Notes
Property from the Collection of Werner Nekes
Internationally acclaimed filmmaker Werner Nekes was born in 1944 in Erfurt and studied linguistics and psychology in Freiburg. In his workings and teachings, Nekes sought to free the medium of film from narration and psychology. In 1965, Nekes made his first experimental films at the same time he met the painter Dore O., whom he followed to Hamburg in 1967 and married. The following year, Nekes co-founded Filmmacher-Cooperative and Hamburger Filmschau. His work has been exhibited at major international museums and festivals, including The Museum of Modern Art New York and the Kassel Documenta. Nekes has taught at the Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste) in Hamburg, Wuppertal University, the Kunsthochschule Offenbach and the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne.
Over the years, Nekes has compiled one of the most important private collections of artifacts documenting 500 years of pre-cinematographic experiments as well as developments in the early history of film, focusing on spatial and temporal principles of representation. His passion for collecting began at the age of five when he accompanied his grandfather to work at the Thyssen steelmill in Duisburg. Nekes was so fascinated by the different surfaces and colors reflected from the piles of mineral ores surrounding the factory that he went home with his pockets full of samples. Since then, Nekes has acquired an entire visual history including 18th-century anamorphosis images, panoramas, early 19th-century moveable greeting cards, transformation and transparent images, Vexierbücher, lithophanes, metamorphosis and animation toys, plus a related media library.
Through his symbiotic endeavors of collecting and filmmaking, Nekes salvages the past for the present. Few collectors exhibit so many combined talents as Werner Nekes, who, equally comfortable in the past and the present, assiduously studies our cultural heritage to entertain and enlighten us.
(Adapted from the text by Frances Terpak, Curator of Special Collections at the Getty Center).
The following sculptures and drawings by Eva Hesse were acquired directly from the artist by Werner Nekes in 1965, while Hesse was married and living with sculptor Tom Doyle.
The following is an interview with the collector conducted early Spring 2010:
When and where did you first meet Eva Hesse?
We met for the first time at the International Kurzfilmtage in Oberhausen. I was [Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle's] guide as I knew the Kurzfilmtagen from the inside out and could recommend the good films and venues where they could be seen. It was because of that meeting that Tom and Eva invited me to come to Kettwig, which I very much appreciated as I was very curious about the world of American underground cinema. We shared a great interest together of American and European underground film.
What was your impression of Eva?
She was sensational, colorful, sort of a Pop-Art style of dress, which was very unusual at the time in Germany. She was very beautiful.
In your film she looks very serious.
Well yes, there are two different sides of Eva.
Did this impression change as you began to get to know her personally and artistically?
We shared a common interest. Her working method, the way she perceived pictures was like a story board for a film and these story boards had relationships with their frames which Eva merged into her world. This was especially interesting to me as a filmmaker.
She taught me a lot about American underground film. Eva was especially fond of this one film made by a Japanese filmmaker, Yoji Kuri titled Aos whose erotic elements encased in sort of these boxes.
What were your first impressions of Eva's work?
Eva was extremely productive, ambitious and hard-working and I could see new works every week when I came to visit her and Tom. She was always on the road and very driven, but also under pressure.
What was it that caused her to abandon the traditional two dimensional convention of painting on canvas and focus on the expressionist possibility of the painted object?
I think she was heavily impressed by the sculptors around her in Germany and also because she advised Tom to paint his sculptures. I believe the beginning was really that she thought of the cords as colored lines, much in the same way that impasto on a canvas can become sculptural in a painting. It's as if the drawing grew out of the surface and became something three dimensional. She was working by a textile mill where there was a great deal of garbage and a lot of found objects which were often used by Tom but quickly began to fascinate Eva who incorporated them into her picture plane, such as in Ringaround Arosie(1965). Later she went one step further, obliterating the picture and focusing solely on the object, producing them as paintings
You visited the studio in Kettwig which was supplied by the Scheidt family where Eva and Tom were living and working. What was that like?
They both came to Germany together. Tom had done very fragile objects which Scheidt wanted to buy, but because they were so difficult to ship due to their materials, it was easier to invite Tom and Eva to come and give him space to work. Eva was very much interested in literature, and they were always reading, there were books everywhere. She read James Joyce and Henry David Thoreau, of course. There was always music playing, the radio. Charles Ives was one of her favorites.
