COURTESY ZEITGEIST FILMS

hung from walls or ceilings or filled
the floor of a room. She defied
conventions about sculpture and
helped establish the post-minimal-
ist movement, with an emphasis
on tactile process and studio tech-
nique. In 1970, the year she died,
she exhibited pieces in more than
20 group exhibitions. Today, her
work is in the collections of many
major museums around the world
— including the DIA.
There seems to be a revival of
interest in Hesse right now. She’s

had many posthumous retro-
spectives, from the Guggenheim
Museum in New York, to the
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture
Garden in Washington, D.C., to the
Tate Gallery in London. In May,
Yale University Press published
a 900-page volume, Eva Hesse:
Diaries, of Hesse’s previously

unpublished journal entries. And
Begleiter’s documentary is likely
to attract more fans to the artist’s
provocative and remarkable body
of work — and a fascinating and
thoughtful artist.

*

TOP, LEFT: Hesse in a
textile factory studio in
Kettwig, Germany, 1964.

TOP, RIGHT: Eva Hesse:
1965 (Yale University
Press) is the catalogue
that accompanied a
2013 exhibit at Hauser
& Wirth London.

RIGHT: Accession II (1969),
galvanized steel and
vinyl, is in the collection
of the DIA and is
discussed in the film.

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young artist and used her mother’s
German reparation money to pay
for her art studies at Cooper Union
and Yale. After graduating and
moving to New York in the 1960s,
she became frustrated by the fact
that men dominated the art world.
“She was a woman who defined
herself by her own terms,” Begleiter
said. “She was really extremely
thoughtful about who she wanted
to be and how she wanted to be in
the world.”
Hesse spent her first nine
months back in Germany moping
and feeling bad about her career.
Then a letter from LeWitt, now
famous for its sage advice (“Stop it
and just do!”), lifted her confidence
and led to a burst of productive
sculpture-making in 1965. She
began incorporating coiled rope
and other objects she found on the
factory floor into her canvases and
made more than a dozen pieces
over the next three months.
“So things started coming off the
canvas. It started breaking through
from side to side,” Begleiter said.
Hesse returned to the U.S.
and rose to become a star in the
New York art world. Her abstract
sculptures seem fragile and imper-
manent. She used unconventional
industrial materials, including
latex, rubber, fiberglass and poly-
ester resin to create sculptures that

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UR
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that moment, it would never get
done,” Begleiter said.
The film is a German-American
co-production, fitting because
Hesse was born in Hamburg,
immigrated to the United States
and then found her artistic voice
when she returned to her home-
land for a yearlong sabbatical. A
year after her first solo exhibition,
German collector Arnhard Scheidt
invited Hesse and her husband,
Tom Doyle, to work in an aban-
doned textile factory in Kettwig.
Hesse felt conflicted about
returning to Germany. In the
1930s, her father, Wilhelm, an
attorney and observant Jew, was
barred from practicing law under
Nazi rule. Three weeks after
Kristallnacht, in 1938, Hesse’s par-
ents put their two daughters, Eva,
2 years old, and Helen, 5 years old,
on a kindertransport to Holland. A
few months later, the family reunit-
ed and immigrated to New York.
Hesse’s uncle and grandparents
died in concentration camps.
Hesse had a difficult childhood.
Her parents eventually divorced
and her mother, Ruth, after bat-
tling what is now known as bipolar
disorder and depression, commit-
ted suicide when Hesse was not
yet 10. For her entire life, Hesse
experienced fear of abandonment.
Nevertheless, she was a talented

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