Letter from Sol Lewitt to Eva Hesse + Mel Bochner’s Portrait of Eva Hesse
Eva Hesse Untitled 1966
Letter From Sol LeWitt to Eva Hesse
While Hesse was living with her husband in Germany, Sol LeWitt nourished and encouraged Eva during her days of artistic isolation They corresponded daily. He was her friend and a mentor.
Eva Hesse (born on January 11, 1936, Hamburg, Germany)
Mel Bochner, Portrait of Eva Hesse, 1966.
Josef Albers and Eva Hesse
Tate:Albers and Hesse – Imperatives of Teaching
Eva Hesse had little praise for her Yale education and Albers seemed aware of this. Upon her death he sent a photograph of himself with Hesse (fig.8) to the Fischbach Gallery asking if her heirs might want to have a picture ‘showing her with me as her painting teacher … despite [my emphasis] my being in it.’16 Although she was among Albers’s favourite pupils, Hesse disliked him in so much as his views were not in keeping with her then expressionist painting technique and by extension, for what she perceived as the restrictiveness of his approach. Upon hearing a lecture by her teacher she wrote in her diary: ‘He is terribly limited but really maintains one point of view throughout. This is a paradoxically strong and weak attribute and shortcoming.’17 Many scholars and critics have addressed Hesse’s stated frustration with Yale University and Albers as part of diverse arguments about the artist, her work, and Modernism.18 Yet Linda Norden is one of few who has discussed Hesse’s formal education in depth and to my knowledge no one has written extensively about how (in a pedagogic sense) she was trained.19 Hesse’s work is intriguing because she studied with Albers, who along with Moholy-Nagy was largely responsible for the dissemination of Bauhaus-indebted teaching ideas in the United States – ideas to which Hesse likely had been exposed prior to her studies with the former Bauhaus master directly.
Lee Bontecou birthday Jan 15 (happy birthday – previous post)