Lot 176: EVA HESSE

UNTITLED

35 1/8 by 47 in. 89.2 by 119.4 cm.

oil on canvas

Executed in 1956.

Renate Petzinger and Barry Rosen, eds., Eva Hesse Catalogue Raisonné Volume I: Paintings, New Haven, 2006, cat. no. P11, pp. 40-41, illustrated in color

Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the artist in 1956)
Gift of the above to the present owner in 1960

Realized in 1956, Untitled's richly textural surface and deep verdant hues are the product of a young Eva Hesse coming to terms with her identity as both a woman and an artist. As a 20 year old student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, for Hesse, painting became the physical vehicle which allowed her to channel a past fraught with pain and loss. Together with her parents, Hesse escaped the horrors of war-torn Europe in the 1940s. In reading Hesse's journals we learn of a heart-wrenching adolescence wrought with death and abandonment. A poignant excerpt from her journal penned on December 12, 1960, reveals, "I am in a bad way. Things have come to pass that shell made of iron.... Only paintings can see me through and I must see it through. It is totally interdependent with entire being. It is (the) source of my goals, ambitions, satisfactions and frustrations...It affords me the problems, which I can think through, form ideas which I can work with and arrive at a statement. Within its scope, I can develop strength and conviction," (Helen A. Cooper. "Eva Hesse: Diaries and Notebooks," Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1992, p. 25).

A catharsis in its own right, Untitled is the aesthetic realization of an internal struggle. The painting comes to us at a moment in which Hesse was beginning to feel confident in her craft. With its strong lines and bold blocks of color, the work resembles a late Cezanne. A golden yellow seems to glow behind the canvas's sea of velvet blues and greens. Peppered with patches of bright oranges and reds, the work reads like a personal pep-talk, the proverbial light at the end of a long dark tunnel.