Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York 9780300214345

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Irrational Judgments

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Irrational Judgments Eva Hesse, Sol LeWitt, and 1960s New York Kirsten Swenson

Yale University Press New Haven and London

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Copyright © 2015 by Kirsten Swenson. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. yalebooks.com/art

Designed and typeset in Univers by Katy Homans Printed in China by Regent Publishing Services Limited Library of Congress Control Number: 2014953549 ISBN 978-0-300-21156-6 ebook ISBN: 978-0-300-21434-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Jacket illustrations: (front) Hermann Landshoff, Eva Hesse (fig. 10), Sol LeWitt (fig. 24); (back) Eva Hesse, Washer Table (fig. 1) Frontispiece: Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse’s studio table (fig. 11) Page vi: Sol LeWitt standing next to Eva Hesse, Several (1965) at the opening of Eccentric Abstraction, Fischbach Gallery, New York, September 1966. Photograph by Norman Goldman. Courtesy of Daniel Goldman.

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Contents vii

1

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Lost Contexts 29

Chapter 1

The Problem of Painting, 1960–64 61

Chapter 2

Real Nonsense, 1964–65 93

Chapter 3

A Paradoxical Situation, 1966–67 131

Chapter 4

It Is Something, It Is Nothing, 1968–69 167

Conclusion

Depth, 1970

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173

Notes

185

Illustration Credits

186

Index

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Acknowledgments The primary subjects of this volume are artists who were committed to spirited intellectual and creative exchange within a large community of friends and interlocutors. The families, friends, archivists, galleries, and estates of Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt have admirably maintained these values. Helen Hesse Charash’s vital decision to contribute her sister’s papers to the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College exemplifies commitment to free intellectual and creative exchange. The LeWitt Collection’s encouragement and support of scholars does as well. I would like foremost to thank all the individuals dedicated to maintaining the intellectual and creative legacies of these artists. Carol LeWitt and Sofia LeWitt have provided kind support. The involvement of Barry Rosen of the Eva Hesse Estate has been crucial, as has the assistance of Sylvia Bandi at Hauser & Wirth. This is a better book for the detailed knowledge, efforts, and insights of Janet Passehl at the LeWitt Collection, and I also thank John Paul Lavertu for his kind assistance as well as for introducing me to pieces from LeWitt’s early work, and Jacob Ketron for his assistance and wonderful sketches. The brilliance, rigor, and generosity of Veronica Roberts—as a person, scholar, curator, and friend—have touched every page of this book. Her outstanding exhibition and catalogue for the Blanton Museum, Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt, has been an inspiration, as was her earlier exhibition Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt at the Craig F. Starr Gallery, the occasion of our first meeting. I am indebted to Veronica in many ways, but as a model of scholarly openness and exchange most of all. I would also like to thank Veronica and the Blanton Museum for inviting me to present my research. While in Austin, I had the opportunity to meet Lucy Lippard, who possesses the intellectual and creative generosity of her close friends Hesse and LeWitt. She is a hero, and there simply aren’t words to capture the importance of her contributions to art criticism and art history since the 1960s. Ellen Landau has been a mentor throughout my career, and provided essential commentary and advice throughout this project. Suzanne Hudson read the manuscript at different stages and offered deeply informed, incisive advice for which I am very grateful, as well as for her friendship and support. I learned so much from the committed scholarship of Jonathan D. Katz, my adviser as a

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graduate student at SUNY Stony Brook, and I thank him for maintaining a dialogue over many years. Also at Stony Brook, Donald Kuspit, Mary Rawlinson, and Ann Eden Gibson were particularly meaningful figures in the formation of ideas that culminated in this book. When this press published Ann’s book Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics in 1999, it provided the occasion for a graduate seminar in which I first delved deeply into the work of Hesse and the aftermath of Abstract Expressionism. The Fellows Program at the Smithsonian American Art Museum allowed the opportunity for prolonged research in the Archives of American Art, and gave me a cohort of fellows whose dialogue and support have shaped this project. This book simply could not have been written without the resources of the Smithsonian. In particular, I would like to thank Amelia Goerlitz, Virginia Mecklenberg, Liza Kirwin, and the late Cindy Mills for their kindness and support. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s Teaching Fellows program also provided an invaluable community, while immersion in the Whitney’s collection and history was enormously influential. The opportunity for exchanges with Elisabeth Sussman while at the Whitney was important to this project. Elisabeth’s exemplary scholarship and curatorial work have been an inspiration. The Dia Art Foundation, the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum, and Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies gave me opportunities to develop and present research related to this book at later stages. I would also like to thank the following individuals for their generous contributions and involvement: Allison Geremia, for her help gathering permissions; Lucille Stiger and Selina Bartlett at the Eva Hesse Archives at Oberlin College; Virginia Dwan and the staff of the Dwan Gallery Archives; Jane and Tom Doyle; Grace Wapner; Ethelyn Honig; Jo Watanabe; Kathryn Potts and Anita Duquette at the Whitney Museum; Kathryn Gile at Alexander and Bonin; Michael Todd; Alvin Holm; Amethyst Beaver. I would like to acknowledge the intellectual and creative support of Eri King, James Lawrence, Alexandra Schwartz, John Russon, E. Luanne McKinnon, Catherine Borg, Stephen Hendee, Wendy Kveck, Louisa McDonald, Helga Watkins, Mary Warner, Erin Stellmon, David Sanchez-Burr, Danielle Kelly, and my former students in the Art Department of the University of Nevada. My Boston-area colleagues and friends Nuit Banai, Jessica May, and Arthur Fournier helped my family and me feel at home here and sustained me during the writing of this book.

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The support of a sabbatical was critical to completing this project, and I thank the administration and faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, for their support and collegiality, as well as the excellent students in the Art Department. It has been a great privilege to work with the staff of Yale University Press. Katherine Boller and Patricia Fidler encouraged the writing of this book at an early stage, and I am grateful for their involvement. Katherine has offered critical advice and encouragement throughout the process. Tamara Schechter has been an expert guide. Amy Canonico and Heidi Downey have provided key support and advice. Linda Truilo copyedited the manuscript with an expert hand. I am grateful to the anonymous readers whose comments and advice have made this a better book. My family has given more than is possible to state. I am deeply grateful to my mother, Elizabeth Swenson. None of this would have been possible without the patience, love, and help of my husband, Stephen Shapinsky. This book is dedicated to our daughters, Ingrid and Kaja.

ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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Introduction

Lost Contexts A snapshot from 1968 shows the coffee table in Sol LeWitt’s living room dotted with objects, arranged as if fixed to points on an invisible grid (fig. 1). Some are reminiscent of the artist’s family: a mug emblazoned with the name of his father, “A. LeWitt,” a doctor who died when LeWitt was five years old, and a Russian nesting doll, perhaps lingering from his childhood as the son of two Russian Jewish immigrants. Others are artworks, small versions or models of larger pieces: a Lucite-encased model of LeWitt’s Serial Project #1, Set D (1967), a single polystyrene unit of his Seven-Part Variations on Two Different Kinds of Cubes (the “small version,” 1968), and, as the table’s centerpiece, a latex mat topped with nine nubby cast latex hemispheres arranged in a loose grid. The latter is a 1967 model prepared by Eva Hesse in advance of her sculpture Schema (1967). LeWitt identified Hesse as his “best friend” when he dedicated his midcareer retrospective at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag to her shortly after her death in 1970.1 LeWitt’s practice of photographing the contents of his Hester Street loft eventually led to the 1980 publication Autobiography, a composite self-portrait comprising hundreds of snapshots organized in a grid. His possessions are documented with a leveling, deadpan aesthetic: artworks by his close friends are given the same banal treatment as bathroom fixtures or potted plants. This indexical presentation belies the intimacy of the project, in which readers are invited to become voyeurs, peering into cabinets or scrutinizing personal notes on a bulletin board, admitting a certain fascination with the historical and personal circumstances of the artist’s life and work. Autobiography is read with different levels of specificity or abstraction relative to the reader’s knowledge of the subject—the items she recognizes, the extent to which the significance of a bottle of liquor or book on the bookshelf is registered. It exemplifies the project of LeWitt’s conceptual art: indexical clarity that recognizes, even elicits, the Fig. 1 Eva Hesse, Washer Table, 1967, in the Hester Street loft of Sol LeWitt, New York, 1968.

subjective and historical nature of perception and experience. Like many of the items catalogued in Autobiography, this snapshot of a coffee table is deceptively mundane. Many who see it will recognize the table itself as an artwork normally attributed to Hesse, included in her catalogue

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raisonné of sculpture and titled Washer Table (1967). Hesse was born into a German Jewish family in 1936, escaping Hamburg on the Kindertransport with her sister, Helen Hesse Charash, at the age of two. Raised in Washington Heights, she studied painting at Cooper Union and then Yale School of Art. Yet by 1968, the date of this snapshot, she had emerged as a prominent sculptor within the overlapping milieus of conceptual, minimal, and postminimal art in New York. As an artwork in Hesse’s œuvre, Washer Table is among her first freestanding sculptures, made just before her “Accession” boxes, a major series of freestanding cubes that combined factory fabrication with protracted handiwork. Moving away from the wall was a critical step, one that occurred within the context of a close dialogue with LeWitt. Washer Table has a more complicated status than is generally acknowledged, as the snapshot of the artwork casually functioning as a piece of domestic furniture suggests. LeWitt himself made the base by repurposing part of one of his own artworks. The black wooden structure with a twelve-inch grid painted on the surface appeared, along with paintings by Frank Stella and Jo Baer, among others, in a small group show organized by Dan Flavin in 1964 at the Kaymar Gallery, the first exhibition of LeWitt’s work (fig. 2). “When the show was over, I decided I didn’t want to keep the piece,” and the structure, legs truncated, was given to Hesse. “She only used the surface of the table as a drawing surface,” LeWitt recounted, before returning it to him.2 Hesse arranged thousands of black rubber washers atop LeWitt’s grid, covering the table’s surface. Her obsessive labor completed, or disrupted, LeWitt’s structured proposal, countering the geometry of his grid with a wavering, irregular freehand application of circles. She returned the table as the gift of a drawing, reportedly telling him, “Now you owe me a table.”3 (She got one—LeWitt made the large rectangular studio table, Fig. 2 Installation view, Eleven Artists, Kaymar Gallery, New York, 1964. Background, on wall: Sol LeWitt, Cube with Random Holes Containing an Object, 1964. Foreground: Sol LeWitt, Table Piece with Three Cubes, 1964.

painted with a dark grid, seen in figs. 10, 11.) The Washer Table is in itself a snapshot of Hesse and LeWitt’s artistic identities in 1967: LeWitt’s discarded structure (by then made obsolete by his manufactured aluminum and steel structures), Hesse’s trove of “Canal Street technology” collected on outings with LeWitt, the desire of both artists to expand ideas of what drawing or sculpture might be. It is also, critically, an artwork that was ambivalent about being an artwork. “Martin Visser wants to manufacture your table with washers and a version of mine also with 3D grid. . . . I told Visser

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to make your color dark gray, very dark but not black,” LeWitt wrote on a postcard to Hesse from Holland on July 1, 1968.4 That same day, LeWitt buried a cube under the foundation of the Visser home, containing “an object of great importance but little value,” documentation of which would appear in the October 1968 Earth Works exhibition, organized by Robert Smithson and Virginia Dwan, at the Dwan Gallery in New York (see fig. 61).5 Visser, a famed Dutch furniture designer who carried on De Stijl principles that likewise influenced LeWitt’s choice of form, never did manufacture Washer Table. However, the identity of the piece as both art and table, along with the concept of drawing as something that might be done with rows of washers, reveals the blurred lines between art and non-art that motivated both artists: the desire to make work that was sited, both conceptually and physically, beyond the bounds of art or any other recognizable category of thing. If a drawing can be the surface of a table, it follows that LeWitt, shortly after returning from Holland in 1968, would start drawing on walls. Throughout the 1960s Hesse and LeWitt were engaged in an ongoing dialogue and artistic exchange, navigating the era’s social and political upheavals, as well as the changing values of the New York art world. With the waning of Abstract Expressionism and the rise of Pop Art, both artists moved from painting to sculpture (or, in LeWitt’s case, “structures”) during the first half of the decade. Hesse’s sculpture verged on chaos and disorder with handmade, organic forms that evoked the body, or through repurposing industrial materials (like washers), contradicting their geometry and industrial origins by asserting the human element of the artist’s hand. LeWitt’s structures, based on squares and cubes, fabricated using industrial materials and processes, eliminated the hand of the artist through a rule- and system-based conceptual approach that extended to the wall drawings he began in 1968. Their collaborative friendship, told through the dialogue of their art, helped define the practice of each artist in the second half of the 1960s, to the extent that the work of each artist from this period is best understood within the context of this formative involvement. This book focuses on breakthroughs in their careers in the 1960s, considering the very different work they produced within shared critical frameworks. Chapter 1, “The Problem of Painting, 1960–64,” considers the importance of Josef Albers for both as they moved from painting to working in three dimensions in the first half of the 1960s. The pragmatism of Albers’s pedagogical

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methods emphasized experimentation in the service of humane ideals: the refinement of individual perceptual experience was an aim of the experiments with color interactivity that he taught at the Yale School of Art. These methods redefined studio art pedagogy in the democratic, accessible form of his renowned book Interaction of Color (1963). Chapter 2, “Real Nonsense, 1964–65,” dwells on an incipient moment as ideas about painting and sculpture began to change radically while not yet codified into the strictures of Minimalism. Lucy Lippard’s theories of a “third stream art” pertained to both artists, and reveal the shared concerns of Pop Art and emerging forms of abstraction that would become known as Minimalism. The narratives of Robert Smithson and Dan Graham illuminate the cultural implications of LeWitt’s structures in 1965, and these artists, as well as Mel Bochner, complicated any formal associations of “Minimalism” in their responses to both Hesse and LeWitt in 1966 and 1967. Bochner’s curatorial projects involved both artists in key exhibitions of these years. In chapter 3, “A Paradoxical Situation, 1966–67,” the eccentricity and expansiveness of Minimalism comes into focus by looking at seemingly remote exhibitions and artworks in tandem. Finally, chapter 4, “It Is Something, It Is Nothing, 1968–69,” views the artists through what Smithson called the “disintegrating order” of art at this time—new approaches to spatial and experiential dimensions of art associated with the developments of post-Minimalism, from earthworks to “anti-form.” The chapters that follow propose a series of convergences and divergences as equally relevant means of understanding the artists. It would be false to force Hesse and LeWitt into the same story throughout the decade; their careers and experiences were as different as their art. Yet engaging these differences—gender, for instance—is essential for a historically grounded understanding. The situational account of these artists’ dialogue that I offer here, grounded in the art critical and curatorial narratives surrounding the emergence of their art in the 1960s, has running through it a narrative of the politics of gender. “What woman essentially lacks today for doing great things is forgetfulness of herself”: this is how Hesse paraphrased Simone de Beauvoir in her journals in late 1964, idealizing the transcendence and universality that were associated with the masculine.6 The forgetfulness that eluded Hesse, who often dwelt upon the philosophical and practical implications of gender inequality in her personal

5 LOST CONTEXTS

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writings, marks a key difference between her experience of the 1960s and that of LeWitt. Yet his involvement with Hesse meant that LeWitt was not forgetful of gender. “It was my friendship with Eva that made me aware of the problems that women artists face in a world dominated by male hierarchy. . . . There seems to be an implicit rule (even among female critics, etc.) that a woman can never be considered the dominant practitioner of a style or idea,” LeWitt wrote in 1978, discussing his 1970 show at Galerie Yvon Lambert in Paris, which he dedicated to Hesse upon learning of her death.7 The stories of Hesse and LeWitt are also told differently due to the availability of very different forms of narrative. For instance, I had the opportunity to speak and correspond with LeWitt about Hesse, but Hesse’s accounts of LeWitt are told through her journals and the memories of friends such as her former studio mates Ethelyn Honig and Grace Wapner. LeWitt could look back retrospectively, as he did many times in many contexts, on the impact of Hesse’s work, overall and for him in particular, and register personal aspects of her experience such as gender with the benefit of hindsight. Telling their stories together has the effect of telling a messy, varied, and broad account of art in New York in the 1960s; looked at together, these artists tend to complicate and make contradictory the art and ideas that thrived within designations such as Minimalism or Conceptual Art. “I always felt there was something ‘haunted’ about [Hesse’s] work. Maybe it’s haunted by all those lost ‘contexts’ of the 1960s,” Bochner once said.8 These lost contexts—Pop Art, Eros and “the new sexuality,” the social and economic transformations of New York City, the Vietnam War, to name a few— seldom introduced in discussions of Hesse, LeWitt, and their milieu, offer possibilities for reexamining art and experience in the 1960s.

New Experience The status of the object was at stake in the most prominent debates on art in the 1960s—for example, Donald Judd’s 1965 proposal of “specific objects” that were neither painting nor sculpture, but factual, direct expressions of their dimensionality and physical presence. Or Michael Fried’s 1967 diatribe against Minimalism, “Art and Objecthood,” which decried the “theatrical,” phenomenological engagement of the very objects Judd validated. Most notorious, perhaps, is Frank Stella’s literalist aphorism “What you see is what you see.” Yet, as Bochner has

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written, “To some of us, too much was missing from these formulations. They represented a kind of solipsism, a withdrawal from the world that left art with no possible means of affecting philosophical, social, or political conditions. How could a work of art destabilize the status quo from within such a limited aesthetic framework?”9 Bochner offers a critical, albeit retrospective, characterization of artistic intention within his milieu: to destabilize the status quo. Along with Bochner, Hesse and LeWitt both pursued work that disregarded endgame arguments about the object, focusing instead on an embodied and intellectual experience of art that expanded outward toward the world rather than back into tautological self-reference. They pursued new forms that rejected academicism and, ultimately, solipsism. Drawing on walls, filling a room with a web of latexdipped rope, leaning dozens of fiberglass poles against the wall, threading thousands of pieces of plastic extrusion through a perforated metal box, creating elaborate systems based on arbitrary measurements, burying a box filled with “something of importance but little value”—these were gestures based on an absurd logic and hence intrinsically destabilizing, producing novel experiential situations for viewer and artist alike. Even Washer Table was an attempt at new form—hovering sixteen inches above the floor, it references, but refuses to imitate, Carl Andre’s floorpieces and Judd’s boxes, claiming a space in between these models. It is a table, yet its oddly low height discourages the tactile, anthropomorphic associations of furniture that correspond to expectations of use. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the women’s liberation movement, among other social, political, and philosophical urgencies, these gestures, with their increasing skepticism toward the very idea of the art object, enacted a radical departure from the status quo, including existing means of understanding and valuating art. “The sixties were the turning point in many areas: political, social, and aesthetic. There were riots in the streets, new evaluations of social equality, and the end of modernism in art,” LeWitt began an unpublished reflection, penned at some point in the 1980s.10 The relationship of conceptual and minimal art to its historical circumstances is an inquiry that propels this book. As Hal Foster contended in his groundbreaking 1986 essay “The Crux of Minimalism,” the art of this milieu was “repositioned among objects and redefined in terms of place,” implying a fundamental transformation in which “the viewer, refused the safe, sovereign space of formal art, is cast back

7 LOST CONTEXTS

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on the here and now . . . she is prompted to explore the perceptual consequences of a particular intervention within a given site.”11 Yet Foster concludes that in this turn to the subject in the 1960s, perception and the contingencies of experience were not yet political—“it does not regard the subject as a sexed body positioned in a symbolic order.”12 Looking closely at the practice, rhetoric, and artworks of Hesse and LeWitt within the environment of New York City in the 1960s reveals a more invested temporal politics than once thought. These politics related not to the sexed body located within a symbolic order (this would come later, through feminist art for instance), but to the very nature of what it was to be a person, an individual, as the nature of subjectivity was being redefined in the contemporary world. Hesse and LeWitt shared an ethos of art that was committed to enlivening the sensory and intellectual experience of the subject by insisting on the personal, contingent, highly specific nature of the experience of art. This ethos, involving the paradox of “irrational judgments,” contained its own politics of personhood formed against the divisive, complex social context of the 1960s. LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art” was first published in the January 1969 issue of 0 to 9, a journal dedicated to conceptual art and writing edited by Vito Acconci and Bernadette Mayer, named in homage to the Jasper Johns’s painting series 0 through 9 (the titular theme derived from the painter’s use of store-bought stencils that subsequently determined the width of the canvas—an important conceptual precedent for LeWitt in the early 1960s). The clipped, axiomatic style of LeWitt’s contribution suggests straightforward, empirical truths, yet the “Sentences” assert an unequivocal antagonism toward positivist thinking, particularly the logic of formalism. 1. Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach. 2. Rational judgments repeat rational judgments. 3. Illogical judgments lead to new experience. 4. Formal art is essentially rational. 5. Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.13

In the 1970s, LeWitt revised the third sentence to read “Irrational judgments lead to new experience,” reinforcing the critique of rational thinking (and hence formalism) contained in the other sentences.14 Benjamin Buchloh has written that

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LeWitt’s work, at the time he composed the “Sentences,” “revealed that the modernist compulsion for empiricist self-reflexiveness not only originated in the scientific positivism which is the founding logic of capitalism (undergirding its industrial forms of production just as much as its science and theory), but that, for an artistic practice that internalized this positivism by insisting on a purely empiricist approach to vision, there would be a final destiny. This destiny would be to aspire to the condition of tautology.”15 Buchloh understands LeWitt’s work and writing as a response to the reductive approach of Stella in particular, and the theories of Clement Greenberg and the logic of formalism in general. The “Sentences” propose an alternative to the tautological, self-reflexive logic of scientific positivism: the artist as mystic, deploying “irrational judgments” within a mechanistic system (one that mirrors modern capitalist production while sabotaging its drive to functional clarity) to create the conditions for “new experience.” The “Sentences” articulate the limits of pragmatism, performing a false axiomatic simplicity while advocating for subjectivity (“24. Perception is subjective”) and meaningful misunderstanding (“23. An artist may misperceive . . . a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual”) in place of tautological, rational logic. This emphasis on the irrational or the absurd—the latter was Hesse’s preferred term—was keyed to the social context of the 1960s. Irrational or absurd art rejected both formal readings of art (associated with institutional valuation) and reductive political meanings. This position, formed against the backdrop of quickening public debates over civil rights, the women’s movement, and the Vietnam War, implied a new agency for the viewer and belief in the primacy of subjective experience and judgment. The work of Hesse and LeWitt insisted on open-endedness and ambiguity; irrational or absurd art rejected interpretation. Telling the story of Hesse and LeWitt’s artistic development in the 1960s in tandem helps unmoor their work from readings based on morphology, readings behind terms such as “Minimalism” that aggregate ideologically disparate artists like LeWitt and Stella. Instead, the artists shared methodological and philosophical commitments that originated with their first dialogues over Albers, who recognized careful, attentive perceptual encounter, and embraced the uncertainty and flux of perception, as the basis for any experience of art. While this was a fundamentally phenomenological outlook, it should also be seen as tacitly political.