How conscious was Eva Hesse of her own identity as a woman artist living and working in what was then a world very much dominated by men?
This was a non-issue for Eva. Eva was very self-confident. She was always in correspondence with American artists, for example Mel Bochner and Sol LeWitt. She was very much integrated in the young American art scene even from abroad. She would send things to them and nervously await their reply. She wanted to stay in touch.
Did outside criticism impact/influence/effect Eva as an artist? What, if any, were her insecurities?
I cannot judge her. I know that she had a hard time in Germany because her marriage was in disarray. That was very difficult for her. As an artist, I was her first audience and she was very interested to know how I perceived the works, the feedback I gave to her was very important. But she wasn't an insecure person. She was appreciative. She cared about what critics said, Lucy Lippard, for example was very important to her. She was most proud to be admired by her artist friends. But it was difficult for her to find exhibitions. In Kettwiger she was forced to install her work in strange places, like a green house without proper walls. There were no vitrines for smaller objects.
Can you talk a little bit about the works that you acquired from her in the mid-1960s?
In her sketchbook there were a lot of small stripes at the edges which resemble spatial dimension which was later translated into her works with the cords. Eva gave me some works as presents. I didn't want to take too many because I knew she needed them for her exhibitions.
[The test-pieces] These are very important examples of how Eva broke through the tradition of painting on canvas and came to relieve the figure from the picture plane. In these works Eva has for the first time totally rejected the picture frame in favor of sculpture while still adhering to the painterly working process. In the blue one, the cylindrical form became a black hole, a void, like nerves or muscles.
In the lilac one, she worked with a found object, an old enamel pipe which became the support for lilac colored pieces in transitional colors. These color scales reappear in other works in which she used chords as part of the object. This piece is a very important example of Eva's sense of humor. She often told me "If you do something absurd, repeat it. Then, it will become meaningful." This principle is to be found throughout Eva's works.
Relocating from the vibrant New York art scene in 1964, where Eva Hesse had already exhibited her drawings at the Allan Stone Gallery, could not have been an easy transition for the artist, who fled her homeland from Nazi occupied Europe in 1939. Personally, Hesse suffered from extensive nightmares and the reality that her marriage to sculptor Tom Doyle was beginning to fall apart. However, this extended stay in Germany, her return to the place where she was born, was the critical turning point in her art-making, and in her own confidence in her work as an artist. While in Germany, Eva grasped the opportunity to pursue the process of clarification that had begun in New York with her drawing. It was an unparalled chance for her to truly work as an artist, away from the larger art world and concerns of money.
The present test-pieces were Eva's earliest encounters with materials developed out of the practice of drawing. The "material" Hesse discovered were found objects by the textile mill where she worked, materials with which she would wind around, bind, stuff and paint. Eva described her earliest process and experimentation with sculpture in a letter to Rosie Goldman, "I have been enjoying the newness and the work. In the abandoned factory where we work there is lots of junk around. Tom used much steel and odds and ends for his sculpture. I have all these months looked over and at much of the junk" (L. Lippard, Eva Hesse, New York, 1976, p. 29).
It's almost impossible to think about these earliest sculptures without noting Marcel Duchamp, who in the 1950s made little objects of his own, similarly sexual in nature. These, together with a group of works titled Bouche-Evier that were cast from sink stoppers shown in an exhibition in Bern in 1964, which Hesse happened to see. Although Duchamp is more associated with the "ready-made," these little erotic objects, which would later be reproduced in editions, started out being made by hand and would have a great influence on Hesse's earliest explorations in sculpture.
In these pieces, Hesse consciously works through formal problems, seeing what might happen if she tried this or that material or technique. While she worked, unconscious thoughts, memories, and desires came into play and the sculpture took shape by a process similar to free association, much like the sexual Surrealist objects by Giacometti or Meret Oppenheim.
She returned to New York with her drive and ambition undiminished, with a respectable body of work behind her, and a confidence about herself as an artist and her place in the art world.
