marriage ended in divorce, and she died at the age of thirty-four from a brain tumor. The diaries featured in this publication begin in 1955 and describe Hesse's time at Yale University, followed by a sojourn in Germany with her husband, Tom Doyle, and her return to New York and a circle of friends that included Sol LeWitt, Mel Bochner, Lucy Lippard, Robert Mangold and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Ryman, Mike Todd, and Paul Thek. Poignant, personal, and full of emotion, these diaries convey Hesse's struggle with the quotidian while striving to become an artist.

In 1964 the industrialist Friedrich Arnhard Scheidt invited Eva Hesse (1936-1970) and her husband, Tom Doyle, to a residency in Kettwig an der Ruhr, Germany. The following fifteen months marked a significant transformation in Hesse's practice. The artist's studio space was located in an abandoned textile factory that contained machine parts, tools, and materials that served as inspiration for her complex, linear mechanical drawings and paintings. In 1965 Hesse expanded on this theme and began using objects found in the factory and papier-mâché to produce a series of fourteen vibrantly colored reliefs that venture into three-dimensional space with such materials as wood, metal, and cord protruding from the picture plane. With dynamic new scholarship and previously unpublished illustrations, Eva Hesse 1965 highlights key drawings, paintings, and reliefs from this pivotal time and demonstrates how the artist was able to rethink her approach to color, materials, and dimensional space and begin moving toward sculpture, preparing herself for the momentous strides that she would take upon her return to New York.