9 LOST CONTEXTS

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Individual perception itself was a value, an experience to be restored at a moment when “the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our senses,” as Susan Sontag wrote in her landmark 1964 essay “Against Interpretation.” “What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” Sontag’s call to renew the sensory experience of art ended with a simple plea: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.”16 The upheavals of war, gender, and race transformed ideas of subjectivity. Sontag’s call to feel and not interpret—her resistance to the idea that the experience of art is transferable, public, able to be codified within shared values—is a position through which I understand the art of LeWitt and Hesse in the 1960s. Far from neutral distance, this was a powerful and humane stance, formed in reaction to contemporary events as well as the examples of Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism. Taking lessons from Albers to arrive at an erotics of encounter—an open, free play of perception and intellect, unbounded by formalism or legitimate meanings—was radical and impure, in the manner of Johns, the other early common touchstone for Hesse and LeWitt, for whom painting was “an impure situation.”17 Open-ended sensory and intellectual encounter endowed the perceiving subject with a new status, marked by radical uncertainty with regard to meaning, a suspended absurd and irrational experience that was against interpretation. Environmental-scale works of the later 1960s such as LeWitt’s wall drawings, and installations by Hesse, including her late works Contingent, Expanded Expansion (both 1969), and her untitled “rope piece” (1970), foregrounded new forms of physical engagement by transforming familiar spaces and surfaces (see fig. 74). Ultimately, for both artists, the experiential—an emphasis on spatial and psychological encounter, and the subjective nature of perception, learned through Albers and Abstract Expressionism but writ large as installation—marked by open-endedness, indeterminacy, and even chaos, implied a real and symbolic engagement with the broader social field of the 1960s.

Telling Stories “The reason I think the art of the ’60s is valuable . . . is that it freed art from the formal and aesthetic as a means or an end. It allowed art to move toward the narrative, it made an art that was able to create stories. So, instead of the aestheti-

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cism and formalism of modernism, art became politicized, then socialized, then sexualized as we see it today.”18 The questions raised by LeWitt’s 2003 assessment of the minimal and conceptual art with which he and Hesse were engaged— the meaning of narrative within this mode of practice, and the relationship of this art to its social context—offer a guide to the inquiry undertaken here. What was behind LeWitt’s progression from the field of commercial illustration and design (a highly conventional path for an artistically minded young man in the 1950s) to his emergence as a defining figure of Conceptual Art in the 1960s? How did Hesse move beyond an immersion in Abstract Expressionist painting to produce the unprecedented and extraordinarily influential sculpture and installation of her later career? How and why, in the course of this progress, did the stronghold of formalist aesthetics give way to an art that “was able to create stories”? And what were these stories? Chronicling the intersections of Hesse and LeWitt’s careers and practices, as well as their divergences, reveals the complexities and contradictions of art in New York in the 1960s. It is most likely that Hesse and LeWitt met in 1958 or 1959, while Hesse was enrolled at the Yale School of Art or shortly after her graduation, but the exact facts of their initial introduction are unclear. They were introduced either by Robert Slutzky or Harvey Becker, both painters who earned BFAs from Yale and worked with LeWitt at the architectural firm of I. M. Pei in 1955.19 Becker, who died in the 1970s and has remained obscure, was a painter of “very dark sort of expressionistic paintings.”20 Slutzky painted geometric abstractions and became well known through his writings on architecture and painting, and as a teacher at Cooper Union. His work drew more immediately upon the teachings of Albers, under whom Hesse, Becker, and Slutzky studied color theory. LeWitt reported at different times to different people that he had met Hesse through Becker or Slutzky, but he always emphasized Albers in conjunction with their initial introduction. Albers’s famous series of homages to the square was grounded in a methodical study of color, yet also embraced the manifold perceptual and individual factors at play in the experience of color. Albers’s theory of “color action,” in which colors do not exist a priori but develop in relation to each other through the experiential encounter of the spectator, was an important model for both Hesse and LeWitt in its emphasis on the embodied, active engagement of an artwork, and implicit tensions between the abstract knowledge and lived experience.21

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Hesse identified herself as an Abstract Expressionist painter from her teenage years through the early 1960s, not wavering from a commitment to an art that was derived from subjective experience. She enrolled in classes at Pratt Institute in 1952 at age sixteen but was underwhelmed by her foundations courses: “The only painting I knew was Abstract Expressionism,” she recalled in a 1970 interview, “and at Pratt . . . you had to do a lemon still life, and then you graduated to a lemon and bread still life, and then you graduated to an egg and lemon one. . . . This was not my idea of painting.”22 By seventeen, she spent afternoons alternately drawing from a model at the Art Students League and visiting the Museum of Modern Art, where she could follow the progress of Abstract Expressionism, studying, for instance, Willem de Kooning’s Woman I (1950–52) and Woman II (1952), both acquired by the museum shortly after their completion. Works produced at the Cooper Union between 1954 and 1957 exhibit a sophisticated mastery of shallow space. At Yale, where Hesse received her BFA in 1959, Albers was a mentor and father figure whose teachings she absorbed even if he “couldn’t stand my painting. . . . I had the Abstract Expressionist student approach that was not Albers’s” (fig. 3).23 LeWitt graduated with a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, where he was trained in a figurative style. He recalled “cast drawing and stuff like that— painting in a very academic way,” at times discounting his art school experience.24 “I really didn’t learn much in art school, probably would have been better off studying something else,” he told an interviewer in 1977.25 Turned off from painting as a student, he turned to lithography, and made prints such as Street Scene (1949) with the compressed space and somber, German Expressionist tone of Max Beckmann (fig. 4). LeWitt traveled through Europe on a grand tour in 1950, sketching the people he encountered in a detailed yet impressionistic style.26 His subjects were often working class—dockworkers, waiters, and a ship porter (fig. 5). In 1951 he was drafted into the army, where he illustrated a newsletter, posters, fliers, and other ephemera for the 40th Infantry Division during the Korean War while filling a sketchbook with scenes of infantrymen in training or at rest (fig. 6). In 1953, LeWitt attended the Cartoonists and Illustrators School (now Fig. 3 Eva Hesse, No title, c. 1958. Oil on canvas. 36 × 48 in.

the School of Visual Arts) and afterward worked in the design department for Seventeen magazine as well as travel and lifestyle magazines as an illustrator and paste-up artist (fig. 7). The girl whose writing desk is imagined in LeWitt’s

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Fig. 4 Sol LeWitt, Street Scene, 1949. Lithograph. Fig. 5 Sol LeWitt, “In the Lounge,” page from sketchbook created aboard the SS Washington, June 1950. Fig. 6. Sol LeWitt, untitled sketchbook drawing, 1950.

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Seventeen illustration “Letter to a Boy” likes to draw, and her table is arrayed with sources to borrow from in writing letters—newspaper clippings, a book of familiar quotations—illustrating the interface between the individual creative process, the social world of mass media, and the shared language of quotations. LeWitt’s illustrations suggest a close study of Andy Warhol, the premier illustration artist of the day, particularly the blotted line technique that was Warhol’s signature. Warhol was LeWitt’s near exact contemporary—just one month older—and the artists followed similar career trajectories, both working in illustration and design in New York before reinventing themselves as fine artists at the end of the 1950s. Yet LeWitt did not approach Warhol’s success in the commercial realm. He was steadily employed but never established a distinctive identity as an illustrator. Still, the import of mechanical reproduction and the intersection of art, mass communication, and commodity production shaped the thinking of both. LeWitt took a job as a graphic designer for the firm of I. M. Pei in Fig. 7 Sol LeWitt, “Letter to a Boy,” Seventeen, February, 1955. Illustration.

1955. “Then at one point,” he later recalled, “I think I was about thirty . . . I said, ‘I really don’t want to do this. I don’t like it.’ So I just quit, went back on unemployment and started painting.”27

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LeWitt painted abstractly and identified as an Abstract Expressionist after leaving his commercial art career in the late 1950s, though never with the deep emotional immersion that was supposed to inform figures like Pollock and Rothko. As Hesse and LeWitt’s mutual friend Bochner recalled, “Eva liked to tell the story that in the ’50s Sol was the only Abstract Expressionist who got up at 5:00 AM, finished a full day of painting by noon, and then spent the rest of the day reading The New York Times cover to cover.”28 By the end of the decade, LeWitt had undergone an autodidactic transformation, immersing himself in new thinking about art within a group of “people who studied at Yale with Albers including Eva Hesse,” and as a night watchman at the Museum of Modern Art, where he became part of a circle that included Dan Flavin, Robert Ryman, and the critic Lippard.29 “It was an important little cell of art at that time. The ideas that were talked about amongst ourselves turned out to be of some significance, because at that time art was changing a great deal, and some of the more important people of that generation happened to be here at that time,” LeWitt recalled.30 In 1961, Hesse was featured in Drawings: Three Young Americans at the John Heller Gallery, her first New York exhibition (fig. 8). Her work included a “semiotic drawing of four black personnage shapes,” in Lippard’s description (referring to Louise Bourgeois’s semi-abstract “personnage” figures of the 1940s that were surrogates for individuals in the artist’s life).31 The layered operations of Hesse’s work, simultaneously self-referential and pointing outward as a signifier, were already identified by an astute observer: Donald Judd noted “the combination of the stroke (used as both sign and association) and of encompassing rectangles” in her “capersome” drawings.32 Hesse had worked frequently with the figure since her graduation from Yale in 1959, but it largely disappeared from her work after this point. Hesse met Tom Doyle in April 1961, the same month her drawings were exhibited, and married him in November of that year. She held a somewhat dim view of her artistic development during the marriage: “I think there was a time, when I met the man that I married, I shouldn’t say went backwards but I did because he was a more mature artist and was developed and I would unconsciously be somewhat influenced and he would push me in his direction.”33 In retrospect, the works on paper exhibited in 1961 seemed “much, much more me” than the direction her work took after their relationship commenced.34 Their

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relationship, which ended in late 1965, was fraught and difficult, often along lines of gender, and Hesse’s artistic exchange with Doyle had in turns a limiting and broadening effect on her work. LeWitt recalled that “through Hesse I met her husband, Tom Doyle at the time, and we all lived very close together near the Bowery.”35 Hesse and Doyle’s Bowery studio, shared with the artists Grace Wapner and Ethelyn Honig, became a center of gravity where Lippard, Ryman, the painters Sylvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Mangold, and Al Held hung out, along with LeWitt, who was close friends with each of the four studio mates and a frequent presence between 1962 and 1964. “Sol became everyone’s father in a sense,” Honig Fig. 8 Eva Hesse, untitled drawing from brochure for John Heller Gallery exhibition Three Young Americans, 1961.

recalled. “He was quiet, apparently calm and very wise. Eva loved him. She said that he was her best friend. . . . It was the kind of friendship that was rare for women trying to become artists. One had no sense of being inferior with Sol. He thoroughly respected endeavor; encouraged constantly, and, in retrospect, he was the only artist that came through those studios who treated all of us as

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equals.”36 That LeWitt had not yet shown his work did not prevent him from mentoring younger artists. He was in his mid-thirties by this point and nearly a decade older than Hesse, Honig, and Wapner. The role of quiet supporter was natural to him. “Sol was one of the great champions of other artists and especially of women. He had a kind of sensitivity and awareness that was unusual at the time,” the curator Marcia Tucker emphasized.37 His experience working in the commercial realm in the 1950s exposed him to a culture in which women had few opportunities for creative success, but, as he wrote in 1968, “Artists live in a society that is not part of society.”38 The Bowery community was its own society. These Bowery artists and Lippard, the central chronicler and critic within this circle, engaged in an intense dialogue, seeking a way around both the commercialism of Pop Art and the emotiveness of Abstract Expressionism. “It was like halftime at the football game,” Doyle recalled of the period.39 No one knew what team would dominate in the next half, or even the rules of the game underway. The New Realists exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery in 1962 incited discussion of Pop Art within the group. Honig, who was Doyle and Hesse’s studio mate on the Bowery, recalls, “Roy [Lichtenstein] was down the block, Ivan [Karp] was collecting all these pop artists. I was having coffee with Eva and said, ‘You’ve got to go see this show at Janis.’ Everyone was in it—[Öyvind] Fahlström, [Claes] Oldenburg, [Andy] Warhol.”40 Hesse and Doyle both believed in the Abstract Expressionist ethos of direct engagement and psychological investment. “Eva, and particularly Tom, didn’t care for the show. They felt disturbed by it,” Honig wrote in her diary. 41 Yet Fahlström’s tight, obsessive graphics were alluded to in Hesse’s works on paper of 1963 and 1964, attesting to the sampling and experimentation of these years. The relevance of the artist’s touch was much debated, at dinner parties and informal critiques, with LeWitt opposing Hesse and Doyle with his assertion that the artist’s hand should be removed from the work. The relationship of Pop to Minimalism and to LeWitt’s conceptual approach is indirect, yet the use of factory fabrication itself implied mass production, whether of commodities in the case of Pop Art or the rapidly multiplying modular office buildings in New York. (The latter were an oblique point of reference for LeWitt’s structures by 1966, when he published “Ziggurats,” a short essay on New York City building codes

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that was the first expression of his ideas on a rule- or system-based art.) LeWitt’s 1964 “Muybridge” series drew from iconic, proto-cinematic photographs of motion to introduce a rudimentary narrative structure, both an adaptation and inversion of mass entertainment. Doyle and Hesse embarked for Germany in 1964 and while there, Hesse grew frustrated with painting and experimented extensively with collage, drawing, and paintings containing flattened, pictographic forms organized into cartoon panels. Arrows, letters, and words (“BOXES” is prominently integrated into one collage that depicts flattened cubes, while another from 1964 includes the phrase “And he sat in a box”) were combined with collage that at times protruded from the surface of the composition to become relief, or décollage, in which areas of the support were removed. A series of mechanical drawings, begun in late 1964, led to relief sculpture in 1965. These series were informed by her early awareness of gender politics through immersion in Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex. She identified the mechanical drawings in terms of the philosophical concepts of immanence and transcendence, which Beauvoir (and Hesse) related to embodiment and gender. She called the drawings and subsequent reliefs “crazylike machines” that produced “real nonsense”—a phrase reiterated and encouraged by LeWitt in his correspondence, as the pair established shared values of irrationality and the absurd that would persist through the 1960s.42 Hesse’s return to New York and separation from Doyle in the fall of 1965 commenced a period of intense exchange between Hesse and LeWitt as the two developed a close friendship and working relationship. Between 1966 and 1968 both negotiated the place of math, logic, serial forms, and the premises of conceptual art in the context of exhibitions such as Bochner’s Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. Hesse’s groundbreaking sculpture Metronomic Irregularity II was installed in Lippard’s 1966 exhibition Eccentric Abstraction with the assistance of LeWitt and Bochner, and LeWitt re-created the unwieldy piece on two occasions after Hesse’s death. He would later call it “one of the very earliest examples of installation art” that had “a strong and specific and direct effect on me.”43 By the mid-1960s, Hesse and LeWitt had become key figures within larger, interdependent currents of abstraction established through a series of influential exhibitions. Framed by polemical curatorial visions, these shows

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articulated a discourse of industry and technology, or, far more subtly, the body and sexuality at a moment of liberated mores and nascent feminist politics. In early 1966 LeWitt began making three-dimensional wood grids, painted white, one of which appeared in the exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, a high watermark of Minimalism curated by Kynaston McShine for the Jewish Museum in New York. The impassive white grid exemplified a reaction against Abstract Expressionist sculpture “with its emotionalism, improvisation, and emphatic marks of individual sensibility.” 44 By late 1966, LeWitt’s structures were factory fabricated of baked enamel on steel or aluminum to achieve a “standardized impersonality.” 45 Hesse, meanwhile, was given pride of place in Lucy Lippard’s theory of “erotic abstraction” and exhibition Eccentric Abstraction. Lippard showcased “voluptuous,” “sensuous,” “lumpy,” or “fluid” forms and yielding materials such as fabric and latex, in opposition to the strict geometries of Primary Structures.46 Nonetheless, like the work of Hesse and LeWitt, the seeming antagonism of Eccentric Abstraction and Primary Structures masked a deep affinity, an interdependence that opens up onto larger social and cultural dialogues of the 1960s. The gender politics of labor is one example. In the fall of 1967, not long after making Washer Table on LeWitt’s repurposed wood armature, Hesse commissioned her first factory-fabricated sculpture, Accession II, at Arko Metals in SoHo (fig. 9). At the suggestion of Robert Morris, she began working with Aegis Reinforced Plastics on Staten Island a few months later to produce fiberglass works such as Repetition 19 III and Sans II (both 1968), riding the ferry with Richard Serra, who also worked with Aegis to produce his fiberglass sculptures. She was among very few women taking advantage of factory fabrication in the production of their work; in Hesse’s ambivalent words, she had joined the ranks of “all those men with their great big sculptures.”47 For women participating in late-1960s avant-gardes (an extreme minority in the New York art world), choice of artistic labor resonated with gender politics on a national scale. On August 31, 1967, a short news item ran in the Fig. 9 Eva Hesse, Accession II, 1968. Galvanized steel and vinyl. 30¾ × 30¾ × 30¾ in.

New York Times: Eight women and three men picketed The New York Times’ midtown classified advertisement office yesterday, charging that the newspaper discriminates against women by labeling help wanted ad columns female and male.

