Paper trail through the artist’s process

With more than 120 examples, the exhibition “Eva Hesse Drawing” is a complete compendium of the artist’s work on paper. All but a handful were made in the 1960s -- the German-born, New York emigre died of a brain tumor at 34 in the spring of 1970 -- so the traveling show newly opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art also provides a concise chronicle of her transformation into a mature artist.

Like an electrician creating sparks by crossing live wires through which different currents flow, Hesse crossed conventions of painting and sculpture in her resolutely hybrid work. Drawing was one way to investigate the process, and its pivotal importance to her development might be suggested in a biographical note: Her first solo gallery exhibition, in 1963, consisted solely of works on paper.

At MOCA, the variety is immediately striking. Some drawings are records of evolving artistic thoughts, reminiscent of entries in a visual diary. Others are clearly studies for specific sculptures and painted wall reliefs.

Some are working diagrams, further spelled out in handwritten text or descriptive notations made on a typewriter. Some have the character of idle doodles -- the kind of thing one might do while talking on the telephone or daydreaming on a lazy afternoon.

And some drawings are polished, highly refined, finished works of art in their own right. These exude all the subtle power and compelling conviction of her widely revered Post-Minimal sculptures made from resin, latex, rope, gauze, wire and other fragile, even perishable materials.

Among these is an untitled work from 1968 that is enthralling as anything she made in any other medium. (Hesse seldom gave titles to her drawings, and fewer than 10 in the show have names.) Just under 15 inches high and 11 inches wide, it consists of 15 rectangles of atmospheric brown ink and gouache, three across and five down, arranged in a grid. The paper rectangle is vertical, while the painted ones are horizontal.

The grid is the Modern image par excellence -- organized, mathematical, machined, as regular as an industrial product, stripped of emotional ambiguity and systematic.

As a concept, it is a pure abstraction. The intersection of vertical and horizontal lines erases all illusionism while merging signs for human figures walking upright on the landscape. Simply put, the grid is the world of modernity.

Hesse’s work, however, is a stark interruption of that idealizing fantasy. Her grid practically bleeds.

The mixture of brown ink and gouache has been brushed on in thin liquid veils. Each painted rectangle comprises layer upon layer of color, sensuous and tactile, its muddiness redolent of decayed leaves and loam. Lined up in rows across the page, they repeat the slow, time-consuming process through which they were made as an almost incantatory ritual -- first one mark, then another and another. Time passes, absorbed into the page like the ink and gouache.

As pigment, brown is an amalgamation of all colors. Here it fairly glows, as if it’s some primordial ooze illuminated from within. The irregular white space between the rectangles dissolves into atmosphere. Hesse’s formalized abstraction of the modern world makes room to acknowledge the persistence of a human stain, to extrapolate Philip Roth’s poetic phraseology. This grid is organic -- meaning it’s a contradiction and a paradox -- and its tender brown patches assume the scabbed look of bandaged wounds.

A quick walk through the large exhibition shows something not altogether surprising. Hesse’s drawings are almost entirely devoid of bright, distinctive color, save for about a dozen works made between 1962 and 1965. Instead, black, browns, grays and metallic hues dominate the drawings.

Partly it’s a simple function of the primacy of pencil and black ink as drawing mediums. Yet the general absence of color also reflects a struggle underway in the hothouse critical culture of the New York art world. The established view of serious avant-garde abstraction put color at the apex of art. Smartly, Hesse was working to shrug off convention.

Her problem as a young artist in the 1960s might be succinctly described: Without relying on the conventional tropes of Expressionism, which had calcified in the New York School, how could she maintain an art that bubbles up from subjective inner experience? Hesse’s drawings offer a detailed sketch of the path she intuitively took.

First, between 1960 and about 1962, she struggled with gesture. Color then came into her sights -- if only sporadically -- in occasional works that remain entirely abstract but feel oddly Pop in derivation. (Several exude the bright cheeriness of a toy store.) In 1965 she made a group of spare, open, airy drawings in linear colored ink; here gesture and hue are subordinate to an exploration of structure.

The breakthrough was accomplished by 1966, when Hesse’s organic grid became a staple of both her drawings and her hybrid sculptures. Houston’s Menil Collection and the Drawing Center in New York jointly organized this exhibition, and it includes five small sculptures and wall reliefs for context and a display case for several sketchbooks.

Oddly, it also features numerous objects dutifully labeled “test pieces.” These objects, in which Hesse was experimenting with nontraditional materials, include a piece of cheesecloth slathered with natural rubber, some unfired clay blocks and plaster tiles, gauze bandages coated with deep red pigment and a length of coiled wire swaddled in latex-dipped cotton. They rest on a white pedestal or inside a pristine display case like fragments of contemporary art’s true cross, enshrined in a chaste modern reliquary.

Are we supposed to see these material experiments as akin to Hesse’s drawings, in which she also tried things out? Especially with important artists who died tragically young -- Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark also come to mind from Hesse’s Post-Minimalist generation -- the tendency to make a fetish of everything they touched is strong.

As various young artists who today make cheeky sculptures from studio sweepings encased in resin and epoxy know well, that inclination is best resisted.

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‘Eva Hesse Drawing’

Where: Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday and Friday; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; 11 a.m. to midnight Saturday; closed Tuesday and Wednesday

Ends: Oct. 23

Price: $5 to $8

Contact: (213) 626-6222; www.moca.org