FILM FESTIVAL
Reading Between Brightly-Colored Lines “Eva Hesse” is thorough and diligent but it leaves some questions BY MICHAEL FOX
E
va Hesse’s childhood was a roller coaster of displacement, reunion, destabilization and trauma. In the journals she kept as a teenager and adult, the German-born, New York-based artist recognized the source of her chronic insecurity. Yet paradoxically, and remarkably, her work evinces no anguish or suffering, and no need to expose or extinguish demons from the past. From Hesse’s early, brightly colored drawings and paintings through the textured, abstract sculptures and installations that made her reputation, her art comprises a series of experiments in forward-looking forms of expression. A palpable labor of love, Marcie Begleiter’s densely detailed documentary, “Eva Hesse,” is a soup-to-nuts portrait that encompasses the artist’s personal life and times – New York in the ’60s – along with her professional development and impact. Begleiter’s diligence notwithstanding, “Eva Hesse” never delivers the “aha” moment where the person and her work snap together, and we understand exactly how Hesse’s defining childhood experiences informed her work. I’ll venture, though, that Holocaust survivors and children of survivors will identify with Hesse’s internalized struggles, and read
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between the lines of her journals and the recollections of her older sister Helen. In 1962, the art-school grad fell in love with and married a hard-partying Irish-American sculptor named Tom Doyle. Because her father insisted that she marry a Jew, Doyle willingly converted to Judaism. Doyle, who was the more advanced and accomplished artist, was offered a residency in Germany a couple years later and the two ended up living there for over a year. Their relationship fractured abroad, in part because of his drinking and flirting, but Hesse made a major leap in her art practice from painting to sculpture. The film generally unfolds chronologically, uses this period of her adulthood in Germany to flash back to Eva’s chaotic childhood. Born in Hamburg in 1936, Eva and Helen were sent on a kindertransport to the Netherlands in 1938. When their parents left Germany several months later, the family reunited and fled Europe for England and, in short order, New York. They were the only members of the family to escape the horror of the Holocaust. When Eva’s mother, who suffered from depression and mental illness, learned in 1946 that her parents had died in the camps, she jumped from a roof to her death. (Eva’s father had separated and remarried by this time.)
While “Eva Hesse” is continually interested in its subject’s mental state, neither the filmmaker nor Eva’s devoted artist friends are especially keen to psychoanalyze her. Perhaps Hesse was scarred by the abandonment of her parents as a toddler, though one could also understand her self-doubts given the establishment of male gallery owners, museum curators and critics. Which brings us to another fundamental paradox of Hesse, namely that the insecurities she voiced in her journals, and in letters to artist, mentor and close friend Sol LeWitt, were matched by an unwavering drive to be an artist, an adherence to her muse (wherever it took her), and the awareness that she was pretty darn good. In fact, Hesse was an extrovert and a lot of fun, by most accounts. From the outset, “Eva Hesse” is plainly not a study of a tortured artist. Nor was she unrecognized and unappreciated in her own lifetime, for she had a major solo show and made the cover of Artforum before she died of a brain tumor in 1970. She was 34 years old. A “Eva Hesse” plays on Feb. 15 at 11 a.m. in Clairemont and again on Feb. 16, also at the Clairemont Reading.