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The pickets were members of an organization called National Organization for Women, which was formed last November to fight what it considers discrimination against women in jobs and legislation.48

This was not a large protest, but it serves as a reminder of how gender-specific labor was at the moment Hesse oversaw the fabrication of Accession II at Arko Metals: it was legally permissible to bar women from jobs based on gender, a practice common in manufacturing. There was a sense of change in the air with regard to gender roles and labor equality; the then barely known National Organization for Women would achieve enormous cultural and legal transformations over the next several years. In 1969 the Supreme Court ruled that it was a violation of Title VII, the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act, to bar women from “heavy industry” jobs.49 This and a string of other legal decisions in the late 1960s challenged male-dominated domains of labor, from factory work to managerial roles. Hesse’s command of divergent formal and conceptual attitudes generated a contradictory, even irreconcilable reception. She employed craft techniques conjuring forms of domestic labor alongside factory production, and used experimental polymers for hand-formed sculptures. By 1968 her negotiation of these symbolically dissonant methods and materials led to objects capable of sustaining diverse meanings: while Lippard extolled Hesse’s “fascination with chemistry and advanced materials,” curator Marcia Tucker noted Hesse’s concern with “creating personal forms” that required her to “only use materials that she can make herself.”50 Hesse often staged this ambiguity by combining industrial materials and domestic routine, as in latex serial pieces like the one placed at the center of Washer Table that were created in the kitchen, set to dry “on the radiator or in a muffin tin in the oven.”51 LeWitt’s brand of conceptual art performed a kind of white-collar, executive artist, whose activities mirrored those of an architect. Separating the cerebral processes of art from the execution of art objects, “all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” he wrote in his decisive prose.52 Elsewhere, LeWitt portrayed the task of the conceptual artist as merely administrative. The artist would “follow one’s predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste, or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial

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artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of a premise.”53 Whether executive officer or white-collar clerk, in both cases LeWitt modeled his practice on distinct cultural and economic formations of labor, concentrating the logic of these activities in the production of his art. Hesse’s prose and practice contravened LeWitt’s notion of the predetermined outcome. “I am interested in finding out through working on the piece some of its potential and not the preconceived. . . . As you work, the piece itself can define or redefine the next step, or the next step combined with some vague idea,” she wrote in an artist’s statement.54 Hands-on involvement in process was critical. Very different, again, was Lippard and John Chandler’s thesis of “the dematerialization of art” developed in reference to LeWitt’s serial sculptures from 1966 and 1967. “It is in the mind, or in the working drawing that sketches all the possibilities, rather than in the eye, that the whole attains its completely realized simplicity and unity,” they wrote.55 The physical, visual form was understood as merely a trace or indicator, a map or set of coordinates standing in for the range of iterations embraced by a concept. As the dialogic involvement of Hesse and LeWitt reveals, the depersonalized, anti-expressive premise of “dematerialization” ultimately contained that which it claimed to reject: the body’s presence, erotic investment, and subjective expression. Drawing was understood in expanded terms by each—the hand-placing of thousands of washers on a flat surface in the case of Hesse’s Washer Table, and LeWitt’s wall drawings, executed first in 1968—but also as a way of maintaining a personal, studio-based practice that allowed subjective involvement while simultaneously expanding conceptions of sculpture. “Eva still maintained the idea of craft, mostly as something to do. I did also in the drawings I did daily,” LeWitt recalled. 56 Even as LeWitt’s conceptual practice found new ways of minimizing work and the object, the hand of the artist was maintained in drawings, often with handwritten text. The terms of Abstract Expressionism persisted in indirect but important ways for both artists throughout the 1960s. Uncertainty and the idea of an art born of “total risk, freedom, discipline” remained at the core of Hesse’s artistic identity, and these traits would become subtly gendered in her reception.57 Artforum editor Philip Leider likened Hesse’s large-scale 1969 installation Contingent to Pollock’s symbol-laden painting of the early 1940s. The

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piece, which consisted of serial latex-coated cheesecloth panels encased in fiberglass, was “as deeply felt, as expressive and as inchoate as, say, a work like Pollock’s She Wolf.”58 In the eyes of her critics Hesse’s abstraction signalled a problematic persistence of expressionism. Deep feeling and emotional affect were incongruous with the contemporary privileging of the unpremeditated composition and vigorous execution of “anti-form” works such as Richard Serra’s splash pieces and Morris’s scatter pieces. LeWitt explained his commitment to “avoiding subjectivity” and removing the hand of the artist as “a reaction to the intense personal and physical involvement in Abstract Expressionism.”59 The problem of subjectivity defined LeWitt’s serial forms and conceptual practice: his professed desire not to make “a beautiful or mysterious object.”60 LeWitt’s practice of the later 1960s—his serial projects, structures, and wall drawings—might be understood as a kind of reaction-formation, inverting the terms of Abstract Expressionism while remaining centrally about subjectivity, in particular questions of the emotional and erotic investment in the artwork by both artist and viewer. In 1969, Hesse’s latex “non-art” pieces and a wall drawing by LeWitt were included in Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form—Works— Concepts—Processes—Situations—Information, Harald Szeemann’s irreverent survey for the Bern Kunsthalle that emphasized “intellectual” over “stylistic” connections in recent art (see figs. 75, 76). It was the rare exhibition capacious enough for both artists. They were, by then, using very different materials and concepts to produce what was perhaps the most original work of their careers; Szeemann’s insistence that “attitudes” toward the contemporary situation could make sense of artists whose work seemed stylistically remote was prescient. The last documented exchanges between the artists are two homages to LeWitt, one unpublished and one published, written by Hesse on LeWitt’s early career retrospective at Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in January 1970, and a wall drawing executed in Paris by LeWitt after he learned Hesse had died on May 29, 1970, its “wiggly lines” an embodiment of her attitude (see fig. 79). Fig. 10 Hermann Landshoff, Eva Hesse in her home/studio at 134 Bowery, c. 1968–69.

Playfully reclined on a divan and covered with a tangle of cord (scholars have called it rope, string, and rubber tubing, pointing to different aspects of her work), Hesse performatively associates the organic and absurdist character of her

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sculptural forms with the body (fig. 10).61 In this photograph, from late 1968 or early 1969, Hesse’s studio appears not so much as a place for work as a place for displaying and staging a compendium of external sources. She presents her art as intertwined with that of others, staged oppositions of order and chaos, concept and matter, a kind of call and response. What is likely a poem by Carl Andre is on the wall, words arranged on a staggered grid, and a “ziggurat” by Robert Smithson projects rigidly over Hesse’s tableau vivant.62 The two “sculptures” juxtapose rational (if pointless) geometry with visceral confusion, an arrangement echoed by the table in the foreground, furnished by LeWitt, on which Hesse’s latex and rubber “test pieces” (small quasi-art experiments with new materials), an assortment of washers, and personal memorabilia appear randomly arranged across LeWitt’s signature thirteen-by-thirteen-unit grid.63 LeWitt’s presence in Hesse’s studio is further established by the Lucite-encased model of Serial Project # 1, Set D from 1967, in the photograph’s foreground. We have seen this model already: it appears in LeWitt’s snapshot of Washer Table as well, having now migrated to Hesse’s studio. Both photographs of tables stage an exchange of ideas between Hesse and LeWitt: each made the other’s table, and each placed work by the other on that table to mark their dialogue. Another photograph, taken by Bochner around the same time, specifically isolates the table made by LeWitt for Hesse and its contents, which include, in addition to Serial Project #1, Set D, a clipping of critic John Perreault’s Village Voice review of Hesse’s exhibition Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers, postcard announcements for Hesse’s show and for that of the sculptor Ruth Vollmer (whose mathematically determined forms imbued with mystical, totemic associations were of great interest to both Hesse and LeWitt), Robert Breer’s 1967 flipbook Flix, and a periodic table of elements provided by Carl Andre (fig. 11).64 While the intersection of Hesse and LeWitt is the primary focus of this book, this story cannot be told narrowly, but only through myriad critical and social frames. The tables pictured in this chapter confirm that as the stakes of art were redefined in the 1960s, the work of art could no longer be understood as an isolated object separable from the artist’s mind, her community, and the field of ideas Fig. 11 Mel Bochner, Eva Hesse’s studio table, c. 1968.

preceding and following from its emergence into the world.

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Chapter 1

The Problem of Painting, 1960–64 When Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt met in the late 1950s, both artists were finding their way as painters at a moment when the relevance and meaning of modernist painting was in doubt. Yet it was through negotiating problems presented by painting that each developed their important three-dimensional work. LeWitt had quit a career in client-based design around 1958 to focus on fine art and, around 1959, ideas began to crystallize: “My thinking was involved with the problem of painting at that time: the idea of the flat surface and the integrity of the surface,” he recalled.1 “I met Eva Hesse and Robert Slutzky who had studied with [Josef] Albers. I decided that I would make color and form recede and proceed in a threedimensional way.”2 LeWitt became close with several of Albers’s students from Yale, including Hesse, Slutzky, and Harvey Becker, during his transition from commercial to fine art in the late 1950s. Through a dialogue with Albers as well as the “impure” paintings of Jasper Johns, LeWitt began producing three-dimensional paintings: paintings with insides that engage the spectator in curious looking, a visual investigation to reveal what might be contained within. Hesse, eight years LeWitt’s junior, returned to New York in 1959 with a freshly minted BFA from the Yale School of Art. She was grappling with compositional structure and emotive spontaneity, seeking a balance between formal control and subjective, expressionistic content: “Free, spontaneous painting delineating a powerful, strong, structured image. One must be possible with the other. A difficult problem in itself.”3 In addition to working with Albers at Yale, she had studied painting with Rico Lebrun, a figurative expressionist for whom painting involved “mess” in pursuit of “profundity,” in contrast to Albers’s emphasis on designed perceptual experience through planning and practice that eschewed disorder and accident.4 In a paper submitted shortly before her graduation in the spring of 1959, Hesse articulated her philosophy of painting: “The Abstract Fig. 12 Josef Albers, Homage to the Square: Earthbound, 1958. Oil on Masonite. 3915⁄16 × 397⁄8 in.

Expressionist attempts to define a deeply-rooted bond between himself and nature and to evoke this kind of union between himself and his painting.”5 For Hesse, painting came from experience—it was somatic, emotional, and autographical. Could this position have legitimacy in the case of a young female painter establishing herself in the New York art world in 1960?

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Painting, for Hesse and LeWitt, was approached as a series of problems defined by the intrinsic formal and conceptual limits of the medium, an orientation that reflected both the major reevaluation of painting under way in 1959 and 1960 and the influence of Albers. Between the fall of 1959 and the spring of 1960, sequential shows at the Museum of Modern Art—New Images of Man and Sixteen Americans—made radically different claims for the present status and the future of painting. The shows, to which Hesse and LeWitt reacted in specific ways, raised questions of what to paint, how to paint, whether to paint, and who paints—the latter a question of gender. What did it mean, in the early 1960s, for a female artist to work with the erotically and psychologically charged imagery of the expressionist tradition? Hesse’s forays into figuration and then large-scale abstraction over the next few years, and LeWitt’s painted boxes that ensconced objects of importance or photographs of nudes, were deliberations on the problems of painting—its limitations, its politics and erotics, and the implications of painting beyond the picture plane.

The Revelation of Vision Hesse and LeWitt first became acquainted through Hesse’s Yale milieu in the late 1950s, and Albers played a role in each artist’s evolving ideas over the next several years. Albers’s steadfast concern with perception and interactivity was an important example for both, while his methodical, systematic studies of color, particularly the series “Homage to the Square,” served as an early model for LeWitt’s conceptual practice (fig. 12). Art historian Jeffrey Saletnik has convincingly argued that Hesse’s later sculptural work, particularly her “test pieces” and exploratory work in the medium of latex, was shaped by Albers’s pedagogical stress on process and experimentation. Yet this thesis might more aptly be applied to her use of collage, as painting became a frustrating endeavor between 1962 and 1964.6 Albers’s approach to art pedagogy emphasized heuristics and problem Fig. 13 Eva Hesse. Free Study with leaves. Plate XXV–I, Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963).

solving, both in his famous color course at Yale and in his iconic teaching study Interaction of Color, published in 1963 as “my thanks to my students,” which included Hesse’s work among a selection of student studies (fig. 13).7 His method, developed while an instructor at the Bauhaus, was heavily influenced by John Dewey and the progressive education movement—“learning by doing”

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pragmatism that held direct experience as the basis of meaningful learning. Albers applied this hands-on approach to the refinement of perception. Teaching students how to see color as a relative phenomenon, underscoring the intrinsic subjectivity of perception and the experiential, contingent nature of color—its fluctuating properties continually revised according to context—was Albers’s aim. The portfolio of color lithographs printed to accompany the first edition of Interaction of Color offered the reader an interactive role in constructing compositions and experiencing color: flaps and windows open and close to block or reveal different color relationships, and readers are given specific instructions on how to expand the studies using their own materials. Each study demonstrates the potential of color activated by perceptual engagement and interactive relationships. The effects of color—after-image, the push-and-pull of simultaneous contrast, and other features of what Albers called “color deception”—were of great interest to LeWitt, who worked through these ideas in two dimensions before literalizing the spatial implications of color in three-dimensional structures. Additionally, Albers’s methodical, systematic approach to the variables of color was a template for LeWitt in developing his serial projects that exhausted all formal configurations of the cube by the later 1960s. While color was of concern for Hesse and LeWitt as painters in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Albers’s emphasis on relativity—the contingent nature of perception and the experiential encounter of an artwork—and his exhaustive accounting of formal permutations were lessons of greater significance for their careers. For his long-running series “Homage to the Square,” Albers applied unmixed paints—to mix would admit an individual perceptual judgment—with a palette knife, not a brush, directly onto primed Masonite panels. Hilton Kramer described the implications of Albers’s method in a review of the artist’s 1958 exhibition at Sidney Janis Gallery: Albers’s method is designed to remove the act of painting as far as possible from the hazards of personal touch, and thus to place its whole expressive energy—or as much as can survive the astringencies of the method—at the disposal of a pictorial conception already fully arrived at before a single application of pigment is made to the surface. The pictorial image is then “developed” in the act of painting in very much the same sense that photography is developed in the darkroom: it is not so much

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created as re-created. . . . The cost is nothing less than the elimination of all those notations of feeling which traditionally invest a painting with its pictorial meaning. . . . To redeem such a radical dissociation of feeling from execution would seem to call for a conceptual content so compelling as to compensate for all that has been eliminated.8

Kramer’s formulations are surprisingly similar to those LeWitt would put forth in his statements on conceptual art in the mid- and late 1960s. In fact, Kramer and LeWitt had been classmates at Syracuse University in the late 1940s and kept in touch. As LeWitt began exploring directions that he might pursue as an artist around 1958, he met with Kramer and at one point persuaded him to visit the studio of his friend and colleague at the firm of I. M. Pei, the painter Anthony Candido.9 Through Candido, “I got really turned on to doing art again,” said LeWitt. “I started painting. And I got really interested in Abstract Expressionism. I did it long enough to discover I couldn’t do it.”10 Kramer’s enthusiasm for Albers’s “conceptual” method that was distant from “the hazards of personal touch” likely influenced LeWitt’s understanding of the importance of Albers at the time and, in particular, LeWitt’s embrace of Albers as an alternative—a near inversion—of Abstract Expressionist ideals. LeWitt would recapitulate Albers’s strategies of reductive process and predetermined outcome that, paradoxically, opened up onto indeterminate experience for the viewer as his conceptual practice developed through the 1960s. “All of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair,” LeWitt wrote in reference to his own practice in his 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.”11 He pushed these principles to the limit, codifying the reductive, positivist logic of formalism to arrive at irrational, albeit purely logical, works of art. LeWitt also maintained Albers’s deep belief in the ultimately individual and irreducible nature of perceptual encounter. Albers’s “Homage to the Square” paintings are surprisingly humble, barely rising above the status of studies, painted imperfectly with the textured surface of Masonite and white primer visible (though these subtleties are lost in reproduction). Paint from the tube applied to Masonite (an industrial material) as mechanistically as possible, yet in service of the “revelation and evocation of vision,” Albers said, placed an extraordinary significance on perception and the act of seeing.12

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Though his paintings were executed mechanistically, Albers understood seeing itself as a process of filtering the world through memory, fantasy, and experience. “Seeing here implies Schauen (as in Weltanschauung) and is coupled with fantasy, with imagination,” he explained in the introduction to Interaction of Color.13 Hesse’s notes at Yale reflect the emphasis that both Albers and Dewey placed on the importance of experience: “I am growing as a human organism through experience. Experience is that which I see and partake of which makes life meaningful to me. . . . One’s Weltanschauung broadens as one matures.”14 Yet for Hesse, Albers’s idea that one’s experience comes to bear on the present moment through the immediacy of perception, eclipsing a more complex psychological or narrative account of experience, was frustrating. She complained about Albers’s “doctrine, all inclusive based on one idea. That all past is said and done, this is new and from this only should new ideas and vision come forth. . . . If every new work is based on this conception it is not new but variations on a theme.”15 Albers’s methodical exploration of variations on a theme, finding endless permutations within narrow formal territory, was certainly part of his appeal for LeWitt, as well as the example of the artist as originator of systems rather than as an expressive, deeply feeling individual. Hesse, on the other hand, rejected the “radical dissociation of feeling from execution” and chose to focus on psychologically invested figural work over the year following her graduation from Yale.16

New Images of Man Rico Lebrun, Hesse’s painting teacher at Yale, offered a very different take on the painting process.17 Her notes from Lebrun’s class reveal the tensions between Lebrun and Albers. “Research to attain profundity can be messy,” Lebrun instructed. “Mess is vital and necessary . . . [it] eventually becomes order in a chaotic image. The eye is not enough.”18 The latter is a direct reference to Albers’s focus on the immediacy of perception. Lebrun discouraged rationalized approaches to painting, including single-point perspective, encouraging “the broadening of form, spreading and dissecting of all its possibilities” in painting the human figure.19 “Move into essence, not merely appearance,” Hesse noted in response to a lecture by Lebrun, returning to underline this later in pencil.20 Lebrun’s urging of chaos to find order and belief in the human figure as a valid and powerful subject for painting was no doubt an impetus for the

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figural work that Hesse executed as she sought to establish herself in New York in 1960 and 1961. In early 1960 Hesse began painting crude, willfully naïve figures— individual female forms as well as paired male and female figures, and figures of ambiguous gender.21 Psychologically fraught images, some of which were produced in conjunction with psychotherapy sessions, negotiate the traditions of figurative expressionism and Abstract Expressionism from the vantage of a young female painter inspired by “my childhood idol Bill de Kooning.”22 The figural work Hesse produced as she “was making a conscious effort to become more professional and enter the art world” included oil paintings and ink wash drawings.23 The oil paintings are frontal portraits on canvas—in at least one case identified by Hesse as a self-portrait—or smaller-scale oil sketches of paired figures on Masonite panels. The figures are isolated and insulated in muddy, opaque fields. The paired figures are always given markers of sexual identity, and are paired either as female and male, or as two women. Many of the women have large and pendulous breasts, some with rounded, pregnant-looking bellies, crude and schematic iterations of maternal femininity suggesting fertility idols. Hesse’s figural paintings were related to the psychic associations explored in her therapy sessions with Dr. Samuel Dunkell, for which she regularly produced drawings to use, in Dunkell’s words, “as source material in our sessions, much as we used dreams and random thoughts to plumb her unconscious processes.”24 One self-portrait was a gift from Hesse to Dunkell. In Lucy Lippard’s account, “[S]he gave him a self-portrait showing a cloud around the right side of her head, supposedly indicating a ‘schizophrenic syndrome’” (fig. 14).25 Lippard’s skepticism about such literalized readings, even those offered up by Hesse or her therapist, sounds an important cautionary note against the temptation to equate these portraits’ openly psychological motifs too fully with the person of the artist. While these paintings reflect Hesse’s interest in recording and exploring her psychic life, they were also self-fashioned images that engaged the field of contemporary painting as Hesse sought a place for herself as an artist in New York. Figurative expressionism had a significant presence in New York in 1959 and 1960: a confluence of styles and ideas from Europe and California, including those of Alberto Giacometti and Jean Dubuffet as well as the Bay Area painters Nathan Oliveira and Joan Brown, and the towering figure of de Kooning, whose

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reputation grew even as Abstract Expressionism seemed increasingly to be an academic style.26 Hesse would later recall about her Abstract Expressionist period; “I loved most de Kooning and Gorky. . . . I know that was for me personally—you know, for what I could take from them.”27 Her journals describe a tension between “the concrete and the abstract” in her painting, noting “Dubuffet, Giacometti, Oliveira . . . Joan Brown” as artists likewise approaching this problem.28 In the fall of 1959 the Museum of Modern Art mounted a muchanticipated and much-maligned exhibition entitled New Images of Man, which brought together the work of twenty-three figurative painters and sculptors, including Lebrun, de Kooning, Oliveira, Dubuffet, and Giacometti. Curated by Peter Selz, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture and a German Expressionist scholar, New Images of Man was a repudiation of abstraction, from Clive Bell’s “significant form” to Greenbergian formalism. “The new imagery of man . . . reveals sometimes a new dignity, sometimes despair, but always the uniqueness of man as he confronts his fate,” Selz explained in the catalogue. “These men owe a great debt to the emotionally urgent and subjectively penetrating painting of the expressionists from Kokoschka to Soutine,” Selz wrote of the artists in the show.29 In retrospect, much of the work included in New Images of Man appears to be a conservative rehashing of played-out existentialist themes, a celebration of authenticity that seemed anachronistic on the eve of Pop Art, or “phonily expressive,” as described by William Rubin, one of the exhibition’s detractors.30 Though the exhibition was retardataire, it was nonetheless a major legitimation of figurative painting by MoMA, Abstract Expressionism’s most stalwart institutional supporter. As such, it summons the sense of uncertainty in the air with regard to what painting would become in the 1960s. By including multiple generations of artists, Selz made the case for an unbroken chain of figurative expressionism that had merely been eclipsed for a decade or so by the dominance of Abstract Expressionism. Lebrun exhibited semi-abstract Holocaust-themed paintings described by Selz as “frighteningly real pictures of death and disintegration” (fig. 15).31 De Kooning, by contrast, was represented by the 1954 painting Marilyn Monroe, among other works depicting Fig. 14 Eva Hesse, No title, 1960. Oil on canvas. 36 × 36 in.

women. The combined presence of Lebrun and de Kooning would have warranted Hesse’s close attention to the show, and such divergent themes and sensibilities suggested rich possibilities within contemporary figurative painting.

