Bridgeman: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, USA/Gift of Helen Hesse Charash/Bridgeman Images
Eva Hesse at the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, c. 1965.
At sixteen, Eva Hesse left the Pratt Institute and went to work part-time at the teen fashion publication Seventeen before continuing her studies at Cooper Union. While at Seventeen, she spent spare hours at the Museum of Modern Art and the movies, and just before she left the magazine, her illustrations won its art competition and were published. She was definitely hip, though her friend the artist Sol LeWitt advised her in a 1965 letter, “Don’t worry about cool, make your own uncool.” At the time, she had just returned to New York from a year in Germany and was wearing her hair in a glossy beehive, chic and unruffled—being unfashionable wasn’t something she needed to worry about and she didn’t. She smoked, wore capri pants, and was a downtown artist who happened to be a woman. Her dark hair went through many changes: from waist length and tied in a ponytail to short and middle-parted, but whether she wore it up or down, it was always with a beatnik nonchalance and occasionally topped with a beret or hairband. Her work, however, is anything but blasé: her sculptures were typically created with unconventional materials such as latex, rope, cheesecloth, papier-mâché, and enamel. Still working out new ways to create, Hesse died from a brain tumor at the age of thirty-four in 1970.