Out With Orthodoxy

SAN FRANCISCO--Two aspects of the magnificent Eva Hesse exhibition organized at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art make this an indispensable show. (It’s on view through May 19 in its only U.S. showing.) One has to do with the past, the other with the present.

For the past, Hesse’s classic sculptures loom large. They were made between the fall of 1965 and her tragic death from brain cancer in May 1970, at age 34, and they exploit such once unlikely sculptural materials as latex, polyester resin and fiberglass. Among these two dozen pieces are some of the finest works made by any postwar American artist. Hesse, a German-born expatriate, was central to the establishment of an artistic vocabulary that defined art for the next quarter-century.

For the present, though, it’s the far less familiar work that’s unusually compelling--work Hesse made between her graduation from Yale’s art school in 1959 and the breakthrough to her mature sculpture in late 1965. In recent years, art has been undergoing a slow sea change, and the idiom she was so pivotal in establishing is passing into history. You stand before the great classic sculptures in reverential awe, mentally genuflecting in obedient wonder. However, the early work remains unruly and strange, thus offering something potentially useful for new art today.

If the brief, decade-long career of so young an artist can be divided into two phases, then the late work has entered the pantheon of universally acclaimed masterpieces. There’s a lesson in this. As a young artist in 1959 Hesse faced a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Her big dilemma was what to do about Abstract Expressionist painting, which she loved. Painting was then the paramount art form for a serious artist, and Abstract Expressionism was its orthodoxy. Hesse had gone to school to become a painter. (At Yale she studied with Josef Albers, Rico Lebrun and Bernard Chaet.) But she made her mark by other means.

Look at it this way: Abstract Expressionist painting was to a young artist in 1959 as Hesse’s classic sculpture is to young artists today. Her achievement was to find a path around the obstacle. She disrupted fixed ideas about what was possible for art--and what was not. That brilliant success eventually made her own work a fixed idea about what’s possible for art. She’s become an obstacle in turn.

What did Hesse’s classic sculptures do? Artistic doctrine in the mid-1960s insisted that the measure of quality for any art form could be found in its refinement of that form’s unique properties. So Hesse went the other way, gaily obliterating categorical distinctions between painting and sculpture. Purity was chucked for a hybrid aesthetic. Hesse made mongrels.

With surprisingly few exceptions, a classic Hesse sculpture is suspended or hangs on the wall--the preferred mode for a painting. If it does stand on the floor, like “Schema” or “Sequel” (both 1967-1968), the sculpture is often a flat sheet, like a painting, with objects placed on top.

In a normal painting a line is two-dimensional. A line in a Hesse is often an actual length of wire, painted rope or rubber tubing knotted at the end. The rope or rubber tubing is allowed to hang, so that sculptural properties of weight and gravity defy expectations and are forced to apply to line.

An untitled 1970 piece is a tangle of rope and string coated in latex and suspended from the ceiling on metal hooks. This sculpture, one of Hesse’s final works, most blatantly returns to the look of Abstract Expressionism. It mimics the tangled skeins of dripped color in a Jackson Pollock painting but makes them into material objects suspended in actual space. And the labored, calculated construction of the work removes any sense of naturalism or psychic spontaneity that is usually associated with Expressionist art.

Hesse’s painterly transformations took another important step. Color is notably suppressed in her classic work.

In fact, color just disappears halfway through the show, upon the arrival of her mature art. Color, an integral feature of painting, was then being advanced as the main ingredient of faltering abstract art, as reflected in the term Color-field painting. And it was critical to the splashy look of abstraction’s chief rival, Pop art. Hesse pulled the plug on color, replacing it with shades of gray or the golden brown translucence of latex, resin and fiberglass.

These plastic materials perform critical functions. (Inherently unstable, they are also proving to be a conservation nightmare, which is another reason to see the show now: Given its fragility, Hesse’s work isn’t likely to be assembled for another retrospective any time soon.) Plastics, so wickedly lampooned by Hollywood in “The Graduate” (1967), which was released just before she began to use the material, held negative social connotations. But Hesse didn’t use these industrial materials in mechanical ways. Handmade and courting light, her sculptural surfaces instead yield the disconcerting look of skin.

In “Sans II” (1968), which may be her greatest single work, the wide double row of wall-hung boxes made from polyester resin and fiberglass takes all this to a crescendo. The machine-like repetition of neutral forms could go on forever, but no two boxes are the same. They’re irregular in fabrication. The plastic surfaces are like a fleshy membrane. Light and space, which paintings contrive, are corporeal.

Is it absurd to use sculptural materials to make paintings? Yes--exuberantly so. The undercurrent of sheer improbability that runs through this work attests to the period’s fascination with Neo-Dada art.

So does its peculiar eroticism. Marcel Duchamp, the father of Dada, conceived of art as a faltering erotic machine. In Hesse’s work assorted suggestions of male and female anatomy do recur. Yet, an even more fundamental artistic coupling also takes place: Painting awkwardly attempts to mate with sculpture.

Hesse started out as a painter when she graduated Yale in 1959, and in a very real sense she was a painter when she died 11 years later (almost to the day). The era just made it impossible for her paintings to look like paintings typically do. So, she found ways to articulate the predicament.

That’s why Hesse’s early work grabs attention now. The San Francisco retrospective isn’t all that different from the pioneering one organized at the Yale Art Gallery in 1992, but the attractions in it have certainly changed. The current show adds several sculptures from late in her career, but it’s the addition of several paintings and numerous drawings from 1959 to mid-1965 that was inspired.

They’re unresolved as works of art--and that’s the point. Hesse is like a vacuum cleaner here, taking in whatever came her way and caught her fancy, and then mixing it up. When the velvet fist of artistic orthodoxy has you in its grip, this work asserts, keep yourself open to trying just about anything.

Think Eva Hesse, and you don’t readily think lime green, acid yellow and hot pink. You don’t conjure Surrealist shapes or junk assemblage sculpture. Arshile Gorky, Willem DeKooning, Joseph Cornell, Louise Nevelson and Jasper Johns are not the precedents who come to mind. But all that and much more is there in her early work, churning around like the roiling thoughts of an especially curious and hungry mind.

It all seems very “of the moment” for art in the 1960s. And it’s a moment that is here again today.

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“Eva Hesse,” San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 151 3rd St., (415) 357-4000, through May 19. Closed Wednesdays.