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Of generational relevance to Hesse were the Bay Area painters, many of whom revered de Kooning. They were interested in the psychological investment represented by Abstract Expressionism but sought to give this investment more specific form through the use of the human figure. Like Hesse, Brown claimed the importance of de Kooning’s women, and her explanation of their appeal may illuminate their relevance for Hesse as well. For Brown, the women did not signal a troubling misogyny, as they would to later critics. Rather, Brown perceived “a marvelous humaneness” in his women: “It’s a whole complex of emotions that I get from them. . . . They’re angry, on one hand they’re put downs, and yet they’re terribly sympathetic to the image that he’s dealing with. He put a vast array of dimensions within the emotions.”32 In Brown’s description, de Kooning’s women are sufficiently complex manifestations of femininity—these are not women Fig. 15 Rico Lebrun, Floor of Buchenwald #2, 1958. Ink, casein, and paper collage on board. 49¼ × 97¼ × 2 in. Fig. 16 Eva Hesse, No title, 1960. Oil on canvas. 49½ × 49½ in.

portrayed as passive or sexually available, but they oppose any reductively essentialist representation of gender. De Kooning also complicated the staging of gender in the women, saying famously in 1956, “Maybe I was painting the woman in me. Art isn’t a wholly masculine occupation, you know.”33 The diverse approaches to figuration and portraiture represented by Hesse’s paintings from 1960 and 1961 suggest that she was studying the examples of many of the painters in New Images of Man. As an experimental, exploratory series, her figural works do not represent a long-refined visual

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language; rather, borrowing is at their core. She used the figure to express inner conflicts, in one case the condition of marriage (fig. 16). This was unusual subject matter within a painting tradition that, by and large, marginalized female subjectivity and did not legitimize female painters. (Yet it should be noted that Hesse was not alone in using the medium to communicate a complicated ambivalence toward marriage—Grace Hartigan’s 1954 painting Grand Street Brides depicted mannequins in bridal attire in a storefront window with mask-like faces, organized in a half circle like the prostitutes in Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon.) Women were represented in New Images of Man only as subjects, not as artists—a structure characterized by Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion in The Second Sex that “humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself but relative to him.”34 When artist Nancy Spero discussed her decision to begin painting the female figure exclusively in the 1970s, she cited New Images of Man as an impetus. “I decided to view women and men by representing women,” she said, “not just to reverse history, but to see what it means to view the world through the depiction of women.”35 A number of Hesse’s figural paintings portray gender as a site of conflict. An untitled painting dated 1960–61 is the most specific treatment of the theme. A slight figure is rendered in thick strokes of muddy green in the foreground, and an expansive figure depicting a bride emerges from a taupe background. The foreground figure is difficult to read, with no distinct markers of identity. The incomplete, skull-like face has circles for eyes; the oversize head is attached to a child’s thin, genderless body. In contrast, the bride’s pendulous breasts and hourglass waist articulate femininity and she is availed of the accouterments of marriage: wedding gown, tulle veil, and pastel bouquet. Her featureless face and stiff, straight arms suggest a mannequin dressed in bridal attire rather than a portrait. Profuse rivulets of thinned oil paint run down the schematic bodies; the bride’s dress is sullied by spattered paint, perverting the decorous, virginal white ceremony of marriage into what reads as a fraught psychological drama. Matrimony is portrayed in a deeply uncomfortable light, with the bride conceived as a ghostlike mannequin. The icon of the bride has obvious meaning for a young woman who came of age in the 1950s, particularly a woman who aspired to break into the male-dominated field of painting. Hesse’s identity as a painter, including her decision to become a painter, was shaped in defiance of social expectations of

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femininity. As early as her teenage years, her goal to be “a real artist” was understood to be in conflict with the “role of wife” prescribed to girls in the 1950s.36 The domains of marriage and art making were frequently linked in Hesse’s writings in the 1950s—she perceived a troubling incompatibility between being a woman, in particular being a wife, and being an artist. At sixteen years old she announced in a letter to her father, “I am an artist. I guess I will always feel and want to be a little different from most people. That’s why we’re called artists. More sensitive and appreciative to nature.”37 Being an artist was not a hobby; it involved real choices and commitment that included the rejection of conventional gender roles: “[I]f I want to be an artist a real artist I must give myself, my mind and heart to study, not a few hours a day but always. Living on Park Ave. a wife of a doctor or lawyer then one must play the part of the ‘Doctor’s Wife.’” Near the end of the letter there is a plea: “Daddy I want to do more than just exist, to live happily and contented with a home, children, to do the same chores every day.”38 As a teenage girl in the early 1950s, Hesse viewed being a wife as a grim fate and a role to play—playing the part of “Doctor’s Wife,” the dull routines of housework, children, and husband. Being an artist seemed the exact opposite of this conformity and absence of inner life. After all, this girl’s idol was de Kooning.

Eva Hesse: Recent Drawings In April 1961, Hesse met Tom Doyle, a freewheeling, hard-living sculptor, with whom the possibility of a relationship must have seemed safely distant from her stifling vision of marriage to a doctor. “When we met, Eva was an Abstract Expressionist painter, and I’ve always been an Abstract Expressionist sculptor,” in Doyle’s words.39 Just weeks after meeting Doyle, Hesse noted the “problem . . . which I discussed only with Rosie [Goldman]” of “woman’s role—feminine [when] both artists.”40 Doyle also perceived an incompatibility; within a month of their meeting Hesse noted in her journals, “Tom is reluctant about my wanting to paint.”41 They married in November 1961. As Doyle explains it, their marriage was “like de Kooning and Elaine,” referring to the two painters’ famously stormy relationship. “That one time, late at night, Bill said to Elaine, ‘What we need is a wife!’ That’s what Eva and I used to say, we’d laugh,” Doyle remembered.42 “The Doyles,” as friends knew them, first lived together on 5th Avenue near Union Square before moving to the Bowery in 1963, becoming fully part

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of the artistic and intellectual Bowery circle that included LeWitt, Lippard, and Robert Ryman. LeWitt, to whom Doyle was introduced by Hesse in 1962, quickly became a close friend of the couple and helped with the move and with transforming the raw spaces at 134 and 135 Bowery into an apartment and studio. Sculptors Grace Wapner and Ethelyn Honig, who had shared studio space on 5th Avenue with the couple previously, relocated with them to share the studio at 135 Bowery, and both became close with Hesse and LeWitt in particular. Though Fig. 17 Eva Hesse, No title, 1961. Oil on canvas. 67 × 97 in.

LeWitt was certainly friends with Hesse and took interest in her work while she

Fig. 18 Tom Doyle, In the Round Forest, 1962. Painted wood. 6 ft. × 5 ft. 8 in. approximate dimensions. Installed at St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, New York.

and shared tools and knowhow with LeWitt (a relationship acknowledged by

lived with Doyle on the Bowery, he and Doyle were particularly close at the time. Both men were building wood constructions. Doyle had long worked with wood

Doyle’s contribution of a hammer in a holster to LeWitt’s Nine Boxes construction from 1963, discussed below). By late 1961, Hesse was no longer producing figurative paintings. Many paintings from late 1961 and 1962 seem ambitious, less apparently introspective and personal than the figurative works (fig. 17). They use color assertively, and

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some are vigorously painted and large in scale, perhaps reflecting the influence of Doyle, whose sculptures were expansive, made of stone or painted wood (fig. 18). Doyle sought a transcendent effect: “That whole romantic idea, there’s something over the hill, there’s something out there. You know like you could move in it, it’s like that space, that real space that we were involved in.”43 But the soaring Abstract Expressionist sensibility was fleeting in Hesse’s œuvre. Her paintings by 1963 were dense with information—glyphic patterns, arrows, “X” marks, and nonsensical notations that look like writing, along with more conventional Abstract Expressionist drips and gestural strokes. By then, the influence on Hesse of a new generation of painters, from Cy Twombly to Jasper Johns to Öyvind Fahlström, was clear in large canvases that are both exuberant and controlled. Yet neither Hesse nor Doyle, who had studied with Roy Lichtenstein at Ohio State University, could embrace Pop Art, which had by then emerged as a dominant painting style. Honig remembers “discussing Warhol’s ideas with Eva and Tom concerning having other people doing the work and treating art in a factory, assembly-line manner. It was threatening to say the least to artists who were involved with the physicality of their work; the need to touch and shape with one’s own hands. The very scale of such an idea was frightening.”44 In 1963, Hesse’s first solo show took place at the Allan Stone Gallery, called Eva Hesse: Recent Drawings. The works on paper incorporated felt-tip pen, graphite, oil crayon, wax crayon, gouache, and watercolor (fig. 19). They are small in scale—8½ x 11 inches—and possess a compressed energy. “She smashes down on little cut-out shapes, half-erased ideas, repetitive linear strikings, and sets up new relationships. She invents dimension and position with changes of kinds of stroke, levels of intensity, starting and breaking momentum, and by redefining a sense of place from forces which are visible coefficients of energy,” wrote Valerie Petersen in ArtNews.45 The abruptly changing focus of the collages relates to the variety of compositions from which Hesse apparently borrowed in assembling each piece. The collages are arranged from discarded drawings and Fig. 19 Eva Hesse, Untitled, 1962. Collage, watercolor, gouache, oil crayon, wax crayon, felt-tip pen, and graphite on paper. 8½ × 11 in.

paintings, as if Hesse had mined a trove of rejected work for discrete successful elements that were cut out and juxtaposed with new drawing and fragments from other compositions. The complexly layered surfaces of her collages are both energetically expressive and involving profuse cancellation. Forms are often unreadable—acrylic and gouache are used to “white-out” drawings and areas of

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color, traces of which remain visible underneath. Edges of drawings peek out from under pasted paper, and black ink bleeds through an overpainting of gouache. They introduce a perceptual dynamic of legible and illegible information—visible hiding that demands scrutiny and prolonged looking to reveal subtle relationships, not unlike Twombly’s paintings from this period. This perceptual dynamic, like Albers’s expectation of viewers’ careful study of subtle color variations, was predicated on the spectators’ responsive, interactive engagement. The announcement for the exhibition was illustrated with an untitled 1962 collage that was subsequently turned ninety degrees and signed by the artist. The collage elements in this work—scraps of other paintings and drawings—were affixed with a pressure-sensitive adhesive film used by paste-up artists.46 This collage approach was an artifact of Albers’s color course. In 1963, Hesse’s free study with leaves, an exercise from Albers’s class at Yale, was published in the portfolio of lithographed plates of Interaction of Color (see fig. 13). The leaves are split in half and with halves reversed, estranging the leaves’ appearance. A thin strip of blue Color Aid paper is revealed between the halves that are arranged around a cut fragment of neutral gray paper. Her collages of 1962 involved a similar economy and process, one that Hesse would return to over the years. Albers extolled the virtues of existing materials like leaves and paper, especially the reuse of scraps from a variety of sources: “cutouts from magazines, from advertisements and illustrations, from posters, wallpapers, paint samples.”47 He urged a “collective search for papers and subsequent exchange of them among class members,” resulting in “a rich but inexpensive color paper ‘palette.’” Mixing oil paint was “difficult, time consuming, and tiring.”48 The strategy of working from a trove of readymade materials would become central to Hesse’s sculptural practice starting in Germany in 1965, but much earlier, this strategy served as a generative technique, and a way to negotiate the problems of painting. It is notable that the canvases that Hesse made in 1962 and 1963—many of which were dynamic, assertively colored, largescale abstractions—did not appear in exhibitions until after her death, that they remained “stacked along the walls” of her studio, according to Honig.49 Whatever the reasons related to market—the changing directions of art, or the validity of a female painter working in the Abstract Expressionist style—collage turned out to be a more productive path for Hesse.

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Hesse would continue to use the collage technique as a means of breaking away from the flat picture plane; in Germany in 1964, she made largescale painting collages cobbled together from an array of repurposed compositions, a handy stock of color and line to be cut and pasted, arranged and rearranged at will, without the permanence or difficulty of mixing paints and generating a composition from scratch. Collage offered a way around painting. It at once documented her frustration with the medium, and offered a new rapidity, freedom, and spontaneity. As the next chapter explores, collage and migrating forms would have a critical role in the development of Hesse’s sculpture while in Germany in 1964 and 1965.

Sixteen Americans Even though “in the early ’60s I had been working and kind of throwing out most of the work that I did,” LeWitt preserved paintings that merge his engagement with Albers’s “Homage to the Square” series and individual figures frozen in motion copied from single frames of Eadweard Muybridge’s sequential studies of motion.50 The earliest extant painting series in his œuvre are canvases from 1960 containing nested squares or rectangles in contrasting tonalities with figures embedded in the center of the canvases (fig. 20). The textured surfaces possess the controlled painterly effect of Johns, a departure from Albers’s knife-applied pigments. Figures are carved into a field of thick paint using the handle of the brush or other sticklike implement, or crudely painted in a primary color set off against a murky field. The rough textures, unevenly applied paint, and carved surfaces imbue the canvases with a material presence that evokes Johns and the idea of paintings as objects, not simply as supports for images. Combining contrasting squares with suspended action—the figures run, box, and somersault—the canvases articulate, however inelegantly, problems of painting: how to establish a sense of narrative without time, a sense of space without the illusion of depth. Figures invested with narrative had been a mainstay for LeWitt since his student years. The figures LeWitt drew in the 1950s were “types” that told stories—the boxer, the dour individuals crowding a German Expressionist–style street scene, the dockworker, lounge patrons, the soldier advancing with his machine gun (see figs. 4–6). The figure, for him, had been a vehicle for storytelling,

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and the hand of the artist imbued the figure with convincing, expressive character through fraught, tentative lines. LeWitt’s figures inhabited specific social roles; they were not the universal, existentially troubled totems that populated New Images of Man. By 1960 the use of Muybridge provided a means of decontextualizing the figure from social narrative while also avoiding the psychological import of much contemporaneous figural work. Another contemporary survey show, Sixteen Americans, followed on the heels of New Images of Man, opening in December 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art. Hesse had hoped to participate in Sixteen Americans, bringing drawings to the curator Dorothy Miller in the spring of 1959 before leaving Yale. She was turned away, given encouragement and $2.00 for cab fare.51 Notably, none of the artists in that show featured the figure prominently in their work, offering a sharp, forward-looking departure from New Images of Man. Sixteen Americans introduced significant directions in painting, yet, paradoxically, the most important works in the show questioned fundamental principles of painting. It was “probably the most influential show of the decade, or for many decades, because it was the opening of many new ideas,” LeWitt recalled.52 Included were Frank Stella’s methodical and highly structured “Black Paintings,” in which each pass of the brush reiterated the shape of the canvas in regimented stripes. The “Black Paintings” asserted themselves as objects as much as paintings, integrating support and frame into the work of art to a radical extent. Robert Rauschenberg’s “Combines” contained worldly debris, from the Coke bottles in Curfew (1959) to a print of a late nineteenth-century chronophotograph by Étienne-Jules Marey heralding the age of motion pictures, incorporated into Double Feature (1959). “Painting relates to both art and life. Neither can be made. (I try to act in that gap between the two)” reads Rauschenberg’s famous catalogue statement.53 Johns, also in Sixteen Americans, was the figure who would ultimately become most pivotal for Hesse and LeWitt as each moved into three dimensions—for LeWitt starting around 1962, and for Hesse in 1965. Johns averted the problem of depth by painting flat graphics (targets, flags, stenciled numbers) Fig. 20 Sol LeWitt, Running Man, 1960. Oil on canvas. 24 × 24 in.

and rendering three-dimensional objects as sculpture. His catalogue statement implied a new freedom from the critical dogmas of painting, particularly formalism, and drew attention to an open, fluctuating spectatorial participation: “Sometimes

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I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.”54 The simplicity of Johns’s statement belies the radical nature of his painting at this moment, and the possibilities of painting that was “impure.” As Mel Bochner wrote, Johns’s “0 through 9” series of stenciled numbers “interrogated the phenomenological condition of painting but went further by injecting doubt into the deadening self-belief of art thinking to that time.”55 The simple sequence of numbers introduced an elemental narrative. The width of the ten stencils, 0 through 9, determined the width of the canvas. Painting could mean nothing, or everything. Paintings by Johns shown at the Castelli Gallery in the spring of 1960, concurrent with Sixteen Americans, were composed of interlocking patchworks of short, rapid brushstrokes, “clusters of harsh, high-keyed blue, red and orange” as well as white, black, and gray tones, wrote Donald Judd.56 False Start (1959) was exemplary, with its “[s]tenciled names of the various colors,” Judd noted. “The words introduce an abrupt formality and actuality (as they are as they would be on a box) into amorphous Expressionist brushwork” (fig. 21).57 The deceptively simple, self-reflexive statement of perceptual facts in False Start, in which stenciled color names appear to label painted passages of color (to which the names usually do not correspond), was enormously influential. It demonstrated a new self-awareness of perception, a teasing apart of the material, conceptual, and expressive properties of a painting: painting as an objective thing that states the facts of its physical, formal components (though inaccurately) like the label on a box, while also signaling “notations of feeling” through “Expressionist brushwork.” The latter, in Johns’s hands, became an appropriation of expressionism. Yet the “impure situation” Johns described meant having it both ways: quoting expressionist brushwork while also making an expressionist painting. LeWitt attempted something similar to Johns’s attention to the interpretive engagement of the viewer and teasing apart of material, conceptual, and expressive elements in two large-scale paintings from 1960, both titled Run (fig. 22). Energetically applied small strokes and daubs of paint in primary colors and in black and white are paired with repeated text and image. The vigor of execution performs the dynamism of the theme: “A PICTURE ABOUT RUNNING” LeWitt wrote in the upper-right corner of one canvas, with the words “RUN” and

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“RUNNING” and the image of a running figure interwoven within an all-over patchwork of color. The running figure, midstride, is painted after a single frame of a running man from Muybridge’s 1887 book Animal Locomotion and functions as a basic grammatical unit: a pictographic statement of “RUN.” Fig. 21 Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959. Oil on canvas. 67¼ x 54 in.

LeWitt began to expand the picture plane into real space in 1962 with constructed paintings such as Run I, in which squares recede into coffers and project as platforms from the canvas, offering true spatiality rather than the

following pages: Fig. 22 Sol LeWitt, Run, 1960. Oil on canvas. 60 × 58 in. Fig. 23 Sol LeWitt, Run I, 1962. Oil on canvas and painted wood. 63½ × 63½ × 3½ in.

illusion of depth (fig. 23). He recalled “understanding . . . what Johns was doing, with three dimensional things were three dimensional, and two dimensional things were two dimensional. I thought this was a very good idea. Then I thought, ‘Well, it should be applied to Albers.’”58 Also based on a Muybridge photograph, Run I communicates the idea of “run” through the word itself, an arrow pointing in the direction of motion, and a running figure. LeWitt soon eliminated painted emblems and words, opting for empty boxes—some receding into the picture

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plane, others protruding assertively into the viewer’s space. The proboscis-like projections of some wall structures draw the viewer’s gaze inside the painting, peering into apertures or peepholes, though there is nothing to see but a black void (fig. 24). A floor structure from 1962 contains coffers on four sides, and a table structure from 1963 (destroyed) contained numerous tubes into which to peer (fig. 25). Both floor-bound and wall-bound structures engage the viewer in a more fully embodied sense than would a conventional painting: to apprehend the pieces, one must walk around and visually probe their depths. The painted boxes, empty at first, by late 1963 began to enclose objects and images often invested with personal significance. LeWitt’s Nine Boxes structure was made for Amusement is . . ., a show at the Museum of Contemporary Craft that sought “to focus attention on the experience of fun and play.”59 Nine compartments each contain the work of another person, including a light bulb contributed by Dan Flavin, a hammer in a Civil War–era holster contributed by Doyle, a small Play-Doh sculpture by Robert Ryman, and a needlepoint picture of a bowl of fruit by LeWitt’s aunt, Luba Appell.60 The objects are only partially visible through slats. The curious curator or art historian might reveal these details of the piece through investigative scholarship, as Veronica Roberts has done, but for the lay viewer, the contents can only be glimpsed and remain mysterious.61 The handmade and personal objects in Nine Boxes, and other works, including a wall piece made for Wapner containing one of her artworks within a box perforated by dozens of drill holes and titled Cube with Random Holes Containing an Object (1964), are enclosed within structures that both announce and withhold meaning. LeWitt “kills the viewer with his own curiosity,” Brian O’Doherty Fig. 24 Sol LeWitt, studio view c. 1964 with Wall Structure (1962) and variations on “Muybridge boxes” containing photographs, in progress. Fig. 25 Sol LeWitt, Table Structure (with Stripes), 1963. Painted wood, 55 × 55 × 30 in. Destroyed.

observed when Wapner’s box appeared in a group show organized by Dan Flavin for the Kaymar Gallery in SoHo in 1964 (see fig. 2).62 Containing affect (what Kramer called “notations of feeling” when describing Albers’s paintings) was a trait LeWitt and his contemporaries associated with the sequential photographs of Muybridge. The potential for dramatic action implied by a running man, for instance, is contradicted by emphasis on the literal: the act of running in the absence of any narrative context, no race or chase, simply “a picture about running,” as LeWitt painted into his painting. Muybridge’s serial photographs of locomotion, particularly the running figure, introduced narrative in its most elemental form—a sequence of events—without

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imparting specific meaning. “Narration was a means of getting away from formalism,” LeWitt explained.63 Yet narrative did not imply a narrative arc, with rising action and denouement. Dan Graham described the suspension of narrative in Muybridge’s sequential photographs as void of causality: “The model isn’t going anywhere. Her task isn’t completed—no work is done. It isn’t possible to see an interaction between her ‘actions’ and the things supposedly acted upon.”64 The Muybridge figures seemed somehow contemporary to Graham in 1967, representing an existentially disconnected sense of time in which “Every thing is in the present—present entirely on the surface. No moment is created; things—moments—are sufficient unto themselves. Things are separated from other things and no thing is more important than any other thing.”65 Graham also associated this flattened emotional terrain with the French New Wave: “Today’s motion picture is returning to its first appearance as a series of static, unrelated moments.”66 The films of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut were, to the critic and curator Gene Swenson, “post-Freudian”: “These directors don’t seem to think that inner psychology is very interesting or applicable in telling stories about later twentieth-century people,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1965 exhibition The Other Tradition, discussed in the next chapter.67 LeWitt’s interest in forms and images drained of affective drama, or inner psychology, nonetheless entailed curious peering into boxes on behalf of the viewer. This mode of spectatorship was made explicitly cinematic in LeWitt’s 1964 “Muybridge boxes.” Muybridge I and Muybridge II both appear externally as long Fig. 26 Sol LeWitt, Muybridge I, 1964. Exterior view. Painted wood with ten compartments, each containing a photograph by Barbara Brown, Los Angeles, and flashing lights. Fig. 27 Sol LeWitt, Muybridge I, 1964. Schematic representation of interior photographs by Barbara Brown, Los Angeles.

