Eva Hesse remains a strangely undecidable figure. Since her death at a premature age thirty-two years ago, critics and historians have been unanimous in their acclaim for her art but with little consensus as to what makes it important. Much of the debate rests, no doubt, on the fact of Hesse's too brief life and the broken record narration of her biography: Hers is a career endlessly reduced to art-historical boilerplate, all morbid excess and spectacular tragedy. She has been variously treated as a protofeminist reckoning with the Art World Boys Club; a childhood survivor of the Shoah; a patron saint of female pathology; a Minimalist with guts, her work appearing to spill over with viscera. Too often the work itself is seen as little more than an epiphenomenon of the life--a life caricatured in terms of victimhood and neurosis, even as Hesse was achieving critical success with her art.
Organized by guest curator Elisabeth Sussman, Hesse's retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art provides a rare--and perhaps final--occasion to confront these and other controversies surrounding her work. Indeed, to hear any admirer of Hesse tell it, the significance of the show far exceeds the usual batch of claims attached to museum retrospectives. Ten years ago, the last major Hesse exhibition was mounted at the Yale University Art Gallery, and its catalogue set an infamously morose (some would say ghoulish) tone for Hesse scholarship by stressing the most excruciating details of the artist's biography in interpreting her work: her escape from Nazi Germany as a child and the resulting temporary separation from her parents; her mother's depression and suicide; her own lifelong struggle with illness. Sussman's show begs to be seen in the context of this earlier reading as well …
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