When I was in younger I looked to Eva Hesse, just as I looked to Virgina Woolf, as a symbol more than as an artist.  The facts of this artist’s life and death made more of an impression on my fevered college-girl mind than her actual work.  A German-born painter and sculptor who emigrated with her family to New York City as a child, Hesse lived and worked in the city through the 1960’s, during the heyday of conceptual art.  She made sculptures from malleable, sometimes translucent, materials like latex, fiberglass, and mesh.  Her pieces have a biological, tissue-like character, and were embraced by my young self (and a lot of feminist scholars, too) as a powerful, mythologically “female” response to the hard-nosed, heroic sculptures of Richard Serra, Donald Judd and other contemporaries who were working in metal and wood.  Hesse died in 1970 at the age of 34 from a brain tumor.  She’d had only one solo show of her sculpture, but left behind a powerful body of work that’s still discussed today.

The recent show of Hesse’s student paintings at the Brooklyn Museum, Spectres 60, complicates the Tragic Lady Sculptress myth.  These canvases, turbulent and not-so-pretty, are the work of a young painter who’s wrestling with form and materials to pin down a subject.  The canvases are all figural and many, like the bride and groom above, are referential, so they can’t be linked in any facile way to her dreamily abstract sculpture.  And the paintings are dark, rendered in a palette of muddled green-greys.  They’re dense and earthbound in a way that her sculpture is not.  If I’d seen these canvases in another context I wouldn’t have believed that they were Hesse’s; they’re different in spirit to her sculpture.  I’m disappointed that there was none of Hesse’s sculpture in the exhibit.  Taken along with these paintings, they fashion a rich, multi-dimensional identity for the artist.