black rectangular boxes (figs. 26, 27). The interior of each box is segmented into ten compartments, each with a small peephole. Inside each compartment, the peephole reveals a frame of a nude woman. In Muybridge I, the camera is stationary as the woman advances, the first shot revealing her entire figure, and the last a close-up of her navel. In Muybridge II, the role of camera and woman are reversed, and this time the camera advances on a seated nude whose entire figure, head to toe, fits into the initial frame. By the third frame, her head is eliminated, and the camera’s focus is revealed by the final frame to again be the woman’s navel, where it rests. The encounter is made filmic by bulbs inside the boxes that flash at random—the image is hidden in darkness between brief bursts of exposure. The peepshow format suggests a lurid encounter, something salacious and hidden out of propriety. Or, as Duchamp revealed in 1966 with Étant Donnés,

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something too awful to show publicly yet to which we are drawn as visual spectacle. The content of the Muybridge boxes is neither lurid nor awful. Rather, the nude is impassive and de-eroticized. She stares matter-of-factly at the camera. As Barbara Rose mentioned in her discussion of a newly objective or “public” attitude toward the body in 1965, “[W]hat we are seeing everywhere is the inversion of the personal and the public. What was once private (nudity, sex) is now public and what was once the public face of art at least (emotions, opinions, intentions) is now private.”68 Robert Morris’s I-Box (1962), in which a nude photograph of the artist wearing a wan smile is contained in a box with an I-shaped wooden door to be opened and closed by the viewer, reveals something of the context for the Muybridge boxes. The I-Box was a direct response to Johns, in particular the manipulable compartments of Target with Plaster Casts (1955) filled with cast body parts of the artist. Like the works by Morris and Johns, LeWitt’s Muybridge boxes at once trade on the erotic and humorous implications of finding nude bodies inside boxes, and deflate expectations by presenting contemporary, desensationalized bodies—of the artist himself, or his girlfriend, as was the case with the Muybridge boxes. Evoking Muybridge’s figures frozen in motion embedded a nineteenth-century erotics of the gaze and spectatorial consumption in objects that proposed an entirely new mode of perceptual and erotic exchange. While perception was LeWitt’s paramount concern, the perceptual dynamic of curious looking, concealing and revealing, possessed its own erotics. LeWitt no doubt was aware of the irony of ensconcing a Muybridge-derived female figure in a black box with a peephole. The humorous erotic associations disrupted the positivist instrumentalism of Muybridge’s photographic “proof” of facts of locomotion, with its claims of a disinterested, objective gaze.69 Honig, who was Hesse and Doyle’s other Bowery studio mate, has recalled LeWitt making the Muybridge boxes, borrowing tools from Doyle and Wapner, with which he “made some boxes pierced with holes and placed [the photos or objects] inside of the boxes. The only way one could see the [photo or object] in the box was to look through the holes. Much later when Eva made her ‘Accession’ pieces, I was to think of Sol’s boxes again” (see fig. 9).70 Interior space remained a significant theme as LeWitt began working with open and closed cubes in the mid-1960s. And, as Honig said, enclosure was an important concept for Hesse in the mid-1960s as well, not unrelated to LeWitt’s early boxes.

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The Muybridge boxes exhausted the usefulness of the figure for LeWitt. After these works, the figure was “discarded” along with the word and the symbol in order “to simplify things rather than make things more complicated.”71 However, as Doyle has suggested, “What’s really curious about that is that Muybridge always had the grid in behind . . . so Sol drops the figure and uses the grid. . . . We always thought that.” Doyle and others suspected that the gridded backdrop of Muybridge’s photographs, used to measure bodies, had migrated to the gridded bases upon which LeWitt organized cubes for his serial projects starting in 1966.72 This sense of hidden personal and semiotic meanings within the anonymity of LeWitt’s grid or in his open and closed cubes was particularly intriguing to Hesse, an aspect of LeWitt’s work addressed by her own sculpture upon returning from Germany in late 1965.

In the early 1960s many regarded Hesse as “Tom’s wife,” Lippard recalled.73 Despite her serious artistic training, during the period when she identified herself as an Abstract Expressionist painter, most people assumed that Hesse was a “woman artist”—not career-driven, but a hobbyist. This category was clarified by Lippard in a supporting letter accompanying Hesse’s application for a residency at Yaddo in 1967. By then, Lippard wrote, “I feel I can say that Hesse is an artist, and a good one, in the truest sense of the word . . . not a ‘woman artist,’ but for the last 2 years, a strong and original sculptor.”74 The sculptor David Weinrib, another mutual friend of Doyle and Hesse, recalled that female artists attached to his milieu were not “taken seriously.” Hesse “was a little in the role of wife . . . these women played a secondary role . . . the women came along as wives.”75 So it was when Doyle was invited to be an artist-in-residence at the textiles factory of a German industrialist and collector, Hesse “was thrown in as lagniappe.”76 But the fifteen months in Germany in 1964 and 1965 were extraordinary, marking Hesse’s transition from painting to sculpture, and the beginning of an intense intellectual and personal exchange with LeWitt. At the same time, LeWitt had his first solo show in New York. He stopped “spending all the time on the skin” and realized he was interested in structure, “so to solve the problem I took the skin off and left the structure.”77 Painting, it turns out, was an experimental ground for Hesse and LeWitt, a series of problems to solve on the way to three dimensions.

59 THE PROBLEM OF PAINTING, 1960–64

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Chapter 2

Real Nonsense, 1964–65 “When is a painting not a painting, a sculpture not a sculpture?” Lucy Lippard asked readers of her essay “The Third Stream: Constructed Paintings and Painted Structures,” published in Art Voices in the spring of 1965.1 The question was not rhetorical. The critic was struggling to pinpoint a trend involving “the projection of painting into space” that she associated with Sol LeWitt, Donald Judd, Walter De Maria, Robert Mangold, and a dozen others. “I think that the term ‘post geometric structure,’ or simply ‘structure,’ is most accurate,” she proposed.2 While not all of these artists could afford to use Plexiglas, Formica, galvanized iron, and enamels, most admired the “dissociation from sentimentality” of such industrial materials. Many, like LeWitt, were trained in commercial design, and their palette and materials inferred commercial and industrial products: LeWitt’s lacquers were “sold commercially for use on houses, boats and porches,” Lippard noted. The work was concerned with “the assault of commercialism on the American eye,” and these artists shared “similar obsessions and influences” with their Pop Art contemporaries. To call the cleanly designed structures “impersonal” was to miss the point. “A determined detachment is just as personal as gut-spilling expressionism,” she concluded.3 In 1964 and 1965, LeWitt’s work continued to engage the rapid unraveling of medium specificity ushered in by Jasper Johns and Frank Stella with paintings that were “sculptures.” (By 1965, with Lippard’s writings, they became “structures,” removing historical and aesthetic association.) LeWitt’s work emphasized perceptual encounter through interactive color relationships and the drama of partial visibility; viewers could slide boxes across a table surface painted in squares of primary colors or peer inquisitively into boxes containing objects or images, sometimes with randomly flashing lights (see figs. 2, 26, 27). It was a matter of “getting away from formalism.”4 In 1964, LeWitt deployed theatricality (a word made infamous by Michael Fried’s 1967 critique of “literal” art) in a more Fig. 28 Eva Hesse, No title, 1964. Oil, crayon, gouache, ink, pencil, and collage on canvas. 78½ × 59 in.

specific and thoroughgoing manner than other artists in his milieu; his work was intended to stage a “tension that leads to a certain ambiguity on the one hand and absurdity on the other hand.”5 By 1965 the drama became a phenomenological, environmental affair with painted structures scaled to the space of the gallery and

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the spectator’s body. The shift to the body of the spectator, and from interior to environmental space, refigured meaning through a turn to the social environment—New York City in 1965, a site equally registered by Dan Graham and Robert Smithson, both of whom became LeWitt’s close interlocutors that year. Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle left the Bowery and embarked for Europe in early June 1964, setting up studios inside a former textiles factory in the German industrial town of Kettwig, just north of Düsseldorf. The couple was sponsored by Arnhard Scheidt, a textiles manufacturer and collector of Doyle’s work, in what Hesse remembered as “an unusual kind of Renaissance patronage,” a remark that captures the cultural remove of their German sojourn from the rapidly changing New York art world of 1964 and 1965.6 Doyle and Hesse stayed closely attuned to developments through friends, particularly LeWitt’s frequent communications, and through periodicals such as Art International, for which their friend Lippard served as the New York correspondent. “While in Germany [Hesse] began to do 3 dimensional pieces—perhaps being aware of the idea floating at the time that painting was a lesser activity—and sculpture was the way of the future. Many painters (me included) started to do 3-D work,” LeWitt recalled with a flatness that belied the stakes of this development for Hesse.7 Hesse’s turn to three dimensions was a pivotal but difficult progression for an artist so committed to the ethos and practice of painting—what painting represented historically and its expressive allowances, as well as its material and formal problems. The transition occurred after months of frustration with painting and extensive experiments with collage. In late 1964 she began drawing imagined machine and body systems that led to reliefs. Surfaces of Masonite, Styrofoam, and enamel paint were built up with cord and augmented by industrial detritus or discarded pieces of Doyle’s sculpture. The reliefs were imbued with highly subjective meanings. Hesse’s move to three dimensions integrated craft-oriented techniques and identified the artist’s own body as an autographic reference. It was a proto-feminist moment, before the women’s liberation movement was so designated, and before the formation of the consciousnessraising and activist groups that would define feminist politics late in the decade. The writings of Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan were discussed privately in correspondence between Hesse and her friends. Problems were personal. Lippard later described her notion of “third stream” art (the term was

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borrowed from music, a merger of jazz and classical styles) as “unbearably naïve,” declining to include her writings on the subject in her first anthology.8 The concept was broad and inclusive, free of formal or ideological parameters, admitting the “sensuous” reliefs of Reva Urban, the martial conglomerates of Lee Bontecou, and the shaped paintings of Frank Stella, along with the painted structures of LeWitt, Donald Judd, and many others. Curator Kynaston McShine winnowed Lippard’s idea of “deadpan post-geometric structures” down to a far more narrow set of tendencies for his landmark show Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors in the spring of 1966. Yet Lippard’s “naïve” art criticism valuably captured an unformed, transitional state of ideas in 1964 and early 1965—a moment when personal, idiosyncratic, experimental strategies prevailed, before categories such as Minimalism and Conceptual Art provided a limiting clarity, when critics saw a flux between the Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol and the structures of Judd and LeWitt, when sculpture was painting. The environment Lippard captured also made it possible for Hesse to rethink painting as sculpture, and for Hesse to draw on the personal as a legitimate source for art, a stance LeWitt strongly encouraged as well. The fluid, permissive state of art Lippard described—a sense that the formalist dogma of medium specificity had been overturned, that one need not decide “painting” or “sculpture” but could define a new set of priorities entirely—was an opening that allowed both Hesse and LeWitt to work in new forms and to embed new meanings.

Mechanical Drawings “My love squeeze sends her regards and is painting like wild,” Doyle wrote to LeWitt in November 1964.9 This was a wishful account; painting had become a complicated proposition for Hesse by this time. She wrote in her journals of being “agonized about my painting,” and later, “My vision of myself and of my work is unclear, clouded. It is covered with many layers of misty images.”10 A German residency had been a troubling prospect. Doyle recalls that Hesse was “very, very concerned about going to Germany . . . that was a lot of anxiety for her. . . . It was a little childlike.”11 Childlike anxiety would seem natural. Hesse was only two years old in 1938 when she was evacuated from Germany with her sister, Helen Hesse Charash, on the Kindertransport to Holland. Observant Jews, Hesse’s family fled Hamburg to settle in the upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights.

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Her grandparents were unable to escape and died in concentration camps. While the girls did not “witness outright persecution or ghettos or concentration camps,” Charash recognizes the “unsure and unstable environment” of their childhood as shaped by the trauma of the Holocaust and its aftermath.12 Hesse experimented intensively in the fall of 1964, combining painting with collage, watercolor, gouache, acrylic, and drawing. Compositions document her frustration with painting: many are cobbled together from rejected drawings and paintings, as if she were mining for discrete successful elements. The layered surfaces amount to frequent cancellation—notations are whited out or scribbled over, staging a play between legible and illegible information (fig. 28). Arrows point to nowhere. Forms evoke shoes, body parts, but remain stubbornly nonobjective. Disparate forms hover on blank spaces, no longer integrated within a painted field, presaging a shift away from the flatness of the page or canvas altogether. Spontaneous gesture is replaced by visible plotting, planning, and arranging, strategies Fig. 29 Eva Hesse, No title, 1965. Ink and graphite on paper. 19½ × 25 in.

that are then contradicted by reversals, erasures, and overpainting. The simultaneous incoherence and control of these mixed-media compositions suspends an anxious energy, as if to freeze a moment of incipient transition and change.

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In late October 1964, Hesse and Doyle headed for Bern, where Doyle’s sculpture was included in an exhibition organized by Harald Szeemann at the Kunsthalle Bern, alongside works by Duchamp, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Josef Albers.13 Duchamp’s 1913 plans for the Appareil célibataire, or “bachelor machine,” as he referred to the bottom half of the Large Glass, were included, along with his readymades (replicas newly issued that year), drawings, and paintings. In Bern, Hesse and Doyle saw the painting machines of Jean Tinguely and met the Swiss nouveau réaliste, infamous by then for his “suicide machines” that broadly limned the “sociological reality” of contemporary life.14 From Bern, Doyle and Hesse traveled to Essen to see an exhibition of drawings by Arshile Gorky at the Museum Folkwang, abstract biological and botanical imagery conveyed in lyrical black outlines: the show was “great,” Hesse noted in her datebook.15 The absurdist humor of Duchamp’s mechanized sexuality and Tinguely’s painting machines, as well as the personalism of Gorky’s automatism, offered Fig. 30 Eva Hesse, No title, 1965. Ink and colored ink on paper. 18 × 24 in.

contrasting conceptions of the body—social, experiential, and symbolic.16 In November 1964, Hesse began a startlingly unique series of dozens of “mechanical drawings” using black and colored inks on paper (figs. 29, 30). The atmospheric

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space and reversals of her earlier experiments are eliminated. As Hesse wrote to LeWitt, they represented a “3rd stage: Drawings—clean—clear—but crazy like machines, larger + bolder—articulately described so it is weird they become real nonsense” (Hesse’s underline).17 Clean outlines describe organic forms, often sacs or tubes with fleshy folds and creases, or machine-derived devices comprised of interconnected parts. The confident rendering of detail achieves an authoritative presentation, calling to mind medical diagrams of the body’s internal systems or technical drawings of mechanical systems. Disparate units—a uterus here, a network of intestinal forms there—were traced or cut out and displaced, collaged with components from other compositions. The arbitrary compositions of her earlier paintings give way to organized organ- or gear-chains described by Hesse as “machines however they are not functional and are nonsense.”18 As Doyle has described them, “They got very sexy . . . they’re mechanical and yet they’re organic.” The mechanical drawings seemed like a breakthrough; there was a sense that “she really had something . . . she’s found herself,” Doyle recalled.19 The organs—often suggesting reproductive or digestive systems— drawn as machine forms would become a primary motif in the following months. Doyle recalls that the advent of the machine drawings also coincided with Hesse’s interest in culling interesting machine parts from the abundant mechanical detritus found in Scheidt’s factory to use as sources for drawings and, soon, reliefs. Gearwheels are clearly rendered in a number of the machine drawings in which forms are organized causally, suggesting the gear chains observed on hulking mechanical looms and wool-washing machines in her surroundings. After settling on the machine form as a motif, Hesse began to cut out parts of drawings, treating them as separable organs. In a practice that presaged her turn to sculpture, these parts would migrate and couple with other parts in an endless series of mutable machine collages. Some cutouts have many pinholes at the corners, indicating their transient status.20 She also traced cutouts onto other drawings to develop systems composed of several cutouts. The elements of the Fig. 31 Eva Hesse, mechanical drawings as shown in their original installation in F. A. Scheidt’s greenhouse, May 1965.

drawings thereby functioned as movable, interchangeable parts. Hesse conceived them equally as constructions and drawings: the elements were transitory, not meant to be frozen within a static picture plane but contingent on their relationships with other machine parts. Hence the machine drawings could operate in the manner of Surrealist exquisite corpses in which seemingly disconnected entities

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come together as an improbable, nonsensical whole. When the mechanical drawings were first displayed in the Scheidt greenhouse in May 1965, Hesse demonstrated the potential mobility of these shapes (fig. 31). The drawings were pinned onto a large panel, about five feet high. Cut-out drawings float amid those contained on the page, hinting at the potentially limitless variations of movable drawings untethered from rectilinear space. Pinned down like specimens on the dissection tray, the animate forms, exposed and immobilized, invite examination. The sanitized, bloodless black outlines convey reproductive and digestive systems as contained, cleanly functioning mechanized systems, however nonsensical and irrational the forms themselves appear. In addition to her recent encounters with Dada in Europe, Hesse would have known the Dadaist female- and male-sexed dessins mécaniques from the Société Anonyme collection at Yale that features Picabia’s Prostitution universelle (1916–17). (Her choice to refer to her drawings as “machine drawings” or “mechanical drawings” itself suggests Hesse’s awareness of Picabia’s dessins mécaniques.) Machine systems spoof causality in human relationships in Picabia’s drawings—several of them, including Machine des idées actuelles dans l’amour (from the 1918 collection Poèmes et dessins de la fille née sans mère), depict a gear chain that suggests sexual and psychological operations, a pictorial motif contained in many of Hesse’s machine drawings. Her machine drawings registered the mechanization of the body as a modernist motif, fraught with anxieties, fantasies, and perversions, liberating and nonsensical while engaging the core of human experience.

“Anti-paintings” In a letter dated “the day after April Fool’s Day, 1965,” Hesse wrote to LeWitt with a sober account of her art and frame of mind. The letter marked the beginning of an intense intellectual and personal exchange. LeWitt was Doyle’s close friend and the two corresponded regularly while Hesse and Doyle were in Germany; Hesse would occasionally add a few lines to Doyle’s letters to LeWitt, but hadn’t before written to him independently. The letter opened with an explanation: Dear Sol, It is to you I want to talk about what is on my mind. It is because I respect and trust you and also in this case you are the one who under-

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stands somewhat me personally and my art, existent or non-existent. Also we strike some diametrically opposed balance, reacting emotionally so differently yet somewhere understanding.21

The “diametrically opposed balance” Hesse perceived was a matter of personality, but it was also an identification that would carry over into an artistic dialogue when she returned from Germany in August 1965 and worked and lived in intimate proximity with LeWitt. Already LeWitt was both a good reader of her work and an understanding friend, even if writing a long and personal letter to him required a bit of justification at this point. She described the progress of her drawings over the past months and an emerging series of wildly idiosyncratic and personal reliefs, bordering on Pop and verging on “real nonsense.” “Lately even got hold of Art International and so pleased to hear from Lucy,” Hesse mentioned at the end of her letter.22 Already Doyle’s good friend and avid promoter (Lippard would write the catalogue essay for a show of Doyle’s work in Düsseldorf that August), Lippard’s March 1965 “New York Letter” discussed a seemingly ubiquitous development in New York: “Distinctions between painting and sculpture have been increasingly blurred in the past two years as paintings are done in non-rectangular formats, built out from the wall on shaped canvases, divided into separate or free-standing sections, and sculpture is painted and often hung on the wall.”23 In the exhibition Shape and Structure at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, paintings by Larry Zox, Larry Bell, Will Insley, Darby Bannard, and others were shown in conjunction with structures by Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Robert Morris. These paintings were “actually an object,” representing a “‘third-stream’ tendency: Shaped canvas anti-paintings or deadpan post-geometrical anti-sculptures in the Judd-Morris vein.” Lippard segued into a discussion of structures, suggesting that the shaped and built-out paintings and the “laconic post-geometric ‘structures’” of LeWitt, Judd, and Morris were “directly related.”24 Lippard’s column outlined a freeform relationship between painting and sculpture that may have appealed to Hesse as she contemplated her next move. She began making relief sculptures that very month. The first, Ringaround Arosie (1965), was titled in reference to Hesse’s good friend Rosie Goldman, who was pregnant at the time (fig. 32). The support is intensely worked—a rectangular

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Masonite panel layered with gauze and papier-caché, rubbed with graphite and varnished. Pieces of cord, remnants of weaving operations in the Scheidt factory, are carefully coiled to form pinnacles, painted a flesh-toned pink, over red painted circles. This confined mode of labor was a departure from the apparent (if not actual) spontaneity of Hesse’s collages and paintings, and even the soaring lines of the machine drawings made prior to the reliefs. Hesse described Ringaround Arosie in her letter to LeWitt just as the relief came into being in March 1965: “So here I sit after 2 days of working on a dumb thing which is three dimensional supposed to be continuity with last drawing. All borders on pop at least to the European eye, that is anything not pure or abstract (expressionist) is pop like. The 3d one now actually looks like breast + penis—but that’s o.k. + I should go on with it maybe it or they would make it in another way but I don’t know where I belong + so I give up again. All the time it is like that.”25 At its inception, Ringaround Arosie was recognized by Hesse as an idiosyncratic statement, in defiance of the conjured response of “they,” an imagined audience who would have her do things differently, specifically regarding the explicitness of the relief’s “breast + penis” form. The work’s explicitness seemed transgressive, too personal an expression that could no longer pass as modernist Gorky-esque eroticism now that the forms pushed conspicuously out into a third dimension. The frontal view of Ringaround Arosie does not reveal Hesse’s reason for calling it a “breast + penis,” but seen in profile, the pinnacle of the center circle becomes a lewd, phallic projectile, raised several inches from the surface of the board. In Hesse’s estimation, it was a break with Abstract Expressionism, a move in unexpected directions—Pop, breast, and penis—a “dumb thing” that Hesse herself might disown. LeWitt responded to Hesse’s letter with a bawdy and personal address, now famous, penned on April 14, 1965 (fig. 33). His rhetoric registers her Fig. 32 Eva Hesse, Ringaround Arosie, 1965. Varnish, graphite, ink, enamel, cloth-covered wire, papier-caché, unknown modeling compound, Masonite, wood. 26½ × 16¾ × 4½ in.

anxieties about art and life, as well as the abject/erotic/absurd force of the drawings and new reliefs. Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder, wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, gasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, rumbling, rambling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning, honing, boning,

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horse-shitting, hair-splitting, nit-picking, piss-trickling, nose-sticking, ass-gouging, eyeball-poking, finger-pointing, alleyway-sneaking, long waiting, small stepping, evil-eyeing, back-scratching, searching, perching, besmirching, grinding grinding grinding away at yourself. Stop it and just DO . . . Do more. More nonsensical more crazy more machines, more breasts, penises, cunts, whatever—make them abound with nonsense.26

LeWitt’s letter also strikes a more prosaic tone: “I have much confidence in you, and even though you are torturing yourself, the work you do is very good,” another passage begins. The insecurities so richly interpreted by LeWitt were frequently linked to questions of gender in Hesse’s journals—her legitimacy as a serious artist for whom female subjectivity could be embraced and not disguised: “Do I have the right to womanliness. Can I achieve an artistic endeavor and can they coincide?” she questioned in March 1965.27 LeWitt also understood the dynamic of Hesse’s marriage, recalling much later, “I wrote to her and urged her to try to get on track (she seemed to defer to Tom too much—and her mind was adrift).”28 Yet in a letter written to “Tom and Eva” in July 1964, LeWitt’s tone had been very different: “Advice to Eva—start smoking and stop worrying—and don’t get fat. Advice to Tom—read up on Civil War because by the time you get back there will be another one and you can help man the barricades.”29 For Doyle’s eyes at least, LeWitt reinforced the gendered narrative of Hesse’s marriage between an easygoing Civil War buff and his anxious wife.30 As Hesse initiated the reliefs, she was engaged with questions of gender through reading Beauvoir and corresponding with friends such as her former studio mate Ethelyn Honig, whose letters to Hesse were laced with references to The Feminine Mystique. The constant menial demands of femininity, in which, Hesse wrote to Honig, “A woman is side tracked by all her feminine roles from menstrual periods to cleaning house to remaining pretty and ‘young’ and having babies,” were a painful complement to Beauvoir’s characterization of male transcendence: “his vocation . . . to produce, fight, create, progress, to transcend toward the totality of the universe and the infinity of the future.”31 In Fig. 33 Sol LeWitt, letter to Eva Hesse, dated April 14, 1965. Page one of a five-page letter.

Beauvoir’s formulation, female longing for transcendence stemmed from a cruel irony: woman is “an object paradoxically endued with subjectivity; she takes herself simultaneously as self and as other, a contradiction that entails baffling consequences.”32 This self-aware objecthood, ready recognition of gender

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difference and its implications for the practice and reception of her art, are themes that course through Hesse’s writings. A letter to Honig written around the time of the first reliefs describes “the female struggle”: I dwell on this all the time. My determination and will is strong but I am lacking so in self esteem that I never seem to overcome. Also competing all the time with a man with self confidence in his work and who is successful also. . . . Are we worthy of this struggle and will we surmount the obstacles. We are more than dilettantes so we can’t even have the satisfaction of accomplishment. The making of a “pretty dress,” successful party—pretty picture does not satisfy us. We want to achieve something meaningful and to feel our involvements make of us valuable thinking persons.33

The tone of this letter, written as she contemplated her first relief, Ringaround Arosie, is, for Hesse, uncharacteristically polemical, engaged with gender politics as a broader field than just the conditions of her marriage. Hesse’s departure from Abstract Expressionist–style canvases and her embrace of techniques and materials that would be perceived as minor or craft-oriented were strategies she might have expected would elicit gender-based value judgments. The painstakingly elaborate surfaces of the reliefs emerged in tandem with Hesse’s heightened consciousness of gendered divisions of labor; these surfaces exaggerate the activities of femininity. The extravagant surfaces of the reliefs—their finely patterned cord and delicately graduated pastels—suggest external markers of gender, the adornment of clothing, jewelry, and makeup. Hundreds of precisely laid pieces of cord create the image/object of “breasts” for 2 in 1, lending the surface the exquisite quality of embroidery, rendered through the effect of precise, repetitive labor (fig. 34). The intuitive process of painting is replaced by its opposite. This nonspontaneous performance of rote actions concentrates on a much different logic, that of “feminine roles”: looking “pretty and young,” making a “pretty dress.” As Beauvoir understood this logic of feminine labor, Fig. 34 Eva Hesse, 1965. Hesse holds the relief 2 in 1, and the relief Ear in a Pond hangs in the background.

“women confined to the feminine sphere have grossly magnified its importance: they have made dressing and housekeeping difficult arts.”34 Hesse produced fourteen reliefs in time for an exhibition at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf that opened in July 1965. They incorporated odds and ends selected from a mass of mechanical detritus culled by Doyle and kept at hand in

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his work area. Doyle prepared Masonite boards for Hesse’s reliefs, drilling them and mounting objects according to her specifications, and she completed the reliefs by applying cord, building raised forms with papier-caché, and painting the surfaces with enamel or tempera.35 The lathed wood pieces used in several reliefs, including H + H, were made by Doyle for his own sculptures (fig. 35). “I used to build the things for her. A lot of [her German reliefs] have pieces from my sculpture in them.” Doyle refers to these lathed wood pieces as “fall-offs,” forms fashioned for his own sculpture, “parts that were always around—I’d pick them up and use them again, or sometimes she would use them.”36 The reliefs have enigmatic titles that embroidered highly personal meanings. A clue to H + H appears in a few lines penned by Hesse at the bottom of one of Doyle’s letters to LeWitt, describing a trip to visit the home where she was born in Hamburg: “Just returned from H.+ H. Visited where I was born, in Hamb[urg] in Hameln house of my grand parents and place of birth and growing up of my mother. Met her old school friends and friends of grandparents quite a trying scene. Tears all around and much talk of those times where ‘no one knew what was happening.’”37 In contrast to this poignant account, Doyle remembers that the black-and-white cord used in the relief reminded him of the packaging of his brand of pipe tobacco, “Half and Half,” and also that H + H had a double meaning: the piece contains his “fall-off” and was made together, and was half hers and half his, as well as being half painting, half sculpture. Whether designating the home her family was forced to flee or her husband, or some combination, the relief demonstrates the layered personal, autobiographical associations of Hesse’s abstraction. Hesse responded to LeWitt’s powerful encouragement with a few desultory thoughts penned between April 20 and April 24, 1965. “Have been working like 10 hr. days along with my wifey chores. Not bitchin’ just a sayin.’ Fig. 35 Eva Hesse, H + H, June 1965. Varnish, ink, gouache, enamel, cord, metal, found object (wood), papier-caché, unknown modeling compound, particle board, wood. 265⁄8 × 27½ × 51⁄8 in.

Anyway I just want to thank you for your letter—and also to wish you much pleasure with your show. . . . I finished the ‘Breast’ job—and another. They are good—or I like them now so that is good—or—am working the 3rd one—much difficulties but I am pushing—and will be—I swear it.”38 Hesse recognized the importance of the reliefs and mechanical drawings, making them the subject of her only exhibitions in Germany, in Scheidt’s greenhouse and then at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, though there is no record of their reception. A photograph

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of Hesse seated with Ringaround Arosie poised suggestively between her legs was selected for the cover of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf brochure, and in another photograph from the series, she raises her arms so that the swelling surface of Legs of a Walking Ball is visually repeated by her body (fig. 36).39 The change of attitude detectable in the disparity between Hesse’s skeptical letter to LeWitt and the flamboyant publicity shots, in which Hesse’s poses establish associations of these reliefs with the body of the artist, manifesting their symbolic narratives of gender and sexuality, may have been precipitated, at least in part, by LeWitt’s advice. The reliefs were a personal and transgressive response to art history, conceived in reference to the female body and “women’s work,” a rejection of the constraints of painting and formalism. They marked the beginning of a highly productive period in Hesse’s career.

Monumental Obstructions “Summer is a pisser—very, very hot—sit around in my jockey shorts, watch TV, drink beer, work a little in AM, drink beer,” LeWitt wrote in July 1964, his first letter to Hesse and Doyle after the couple departed for Germany a few weeks earlier.40 He was teaching “suburban housewives” in the adult education program of the People’s Art Center at the Museum of Modern Art, and was becoming integrated with a new group of artists. Through Dan Flavin and Robert Mangold, with whom he worked at MoMA, he met Dan Graham, who would in turn introduce him to Robert Smithson.41 Graham introduced him to an influential essay on the concrete poetry of Mallarmé and also a dystopic French novel by Michel Butor, Passing Time, which, along with the political events of the season, informed a new way of thinking about his work over the coming months. U.S. involvement in the conflict in Vietnam escalated dramatically with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, and racial divisions in the country intensified with polarizing debates over federal civil rights legislation leading up to the 1964 presidential election. The unrest of the civil rights movement was immediate and warranted a description of the sociopolitical landscape: “Watched Republican convention some on TV. Surrealist nightmare—endless bullshit. . . . Fig. 36 Eva Hesse, 1965. Left: Ear in a Pond; Right: Legs of a Walking Ball.

G’water could win! If all bigots vote for him, he’ll win in landslide. All whites who are afraid of negroes or afraid of anything whoop it up for him. . . . Riots in Harlem this past weekend. . . . Maybe stay in Europe for the next 8 years.”42

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There might be a new Civil War by the time Hesse and Doyle returned, he joked mordantly. Against a background of riots and emotional debates, LeWitt reported “working steadily as usual” making three-dimensional painted objects that “continue the idea of working with the picture plane in three dimensions.”43 They were “[f]inished boxes with things and lights. . . . Also made table with thing going thru center. Table is 4' sq. and bright red. Thing is blue (light). Also am workFig. 37 Sol LeWitt, letter to Eva Hesse and Tom Doyle, July 20, 1964. Page two of threepage letter. Fig. 38 Sol LeWitt, Table Structure, 1964. Painted wood. 48 × 48 × 55 in. Destroyed.

ing on standard structure with similar concept. I have not painted it yet so what color it is, you’ll have to wait and see—me too,” he wrote Doyle and Hesse, including a sketch to illustrate the unusual table that also appears in a studio photograph from the time (figs. 37, 38).44 The table was repurposed from the Table Piece with Three Cubes that appeared in the Kaymar Gallery exhibition earlier that year, and would eventually become Hesse’s Washer Table (see fig. 1). His structures from the summer of 1964 were elaborate: latticed, brightly colored, pierced with tubular forms or containing lights and objects made by other artists

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and only partially visible, holding meaning in suspense. Each side of a wall-bound box made for Grace Wapner was painted in a primary color and pierced with drill holes to allow glimpses of a small wood construction, one of Wapner’s artworks (see fig. 2).45 However, a major transformation was imminent and much work from these months would be destroyed or repurposed as LeWitt shed the intricacy and fussiness of these structures, precipitated by a broadened understanding of his work within the environment of New York City. LeWitt’s impassioned letter to Hesse of April 1965 also confessed his own fraught artistic process: “I have an ‘agonizing reappraisal’ of my work and change everything as much as possible and hate everything I’ve done,” allowing him to “understand your attitude, somewhat, anyway.” By the time of his writing, one such reappraisal had occurred. The letter ended with a promising development: “My work has changed since you left and it is much better. I will be having a show May 4–29 at the Daniels gallery 17 E. 64th St. . . . I wish you could be there.”46 LeWitt’s first solo exhibition was at the invitation of Graham, co-director with David Herbert of the short-lived John Daniels Gallery. The opportunity introduced LeWitt to a new circle of artists, notably Graham and Smithson, who, along with Hesse, would become his most important interlocutors through the second half of the 1960s. The work LeWitt showed at the Daniels Gallery was profoundly different from the containing structures of earlier years. The new work looked outward, at the city, but also engaged the delirious science fiction dystopias that occupied Smithson and Graham as well. As Graham recalled, “He worked for I. M. Pei, so the grid of New York City was very important. . . . We all got the idea of the city plan.”47 Graham identified influences shared by the artists as LeWitt prepared his exhibition for the Daniels Gallery: Judd’s “Kansas City Report” in Arts magazine, which treated the city’s architecture, grain elevators, limestone outcroppings, and displaced European and Chinese collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum all equally as art; and Michel Butor’s nouveau roman set in “an industrial city in Northern England,” in which the protagonist “got lost in the city, it was like a labyrinth.”48 Smithson and Graham were autodidacts from New Jersey who inhabited fluid boundaries between art and non-art. Both figures were deeply invested in rethinking the identity of art, developing multivalent practices that extended

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into the realm of contemporary social phenomena and dismissed the notion of artworks as self-contained objects. Graham “was not sure he was ‘an artist’” in 1965 when he began taking photographs of tract homes in suburban New Jersey, documenting the “assembly line standardization” and serial logic of postwar development housing that he understood as “part of a larger, predetermined synthetic order.”49 (The project would become his famous Homes for America.) Smithson was interested in new conceptions of space and was seeking ways to locate his crystalline structures in the landscape itself.50 “The highways crisscross through the towns and become man-made geological networks of concrete. In fact, the entire landscape has a mineral presence,” Smithson wrote of suburban New Jersey in his 1966 essay “The Crystal Land.”51 LeWitt’s Daniels Gallery debut featured the slab-like structures coated Fig. 39 Sol LeWitt, installation view, John Daniels Gallery, April 1965.

with commercial spray lacquers characterized by Lippard in her “Third Stream” essays as “extremely unified and self contained” pieces that demonstrated LeWitt’s “interest in engineering techniques” (fig. 39).52 Wood planes were joined

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at right or obtuse angles. The structures cast strong shadows on the walls and floor that redoubled their clean, angular forms. Each piece was lacquered in a different hue—orange, maroon, blue, dark green—that would have differentiated the units from each other as well as from the white walls and neutral carpeting of the space. The color relationships would have unfolded along anticipated sightlines: a series of color interactions for the viewer to navigate in real space. The lustrous, lacquered surfaces glowed, reflecting the track lighting and, one presumes, the viewer as well. The high-gloss “industrial” affect on the planar surfaces suggests ambivalence toward painting, though the painted picture plane is still strongly evoked by the format. As LeWitt’s last exhibition of colored structures—by 1966, “it had to be black or white, and I chose white”—the show Fig. 40 Sol LeWitt standing in front of a structure at the John Daniels Gallery, April 1965.

in a sense presaged the wall drawings to come three years later by preserving the residue of painting through an emphasis on the planar surface, and, further, a specific engagement with the architectural environment.53

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The gallery’s “‘negative’ areas are equally meaningful,” critic Anne Hoene commented, observing the “spatial involvements of the works and their lure to spectator participation.”54 The structures were “designed specifically for the gallery’s domestically scaled rooms, a space Daniels Gallery had taken over from Andre Emmerich,” art historian Rhea Anastas has noted.55 In a snapshot LeWitt appears before a lacquered blue structure that approaches the height of the ceiling, its rectilinear format echoing the doorway (fig. 40). The solid, thick panels created tight spaces and controlled the flow of traffic through the gallery. A floor plan of the exhibition, sketched for Wapner, depicts the panted slabs as architectural obstructions within the gallery space (fig. 41). To engage the gallery Fig. 41 Sol LeWitt, Working drawing for John Daniels Gallery installation, “Dear Grace,” 1965. Ink on paper.

as a site by activating its negative space, and to solicit viewer participation, were fairly radical propositions in May of 1965, a full year before Primary Structures at the Jewish Museum would establish such strategies as central to Minimalism. The Daniels installation represented an eschewal of psychology and hierarchy that

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would come to characterize LeWitt’s work: the shift of focus from the object to the viewer’s subjective perceptual, intellectual, and physical engagement, and from the object to the spatial conditions of its display. The Daniels constructions were reminiscent of everyday structures, vaguely familiar and conjuring the possibility of use—a booth, a toboggan, a cellar door, a cradle, sofas, a wall, and a “weird bed” were descriptors offered in reviews of the show.56 “One could hide in the booth, and the cradle, which looks like a pair of simplified sofas, interrupts traffic through the room and suggests that one could sit down,” Hoene wrote.57 Lippard likewise noted of the “booth” that “the person standing inside is hidden from the outside, blocked off from the world,” adding, “the self-containment of the structure is transferred to the viewer.”58 The Muybridge photographs, lights, and artworks made by other artists were eliminated, but spaces of containment remained an operative dynamic with the Daniels Gallery structures. The empty structures had become lures for the spectator herself, who placed her own body inside to become an animating agent. Interactive and environmental in scale, the Daniels Gallery pieces represent a remarkable transference. LeWitt’s abiding interest in narrative sequence and filmic tension, asserted through Muybridge and the use of flashing light in his Muybridge boxes as well as Nine Boxes (1964 and 1963, respectively, discussed in the previous chapter), isn’t immediately evident. Nor is the dynamic of containment that marked his previous work—the revelation of content to a probing viewer willing to peer between slats, or through an aperture, awaiting an illuminating burst of light. Yet the critical reactions to the Daniels exhibition reveal that these dynamics were palpably, powerfully present, subsumed within simple architectonic forms that elicited the spectator’s participatory engagement. Containment had become environmental, operating in relation to the architectural “container,” as the cradle that interrupts traffic. Or, the contents might be the viewer herself, tempted to slip inside the booth and hide. Containers within containers like Russian nesting dolls, the objects enclosed in a gallery on 64th Street could also dilate outward to the city itself. As Graham would write upon seeing LeWitt’s work installed at the Dwan Gallery two years later, “The mirroring of the gallery cube reverses ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’”59 In 1966, nearly a year after LeWitt’s Daniels Gallery debut, Smithson revisited the exhibition in his essay “Entropy and the New Monuments,” which

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offered a dystopian narrative in resistance to the formal implications that were quickly becoming associated with the term “Minimalism. In the recent work of figures like Flavin, Morris, Judd, and LeWitt, Smithson, like Lippard in her “Third Stream” essays, saw a deep affinity with Pop Art. As in Pop Art, these abstract three-dimensional structures involved a dark inversion of mass-consumer culture, according to Smithson’s reading. They reflected the enervating, Eros-destroying economic superstructures of contemporary life, in particular the “architecture of entropy” characteristic of the postwar building boom: the “slurbs” and—Smithson quoted Judd’s review of Roy Lichtenstein—“‘a lot of visible things’ that are ‘bland and empty’ such as ‘most modern commercial buildings, new Colonial stores, lobbies, most houses, most clothing, sheet aluminum, and plastic with leather texture, the formica-like wood, the cute and modern patterns inside jets and drugstores.’”60 Smithson continued to riff on the “sterile facades,” “maze-like counters,” and “lugubrious complexity” of the interiors of discount shopping centers, which have “brought to art a new consciousness of the vapid and the dull.”61 Among the artists Smithson engaged in “Entropy and the New Monuments,” none would have possessed a more direct understanding of the logic of retail space than LeWitt, whose major assignment while at I. M. Pei’s firm in the mid-1950s had been to design the interior and exterior signage program for Roosevelt Field Shopping Center in Nassau County, Long Island (figs. 42, 43). LeWitt’s engagement with commercial design was a tacitly understood association of his work—Lippard had acknowledged this background in her “Third Stream” essay, and Graham likewise has frequently cited LeWitt’s work at Pei. Extant images of maquettes designed by LeWitt for Roosevelt Field include parking lot signs, an entranceway sign, and a store directory. Only the latter was realized—shoppers would push a button and a light for the store would light up, “like the Paris subways,” as LeWitt put it, referring to the interactive station maps of the Paris Métro. Though LeWitt was deeply frustrated while at Pei—it was a “tread mill . . . doing stupid things endlessly,” and most designs were never implemented—the experience shaped his conception of the role of the artist, as well as the role of the spectator, and the idea of art as an informational interface.62 As he stated in the early 1980s, “An architect doesn’t go off with a shovel and dig his foundation and lay every brick.”63 Conceptualizing a schematic map to communicate a complex spatial layout to an information-

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seeking public prefigures works such as Serial Project #1 (1966), discussed in the next chapter. Behind the glossy and banal industrial surfaces of LeWitt’s Daniels structures, Smithson saw shadow narratives: a sublimated Eros and lurking evocations of the dystopic city outside. LeWitt’s first one-man show at the now defunct Daniel’s [sic] Gallery presented a rather un-compromising group of monumental “obstructions.” Many people were “left cold” by them or found their finish “too dreary.” These obstructions stood as visible clues of the future. A future of humdrum practicality in the shape of standardized office buildings modeled after Emery Roth; in other words, a jerry-built future, a feigned future, an ersatz future, very much like the one depicted in the movie The Tenth Victim. LeWitt’s show has helped to neutralize the myth of progress. It has also corroborated Wylie Sypher’s insight that “Entropy is evolution in reverse.” LeWitt’s work carries with it the brainwashed mood of Jasper Johns’ Tennyson, Flavin’s Coran’s Broadway Flesh, and Stella’s The Marriage of Reason and Squalor. Morris also discloses this backward looking future with “erections” and “vaginas” embedded in lead. They tend to illustrate a fossilized sexuality.64

In Smithson’s description, the Daniels Gallery structures quickly dilated outward. The “brainwashed” obstructions were made during an economic boom; glassand-steel corporate towers rose along avenues in midtown while race riots took place in Harlem and a war escalated in Vietnam. (In Marcello Mastroianni’s 1965 film The Tenth Victim, violence is legal and individuals run past the generic glass curtain walls of Emery Roth–designed buildings, hunting each other like game in the streets of Manhattan.) Also within the stilled expressionism of LeWitt’s art, Smithson saw the complicated romantic pathos of Lord Tennyson, or perhaps that of Stanley Coran, a friend of Flavin, “a young English homosexual who loved New Figs. 42 and 43 Sol LeWitt, maquettes for Roosevelt Fields Shopping Center signage program and directory, c. 1955. Designed for I. M. Pei.

York City.”65 This enervated eroticism, also detected in the “fossilized sexuality” of reliefs by Robert Morris, conjured Eros succumbing to entropy—a “tendency to sink back into that original chaos,” a “drift toward inertia.”66 Smithson’s association of LeWitt’s structures with the architecture of Roth was a laden reference, one that captures something of the logic of LeWitt’s practice as it would emerge the following year. The architectural firm of Emery

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Roth and Sons was responsible for designing half of the new office buildings erected in Manhattan during the postwar building boom. By 1967, thirty million square feet of office space was contained in seventy “Rothscrapers,” concentrated in midtown and along the East Side avenues. “Emery Roth, the most efficient of the investors’ architects, is as responsible for the face of modern New York as Sixtus V was for baroque Rome,” declared architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable. “This is Roth city. The Roth firm has lined the streets and avenues of Manhattan with the Roth style of financial expediency.”67 The Roth firm was “in the business of designing business buildings for businessmen who sell them to other businessmen,” according to a Newsweek profile.68 The firm referred to its “cavernous drafting room as ‘the factory,’” a term meant to reflect its unapologetically unaesthetic, pragmatic approach.69 “Architecture reflects society and this is not a great age,” Richard Roth explained to a reporter.70 It was “not a great age.” The traditionalist values implied by this phrase were being challenged on many fronts, but there was money to be made, lots of it, in a robust economy driven by military and consumer spending. The Roth skyscrapers announced the triumph of economic expediency over any aesthetic or humanist architectural mission—speculative architecture built according to the ethos “An office building is a machine to make money with.”71 (LeWitt would famously adapt Corbusier’s adage himself in his 1967 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art”: “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”72) The relationship between LeWitt’s Daniels Gallery structures and the socioeconomic context of New York City is both indirect and immediate. Through materials, processes, and familiar forms—almost, but not quite, a bed, sofas, a telephone booth—as well as their siting in midtown Manhattan, these works concentrate the conditions of a time and place. The following year “Ziggurats,” LeWitt’s first major published writing, appeared in Arts magazine.73 A conceptual and formal analysis of New York City’s building codes and changing architectural forms, the essay demonstrates parallels with LeWitt’s own emerging conceptual practice. LeWitt’s Daniels structures cannot be abstracted from the environment of New York in 1965. These colorful, shiny slabs were “monumental obstructions” in the face of the “Roth city,” invoking, through their inversion of the logic of economic expediency, the violent transformations of the social environment underway in the shadows of the Rothscrapers and the irrational psychology of a consumer-driven economy.

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As Smithson explained to an interviewer in the early 1970s, Conceptual Art tended to be mechanistic, “especially in terms of LeWitt, who actually says his ideas are machines. So this mechanistic view permeates everything.”74 LeWitt’s pursuit of mechanization in the development of the structures in 1965 and 1966— he ultimately rejected the Daniels Gallery structures because “the wood and varnish were inconsistent . . . the pieces should have been made at a factory”— suggests a parallel with larger cultural forces, in particular the modular uniformity and standardization of the built environment.75 The Daniels Gallery, open only for five months in 1965, was an experimental endeavor. “My gallery failed. It was a total failure. We sold nothing,” Graham said later.76 However, Daniels was an important augur, and the right people took notice. Gallerist Virginia Dwan “just happened into that gallery knowing nothing about it” and saw LeWitt’s work for the first time, an event that precipitated her important patronage the following year.77 LeWitt’s Daniels Gallery structures and Hesse’s German reliefs were both, in a sense, left behind. LeWitt’s structures were destroyed, and Hesse’s reliefs remained in Kettwig when she and Doyle left Germany in August 1965.78 The couple separated later that year. By 1966 the New York art world was changed. Two landmark shows that year—Primary Structures and Eccentric Abstraction—evolved from Lippard’s unformed “Third Stream” ideas, and LeWitt and Hesse had central roles in these new, interdependent developments. Their friendship and artistic dialogue was most intense in 1966 and 1967, and through the story of their exchange, larger currents of the art world come into focus.

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Chapter 3

A Paradoxical Situation, 1966–67 “‘Form-content,’ ‘tradition,’ ‘classic,’ ‘Romantic,’ ‘expressive,’ ‘experiment,’ ‘psychology,’ ‘analogy,’ depth,’ ‘purity,’ ‘feeling,’ ‘space,’ ‘Avant-garde,’ ‘lyric,’ ‘individual,’ ‘composition,’ ‘life and death,’ ‘sexuality,’ ‘biomorphic,’ ‘biographic’— the entire language of botany in art—can now be regarded as suspect,” declared artist Mel Bochner, reviewing the Jewish Museum exhibition Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors for Arts magazine in his critical writing debut.1 Such language served only to “separate the viewer from the object of his sight” by asserting an irrelevant historicism and sentimentality. “The New Art of Carl Andre, Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, Don Judd, Robert Morris, and Robert Smithson deals with the surface of matter and avoids the ‘heart,’” and further, it succeeded in erasing “the dichotomy between art and science” by embracing such de rigueur conceptual tools as Set Theory, Fibonacci numbers, and “modern technology” in general. All significance was manifest in an unmediated encounter with the viewer. Scale, materials, form, and presence in physical space were irreducible facts, “distant from the humanistic stammerings of Abstract Expressionism, Happenings, and Pop Art.”2 When Primary Structures opened in April 1966, the new tendencies in three-dimensional art that Lucy Lippard had termed “laconic post-geometric structures” in her “Third Stream” essays the previous year became the focus of the art world. Curated by Kynaston McShine, Lippard’s good friend and former Fig. 44 Sol LeWitt, installation view, Dwan Gallery, New York, 1966. Foreground: Double Modular Cube, 1966. Painted wood. 108 × 55 × 55 in. Destroyed, remade in steel 1970. Background: Modular Floor Structure, 1966. Painted wood. 25¼ × 141½ × 141½ in. Destroyed, remade in steel 1968.

colleague at the Museum of Modern Art, Primary Structures developed out of conversations between McShine and Lippard.3 Lippard’s observations regarding artists’ use of industrial and commercial materials as an oblique reaction to postwar consumerism were taken by McShine in the direction of technological optimism. “Methods of industrial fabrication in the Space Age have facilitated the accuracy of many of the structurists,” he wrote in the catalogue introduction.4 Tom Doyle’s sculpture Over Owl’s Creek (1966), a “free-flowing floorpiece” of linoleum, wood, and steel, painted red, demonstrated that work in the show need not be modular, or even a structure.5 Rather, industrial materials and anonymity of execution were common properties—even if many artists, including Doyle and LeWitt, still made their own work. McShine dwelt upon the “Space Age” sculptor

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who could now “conceive his work, and entrust its execution to a manufacturer whose precision and skill convey the standardized ‘impersonality’ that the artist may seek.” This “impersonality” was, in McShine’s estimation, a reaction “against the open welded sculpture of the fifties, with its emotionalism, improvisation, and emphatic marks of individual sensibility.”6 The discourse surrounding Primary Structures represented the most prevalent ideas in the air following Eva Hesse’s return to New York from Germany in August 1965. Hesse and Doyle separated, and Hesse managed to quickly establish herself as a compelling sculptor, developing close ties with Lippard, LeWitt, Bochner, and other artists and critics who had strong positive responses to her new three-dimensional work. New ideas about the erotic in art associated with the critic and curator Gene Swenson and a group of artists including Paul Thek, Mike Todd, and Joseph Raffaele, as well as Lippard, offered a contrast with the industrial anonymity of Primary Structures.7 At the same time, Hesse and LeWitt shared a complicated closeness as potential lovers and confidants. LeWitt was a mentor and father figure, “an armature in her life,” recalled Nancy Holt (then Smithson).8 Hesse’s journals from the summer of 1966 document the constancy of their friendship: “Today there were 5 phone call exchanges between Sol and Eva,” or, “Today Sol spent 4 hrs. shopping (Canal St.) with me.”9 As “best friends” the artists were in contact almost daily in 1966 and 1967, a period when each formulated critical new ideas. The work of both artists thematized perceptual, embodied experience in ways that reflected a new ethos of art in reaction to the world of the 1960s. Bochner, a close friend of Hesse and LeWitt in 1966 and 1967, homed in on the work of artists in their shared milieu in his discussion of Primary Structures: Judd’s galvanized aluminum serial wall and floorpieces, Morris’s plywood L Beams, Andre’s Lever, a single line of firebricks. Flavin contributed the emotive red fluorescent monument 4 for those who have been killed in ambush (to P.K. who reminded me about death), its poignant title registering the rising death toll in Vietnam, revealing that at least some work maintained a symbolic and empathetic connection to human events. As Judd argued in a symposium on Primary Structures, the “new abstraction . . . deals with the way you think about the world. . . . [I]t’s certainly not impersonal, anonymous, and all that sort of stuff. I’d rather stay clear of the word spiritual since I don’t like its old meaning.”10

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Circumventing ideologically problematic ideas of the spiritual, or easily read emotional affect, many in the Primary Structures milieu pursued work that was “not impersonal so much as a different kind of personalism.”11 LeWitt made the first of his white modular “open cubes” for the exhibition, a seventy-two-inch wooden structure subdivided into twenty-seven 24” x 24” cubes, an approach that was extended in his contemporaneous solo exhibition at the Dwan Gallery (fig. 44). It seemed divested of personal significance: an instance of Set Theory, Bochner suggested, or simply “[a]n art of units.”12 Rather than a hermetic end in itself, however, LeWitt’s work also hinted at ways of thinking about the world. It was among—and against—these artists interested in industrial techniques and materials and the derivation of form through mathematical systems that Hesse devised new means of investing objects with the somatic, bodily notations of presence and experience that had long preoccupied her. The rhetoric of Bochner and McShine demonstrates the degree to which the art then becoming known as Minimal—also, “structural” and, by 1967, “conceptual”— undertook the work of emptying out conventionally understood notations of value and meaning. It was an art of inversion. Lurking within LeWitt’s impassive cubes and serial forms were “depth” and “visual presence,” Hesse later insisted.13 This was the basis of a dialogue between the two in 1966 and 1967 during which they worked within the same emerging critical frameworks of Minimal and Conceptual Art. Hesse’s presence in this milieu was provocative at times, asserting the body, disorder, and an absurdist humor. But LeWitt’s work was not as different from Hesse’s as it at first seems. LeWitt’s radically reductive forms redefined the agency of the viewer as well as the artist, in ways both real and symbolic. LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” published in the June 1967 issue of Artforum, noted that “logic . . . is a device that is used at times only to be ruined. Logic may be used to camouflage the real intent of the artist, to lure the viewer into the belief that he understands the work, or to infer a paradoxical situation (such as logic vs. illogic).”14 A drawing by Hesse—hundreds of handdrawn circles, a bit shaky and uncertain but arranged in a tight grid—was among the artworks LeWitt chose to illustrate the essay, placed in the layout next to his white modular open cube (fig. 45). The work of each artist was defined by strategies of paradox—the use of logic to get at something irrational, even political, and a new ethic of subjectivity.

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And Impenetrable Chaos Concurrent with Primary Structures in the spring of 1966, LeWitt installed the second solo show of his career at the Dwan Gallery. The modular cube structures, made of wood and painted white, seemed to press against the limits of the West 57th Street gallery (see fig. 44). The brightly colored slabs that had filled the Daniels Gallery were distant artifacts. The new work was uniformly white, becoming “visually more a part of a white wall,” and it was dominant in scale: the central Double Modular Cube was nine feet, and the Modular Floor Structure was almost twelve feet by twelve feet, and two feet high.15 The gallery environment was integral to LeWitt’s conception of the structures: “The space of the gallery was a guide to the size of the work,” LeWitt recalled about his first show at Dwan.16 Dialogue with architectural space was a concern of other “structurists,” but the degree to which LeWitt’s installation at Dwan reflected and distilled the space of the room seems unprecedented. In his review, Hilton Kramer emphasized the structures’ integration with the architecture of the gallery, writing, “Some of these constructions are tall, thus becoming ‘walls,’ while others spread across the floor or fill corners.” To Kramer, the effect was blasé: “The basic conception is a boring one, though the artist derives a bit more expressive mileage from it than you might think possible.”17 Bochner, in his review, reeled off the positions of the structures: “On the floor. In corners. Against walls. Floor to wall. Wall to wall. Ceiling to floor. . . . Sol LeWitt’s white wood grid multiple structures are computations of interstices, joints, lines, corners, angles.”18 The structures, in Bochner’s reading, became a kind of abstract architecture, repeating the interstices, joints, and corners of the room. Integration with the gallery space and minimizing “expressiveness” established the referential function of LeWitt’s work within the sanctum-like environment of Dwan. However, Bochner’s review continued into the realm of phenomenological free association. LeWitt’s white cubes turned out to induce a perceptual vertigo, a chaotic collapsing of time and space in the gallery: “Space tenses: past, present-future, plural-present. Perceptual phenomena: indeterminate sequence, infinite invention, coordinate disorder. Everything is still. Everything is repeated. Everything is obvious. The accumulation of facts collapses perception. The indicated sum of these simple series is irreducible complexity. And impenetrable chaos. They astound.”19 No doubt Bochner’s review should to some extent be

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understood as performative hyperbole, but it nonetheless captures something about the experience of walking among the monumental white three-dimensional grids contained within the gallery. These vast structures mapped the cubic volume of the gallery itself, invoking a condition in which “all air and land is locked in a vast lattice,” as Smithson imagined.20 The structured space, made formal and visible, caused the gallery-goer to become acutely aware of the phenomena of perception, his place in space and time. Such extreme order made manifest the irreducible chaos of perceptual experience: “indeterminate sequence, infinite invention, coordinate disorder.” Bochner’s description suggests that the subjectivity of the artist has been displaced onto the viewer: the intensive subjectivity excised from the artwork itself is manifested by the individual experiencing the work who succumbs to perceptual delirium as he navigates this radically new kind of space. Similarly, for Dan Graham, LeWitt’s structures amounted to a merger between subject and object: “Object and subject are not dialectical Fig. 45 Artworks by Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse illustrating Sol LeWitt’s “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5 (Summer 1967): 82.

oppositions, but one self-contained identity; reversible interior and exterior termini,” he wrote in 1969.21 Smithson also described a situation of perceptual bewilderment associated with the clean, white modular cubes. His embodied account served as the Dwan Gallery press release: “LeWitt’s elementary skeletal cube is projected into

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an inert magnitude. These progressions lead the eye to no conclusion. The high degree of structural organization dislocates one’s ‘point of view.’. . . Extreme order brings extreme disorder. . . . Every step around his work brings unexpected intersections of infinity.”22 Smithson, like Bochner, animated the stolid modular structures with a vertiginous account in dramatic contrast to the extreme reductiveness of form. LeWitt’s friends and fellow artists understood something of the implications of the work. These reports of embodied chaos reflected a new ethos of art that emerged in step with the dominant discourse of industry and technology: the haptic encounter over modernism’s “purely optical experience.”23 This experience was likewise conveyed in Andre’s famous description of his floorpieces as akin to a road that “doesn’t reveal itself at any particular point or from any particular point,” always seen while moving and privileging no single, static point of view.24 Hence the only valid meaning was that generated through the individual phenomenological experience of an artwork—the intertwining of intellectual apprehension and physical encounter. Art that could be reduced to received critical readings, biography, literary content, or stale formal associations—all those terms listed by Bochner in his Primary Structures review—was now beside the point.

A Self-Destroying Logic As summoned by Roland Barthes’s oft quoted line “the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author”—published first in 1967 in the “Minimalism” edition of Aspen magazine along with LeWitt’s Serial Project #1—the authorial distance of minimal and conceptual strategies implied a new agency for the “reader,” the individual who perceives and intellectually apprehends an artwork. Authorial authority was limited to providing a set of variables or conditions. In LeWitt’s view, an object should contain only the minimum intrinsic meaning. “The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer but to give him information. Whether the viewer understands this information is incidental to the artist; he cannot foresee the understanding of all his viewers,” LeWitt wrote in the booklet produced to represent Serial Project #1.25 “The reader,” wrote Barthes elsewhere in Aspen, “is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.”26 There could be no presumption of common values,

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no intimate appeal to an individual. After all, the “reader” could not be known in any personal sense. The reader, as far as the artist or author was concerned, was a cipher. Emptied of the artist’s subjective emotional appeal to a sympathetic reader, conceptual art spoke to no one in particular. Rather, Serial Project #1 was an exercise in presenting information, a kind of information with no urging or message, existing outside the causal, functional, commercial context of the world. LeWitt’s major project of late 1966 and early 1967, Serial Project #1 was governed by a simple premise: “to place one form within another and include all major variations in two and three dimensions.”27 Though “the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” Serial Project #1 was a displaced artwork realized in multiple formats and locations: as models, as a single component exhibited at the Dwan Gallery exhibition The 10 in the fall of 1966, as a booklet with text and diagrams in Aspen magazine, as working drawings such as that used to illustrate the announcement for LeWitt’s show at Dwan in Los Angeles in 1967, and the Los Angeles installation itself, comprising the “large version” of Set A (figs. 46–48). Each set mapped nine 81-inch cubes, each cube subdivided into nine 28-inch cubes. For LeWitt, the phenomenological relativity of the scale was important: “28 [inches] is less than the size of the observer who must look down to see it. 81 [inches] is higher than most people who must look up to see it entirely.”28 The gridded surfaces on which LeWitt arranged the open and closed cubes in a “small version” with all four sets (and the Lucite-encased model Serial Project #1, Set D seen on the tables in the Introduction [figs. 1, 10, 11]) mapped the hidden interiors of the walled aluminum boxes, revealing “cubes with hidden cubes,” on the premise that “one needn’t actually see things to understand their form and placement.” Yet, LeWitt assured, “in all cases, the hidden elements were actually in place, even if they were not verifiable visually.”29 Logical and transparent on the one hand, Serial Project #1 is also a visual and conceptual puzzle that provokes tension between clarity and senselessness, a strategy that prompted Rosalind Krauss in 1978 to analogize LeWitt’s fixation on logical modular iterations to the neurotic ordering and reordering that preoccupied Beckett’s Molloy.30 LeWitt performed an exaggerated bureaucratic logic in the creation of Serial Project #1, determining to “follow one’s predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste or unconsciously remembered

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forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of a premise.”31 Yet far from emptying the artwork of content, as this bureaucratic logic might imply, LeWitt’s aim was a “massive reassertion of content,” he contended. Indeed, content “started to become very complex.”32 What is this content? readers of the work might ask. It was not of the sort that could be narrated or retold. Rather, it would be experienced, pursued through the probing of forms, which served as “the clue to the content.”33 Following the clues offered by Serial Project #1—the rigorous transparency of the logic governing the forms—one becomes embroiled in a situation of senselessness, absent any familiar signposts: metaphor, symbolism, formal or aesthetic significance. “I wonder how effective the clue to the content was for people so used to looking at things formally,” Lippard mused in an interview with LeWitt around 1971, betraying the frustration of some viewers of his work. “Well, they’ve had to rethink these things. That made for a lot of bad art criticism, bad Fig. 46 Installation view, The 10, Dwan Gallery, New York, 1966. A unit of Sol LeWitt’s Serial Project #1, Set A is in the background. Other works, clockwise starting with floorpiece, are by Carl Andre, Jo Baer, Donald Judd, Robert Smithson, and Robert Morris. following pages:

art history writing, which persists because it’s so much easier to be raped by the work instead of coming to terms with it. It requires a certain amount of probing, so it couldn’t be too popular anyway.”34 LeWitt’s requirement of a probing engagement, a search for information and clues to uncover explanatory logic, demanded a kind of agency far from programmed emotional reactions—the “expectation of an emotional kick” with which many viewers, critics, and historians alike seemed to approach art.35 Boredom could be a consequence, or frustration, and even hopelessness. Like the contemporary nouveau roman, this “massive reassertion of content” might be understood as a shift to the “total subjectivity” of the reader or viewer. The role of the artist or author was not to instruct the reader as to what

Fig. 47 Sol LeWitt, announcement for solo exhibition at Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, April 1967. Fig. 48 Sol LeWitt, Serial Project #1, Set A, 1966. Installation view, Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles.

to think or feel, but simply to inform about a set of conditions. The serial work conveyed no human drama, narrative arc, or metaphorical significance. It existed only in lived perceptual and intellectual experience. The endless descriptions of the nouveau roman built dizzyingly complex and detailed lived worlds of “I.” Most sentences of Michel Butor’s Passing Time, the novel LeWitt and Graham read in 1965 in the lead-up to the Daniels show, begin with a subjective experience: “I had to wait . . . ,” “I heard a door open . . . ,” “I now realized. . . .” “The objects in our novels never have a presence outside human perception, real or imaginary,”

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Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote in his 1961 essay “New Novel, New Man.” “The new novel is interested only in man and in his situation in the world.”36 The “massive reassertion of content” represented by LeWitt’s serial work might be understood as this, too: man and his situation in the world, in a specific, lived, contemporary sense. Serial Project #1, with its simple premise, was also mannerist and obsessive, concentrating the logic of a bureaucratic mindset, containing the potential for a kind of existential despair. The announcement for LeWitt’s spring 1967 show at the Los Angeles branch of the Dwan Gallery reproduced a “working drawing” for Serial Project #1, a diagram crowded with explanatory notes and measurements in the artist’s hand (see fig. 47). The instructions are clear and direct in isolation, like bureaucratic directives, but the sum is obfuscating and overwhelming, a complex but empty architecture of logic, irrational and absurd. Smithson found the Dwan announcement maddening: “Everything LeWitt thinks, writes, or has made is inconsistent and contradictory. The ‘original idea’ of his art is ‘lost in a mess of drawings, figurings, and other ideas.’ . . . His concepts are prisons devoid of reason.” The information conveyed on the announcement “is an indication of a self-destroying logic,” Smithson noted.37 Despite, or maybe because of, its cleanly machined forms anchored on a grid and derived from a clearly stated premise, Serial Project #1 amounts to an absurd grand gesture, embodying the “paradoxical situation” of logic and rational thought. The Lucite-encased model of Serial Project #1, Set D owned by Hesse and placed on her studio table was returned to LeWitt and placed by him on the Washer Table for the 1968 photograph discussed in this book’s Introduction (see fig. 1). Serial Project #1 represented an epistemic shift in art and the transmission of meaning through art, demanding new ways of experiencing and reading form. It was an absurdity, a paradox, a simultaneous gesture of optimism and negation—“something and yet nothing,” as Hesse described her first work to gain significant recognition in the New York art world.

Erotic Abstraction The “personal” was never minimized in Hesse’s art even as she entered the stage of an art world where Primary Structures ruled the day. LeWitt had encouraged this in his letter to her in Germany: “Try and tickle something inside you,

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your ‘weird humor.’ You belong in the most secret part of you,” he urged her.38 The first sculptures Hesse made in New York pushed biomorphic elements of the German reliefs and mechanical drawings into real space as singular forms—surrealistic “organs” wrapped in black-lacquered cord, or a grouping of “sausages” bandaged in papier mâché and painted black. These hung along the wall, or, in the case of Long Life, a black cord–wrapped beach ball, appeared attached to the wall with an umbilical cord, a lifeline (fig. 49). The wall, as the planar, vertical space of painting, remained a support and explicit reference for most of Hesse’s sculptures in 1966 and 1967, though in a far different manner than for LeWitt’s white structures designed to mitigate expression and become more a part of the white wall. Hesse’s work, by contrast, engaged the impassive white cube as a foil for the absurd, slightly outrageous nature of her sculpture. The aftermath of painting was particularly poignant in the case of the wall-bound Hang Up (1965–66), Hesse’s first major work after returning from Germany (fig. 50). The cloth-wrapped empty stretcher affixed with a stiff metal loop was, in her estimation, “the most important early statement I made. It was the first time where my absurdity or extreme feeling came through.”39 Hesse’s description of Hang Up in a 1970 interview with Cindy Nemser suggests that it was conceived as a mockery of painting: It is so absurd. This little piece of steel comes out of this structure and it comes out a lot. It’s about ten or eleven feet out and it is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous structure I have ever made and that is why it is really good. It is coming out of something and yet nothing. . . . It is framing nothing. And the whole frame is gradated—oh more absurdity—very, very finely. It really was an effort.40

The careful tonal gradation and the frame itself that is flush with the wall as a following pages:

canvas evoke the craft of painting while visibly sublimating painterly expression. Fig. 49 Works from 1965–66 in Eva Hesse’s studio.

The frame, simultaneously something and nothing, alludes to painting as both

Fig. 50 Eva Hesse, Hang Up, 1965–66. Acrylic, cloth, wood, cord, steel. 72 × 84 × 78 in.

with its graduated tones that occupy real space.

window and mirror but contains only a blank wall. The painted, cord-wrapped steel tube looping into the viewer’s space parodies painting’s spatial illusionism

“Free and confined, regular and irregular, rectangular and unmanageable, these opposing components exist in a peculiar idiosyncratic space. There is a yearning quality of suppression and release as well as pathos and humor to this

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strange relief that should reach a broad audience,” Lippard wrote of Hang Up in her May 1966 article “An Impure Situation.”41 Lippard was by then immersed in ideas about erotic art and the potential for “erotic abstraction.” She discussed Hang Up in conjunction with Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures of private domestic objects, such as his Soft Bathtub that “yawns like the cross-section of an immense and awkward womb. . . . These sculptures are the source material for a witty and objective eroticism that could be abstract as easily as figurative.”42 The idea of eroticism that could be abstract, that could be animate and yet disappear within the anonymity of geometry, was a concept that greatly appealed to Hesse. Against the abnegation of personal and erotic investment represented by Primary Structures, Hesse became involved with a very different set of ideas that coalesced around the critic and curator Gene Swenson’s exhibition and catalogue essay entitled The Other Tradition. “Hesse was very impressed, as was I, with Swenson’s exhibition and book-length catalogue. . . . In it, Swenson treated the kind of contradiction Hesse dealt with,” Lippard recalled.43 Swenson’s thesis proposed a bold antiformalist position for contemporary art based on “the new sexuality” of the 1960s. The work Swenson championed typically involved explicit and in some instances homoerotic subject matter, graphic and yet indirect, familiar yet estranged, utilizing surrealist strategies of contradiction. The body was understood as contemporary, connected to world events, from Vietnam to the politics of gay identity in the 1960s. Much work took the form of figurative painting in neosurrealist or Pop styles, or collage, as in Joseph Raffaele’s Belts and Forehead (1965), which features a muscleman bound in leather restraints, typical of the artist’s adaptation of S&M pornography.44 Yet Swenson also included sculptor Mike Todd’s fetishistic agglomerations of wood, metal, and leather, appended with orbs and painted a uniform white—abstract “breasts” populating a biomorphic form, yet industrial, armored, and hard (fig. 51). “I trained my eyes to see the erotic forms of the human body in hard shapes,” Todd recalled of his work from this period.45 The tension between structurist and minimalist restraint and the erotic informed both Todd and, as he recalls, Hesse as well: “Eva’s work may have been reinforced by the sexual and psychological works of The Other Tradition. I on the other hand was thrown of my personal, obsessive sculptural tendencies by the minimalists.”46

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The erotic was central for Swenson. “Is one conscious of style when one is hot and bothered?” he asked, seeing eroticism as a foolproof way to counter the iron grip of formalist logic.47 Like pornography, sexuality was frank and central, not cloaked in literary or Freudian symbols. The erotic pervaded art and the experience of art, fused with poetic, moral feelings; if successful, Swenson wrote, the “new sexuality” in art should “arouse the viewer sensually and sexually,” an antidote to the formal.48 Yet the erotic was understood not as something personal and tied to inner psychology, but as part of a broader social field. As Swenson wrote, Fig. 51 Michael Todd, Fetish II, 1963. Mixed wood and metal. 9 × 7 × 6 in.

Three young artists, Joe Raffaele, Paul Thek, and Mike Todd might be called post-Freudian. They are not, however, sexually obsessed nor are they pornographers; but sex is a more important and conscious part of their content than is usually the case. As in pornography, the erotic and

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sensual are not a subclass of love or tragedy; unlike pornography, there is an integration of sexual with poetic and even moral feelings. The erotic is turned toward a wider range of human possibilities.49

This merger of art and erotic experience represented a kind of upheaval, moral and even poetic, in which explicitly homoerotic men’s bodies usurped the female nude in art, in which sexuality was fluid and could be redefined for a new age. Freudian guilt, Swenson argued, had become “a shamefully legalistic technicality. . . . Perhaps as a result of the laws, there is a sado-masochistic flavor to much post-Freudian art: didn’t Prohibition add a gangster flavor to many of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s heroes?”50 Swenson did not elaborate on “the laws” and resultant sadomasochism, but this reference would have been obvious to any member of the pre-Stonewall gay community. Thek’s contribution to The Other Tradition, Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box (1965), encased a chunk of blood-red encaustic flesh in one of Warhol’s famous silkscreened boxes, faced with Plexiglas to suggest a vitrine—a grotesque intervention within Pop Art’s deadpan social commentary. His “technological reliquaries” paired disturbing grotesquerie and cool objectification, presenting encaustic hunks of meat (and, later, severed limbs) in glass-and-steel cases (fig. 52). The work of both Todd and Thek conjured a cultural environment of psychotropic drugs, sexual liberation, and unease over the violence in Vietnam. Thek’s cases enacted technological distancing similar to Minimalist boxes—the “pristine construction of the period,” in his words—while Todd’s industrial materials and uniform white paint likewise referenced and dismissed prevailing minimal concepts. Thek began using Plexiglas because, he said, I thought it made fun of the scene. . . . Nobody ever mentioned anything that seemed real. The world was falling apart, anyone could see it. I was a wreck, the block was a wreck, the city was a wreck, and I’d go to a gallery and there would be a lot of fancy people looking at a lot of stuff that didn’t say anything about anything to anyone. Not that I will in any way negate the value of beauty and patience and dedication and the work of the contemplative. Of course not, how absurd of me. But still, I thought there was a lack and that it was my job to say so.51

Thek used glass and Plexiglas boxes to contain objects that conjure flesh and limbs hacked from living bodies, asserting a violent (sur)realism within the hollow

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minimalist cube—redressing the “lack.” The reference to Primary Structures was clear: the Minimalist ethos was depoliticized, distant from the stakes of contemporary life, a stance Thek could not abide. His work manifested a collision of worlds: the gallery as a space of contemplation filled with “swanky” “Modern Fig. 52 Paul Thek, Untitled (Four Tube Meat Piece), 1964, from the series “Technological Reliquaries.” Wax, metal, wood, paint, glass, plaster, rubber, resin, and glass. 16 3⁄16 × 16 5⁄16 × 5 7⁄16 in.

Art” cases, and the violence done to bodies in the world as the civil rights movement and events in Vietnam intensified, and the sexual revolution—not just free love, but a politicization of sexual identity that was at times violent—played out in New York.52 In 1966, Hesse became close with all three artists singled out by Swenson, spending time with Thek, Raffaele, and Todd (the latter was an on-and-off lover), including a weekend on Fire Island with Thek and Todd.53 Hesse received a letter from Raffaele humorously describing a gift to her from him and

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the artist William T. Wiley of an artwork by Raffaele: “Brown rubbered circle with cunty-bull-dogged head, mouth open and white, heavier than but like, bakery box string coming through hole moving on towards scotched tape center crossing which has hairs four and I don’t know if they’re Wiley’s or Raffaele’s and then the string moves on towards a tampaxian puff again scotch taped and then string on and on and on . . .” Raffaele conjured a surrealist-erotic object that could have been in response to Hesse’s wrapped “sausages” or even her reliefs of 1965 and 1966. “Could it be that this piece will be in Lucy Lippard’s new show at the Goatgroin Gallery called ‘Concentric Extraction’?” Raffaele joked at the end of the letter.54 Lippard was developing her exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, which would open at the Fischbach Gallery in September 1966, and Raffaele’s joke points to something significant about Lippard’s show. As she wrote in her review of The Other Tradition and again in an essay entitled “Eros Presumptive,” Lippard was “left cold” by the “third rate Pop and warmed-over neo-Surrealism” of Swenson’s artists.55 With her exhibition Eccentric Abstraction and its correlate theory of erotic abstraction, Lippard reconceived The Other Tradition and “the new sexuality” in terms of abstract sculpture that also responded to the proposals set forth in Primary Structures. While Swenson promoted forthrightly erotic content in art—“[a]s in pornography, the erotic and sensual are not a sub-class of love or tragedy”—Lippard’s guarded alternative noted that “abstraction cannot be pornographic in any legal or specific sense no matter how erotically suggestive it becomes.”56 The politicized contemporary take on eroticism Swenson emphasized in his exhibition through explicitly sexual and violent work disappeared in Lippard’s treatment in favor of an undifferentiated abstract eroticism. Lippard’s elision, almost certainly unintentional, reflects both the radical, outré nature of Swenson’s thesis and the degree to which the body and sexuality were not yet understood as political. “The general, liberal intellectual community seems hardly aware of the deep and basic revolution now taking place in the realm of sexual awareness; they seem not to distinguish between the old and the new,” Swenson wrote in The Other Tradition.57 Eccentric Abstraction emerged from the layered sexual politics hinted at by Raffaele’s upending reference—searching, but unaware of the political stakes represented by sexuality and the body. Lippard herself later acknowledged as much, writing in 1984, “I just looked back to an

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essay on the subject [of erotic art] I wrote in 1967 and found that I had entirely disregarded gender, interpersonal, or power relations.”58 In late 1966, Lippard gave Hesse a draft of her essay “Eros Presumptive,” and Hesse took copious notes that indicate her engagement with the concept of neutralizing the erotic or sensuous: Anti-dynamic sensuousness . . . /contradictions or opposites/flexible but still/kinesthetic but passive/potentially dynamic but frozen. Abstract objects that produce/unmistakable sensations attachable to, though not/necessarily interpretable as the erotic. ... Endless repetition can be considered erotic. ... inactive: death like premise with sensuous: as life giving element . . . opposite used as complementaries result: formal neutralization/paralysis.59

Hesse’s notations posit forms as contradictions. One side of the contradiction described elements that Minimalism distanced itself from: eroticism, intimacy, flexibility, kinesthesia, sensuality. The other side was in line with Minimalism’s anti-sensuous, detached, deadpan sensibility—but here these traits are given a negative spin, called “passive,” “death-like,” and “inactive.” The contradiction described in Hesse’s notes is between two identities, one latent, frozen in a chrysalis state of becoming and laden with potentialities—“potentially dynamic,” “flexible but still” and is “sensuous” and “life giving”; the other, an “inactive: death like premise.” When the two identities are paired, a “formal neutralization” results and the sensuous is restrained.

A Logical Fiction Lippard’s ideas of “erotic abstraction” formed the basis for her show Eccentric Abstraction at the Fischbach Gallery. Lippard chose artists who employed the structurist idiom—whose work implied an underlying grid, for example, or used a limited palette—but opposed this restraint with irregular, aleatory techniques and body-derived abstraction.60 Hesse contributed two pieces. One was Several

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(1965), a cluster of long “sausages” described by Bochner as “atrophied organs or private parts” that were “not garish or horrifying. The lacerated shiny surfaces have a detached presence which is real.”61 But the main work she exhibited was her celebrated wallpiece Metronomic Irregularity II (1966), made in the late summer in response to Lippard’s invitation (fig. 53). “Lucy wants me to do a big piece for show. It scares me to have it put that way. A finality also like an examination,” Hesse wrote, sensing that her participation meant a larger stage and that important critical judgments would be passed on the new sculpture.62 Metronomic Irregularity II was an expansive relief that ran twenty feet across the wall, consisting of three forty-eight-inch square panels painted a flat gray and mounted at forty-eight-inch intervals. The panels were perforated in a grid pattern, resembling pegboard, and cotton-covered wire entered and emerged from the perforations to connect each panel with the next. The coursing wires approximate hand-drawn lines across the wall itself, including the shadows appearing in photographs that double and exaggerate the linear undulations. Metronomic Irregularity II is also notable for the pairing of lines organized by, and emergent from, a grid with a chaotic and complex linearity resulting from the wire’s retention of its spooled contraction and the varied intermingling of hundreds of wires across the white planar surface of the gallery wall. The frenzy of wire in Hesse’s “metronome” emerged from the regulated beat of the grid. The degree to which Metronomic Irregularity II incorporated structurist ideas was unexpected to Lippard, who was “surprised at the precision” of the relief, with its “understatement and focus on structure.” 63 In planning Eccentric Abstraction, Lippard had “traveled on both coasts looking for work, with Hesse’s Fig. 53 Eva Hesse, Metronomic Irregularity II, 1966. Graphite, paint, papier-caché, Masonite, wood, cotton-covered wire. 48 × 240 in., three panels. Installation view, Fischbach Gallery, New York 1966. Whereabouts unknown after 1971.

image in the back of my mind. Hang Up, with its awkward shift from the geometric, would have been just fine.”64 But by forgoing the singular form of Hang Up or the German reliefs and instituting a repetitive, modular organization, Hesse indicated her participation within the structurist milieu. Lippard was not the only one taken off guard by Metronomic Irregularity II. Hilton Kramer, in his review of Eccentric Abstraction, dismissed it outright: “Miss Hesse’s intricate labyrinth of slender white wires on painted plywood simply adapts the imagery of Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings to a three dimensional medium.”65 Arthur Danto, in 1998, astutely characterized Kramer’s review as a “crushing misreading,” one

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that established the extreme novelty of the piece by demonstrating the critic’s utter unpreparedness to comprehend the work outside the irrelevant terms of abstract painting.66 At least two people were prepared for it, however, thanks to their deep and nuanced understanding of Hesse’s art and its place in the broader field of the New York art world at the moment. Bochner and LeWitt helped install the unwieldy relief and both had strong reactions. As LeWitt explained to Michael Kimmelman in 1992, on the occasion of a retrospective exhibition of Hesse at the Yale University Art Gallery, “[Metronomic Irregularity II] was really a magnificent piece and a way of liberation for me in my own work . . . it had a strong and direct and specific effect on me.”67 What was that effect? LeWitt also credited Metronomic Irregularity II as one of the first instances of what would become known as installation art. “It raises all of the problems and questions of that type of art: it’s never the same twice; it has to be remade anew each time. This is what installation art is.”68 Metronomic Irregularity II introduced the import of immediacy: making work that could exist for a time and place, and have as its main significance the situation for which it was generated, one that could never be replicated exactly. Hence each new installation produced a new work, with the potential for new import. As discussed in the following chapter, these were enormously important principles for LeWitt, particularly as he began making wall drawings in 1968, as they were in the later 1960s for Hesse as well. Metronomic Irregularity II brought into focus the contingencies of experiencing art—the time and space when it is available, both historically and in the sense of a specific environment. Photographs of Metronomic Irregularity II installed at Fischbach Gallery in 1966 show pronounced shadows cast by the chaotic wires. Track lights illuminated the relief from an acute overhead angle. The raking light produced shadows that nearly reached the floor, reinstating the linearity of the contracting wires like drawings on the wall. In LeWitt’s estimation, Metronomic Irregularity II was “one of the major pieces of not only installation art, but of art, period, of our time.”69 He would, famously, turn to the wall as a surface for drawing in 1968, instituting the principles of installation art—never the same twice, remade anew each time—learned from Hesse’s relief and perhaps especially from the shadows “drawn” on the wall that integrated the conditions of the environment, its architecture and lighting, within the work.

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To Bochner, Metronomic Irregularity II was “not chaos but a structure ordered in itself yet unavailable to comprehension. The totality is mind-boggling. It is a fabrication of entanglement, a logical fiction. Regular, remote, lifeless.”70 This characterization of Hesse’s work as lifeless and remote was followed by Bochner’s description, quoted earlier, in the same review, of her “atrophied organs,” “not garish or horrifying” but “detached.” This sense of Hesse’s work as somehow drained of life was a response that Bochner shared with Smithson, who noted that her artwork seemed “destined for a funerary chamber that excludes all mention of the living and the dead. . . . Nothing is incarnated into nothing.”71 This insistence on a lifeless quality—which is not to say dead, but a quality of having once been alive—captures an important way in which Hesse’s sculpture functioned within the Minimalist milieu. Smithson owned an earlier, much smaller variation, Metronomic Irregularity I, and wrote approvingly of her 1966 structure Laocoön using terms that reveal meanings at play in Hesse’s work (fig. 54).72 In November 1966, a month after Eccentric Abstraction opened, Smithson described Hesse’s work in his essay “Quasi-Infinites and the Waning of Space.” Of her modular Laocoön, a tower of open cubes encrusted with gray papier-mâché, snaked through with gray rope, he wrote, “We discover an absence of ‘pathos’ and a deliberate avoidance of the anthropomorphic. Instead one is aware only of the vestigital [sic] and devitalized ‘snakes’ looping through a lattice with cloth bound joints. The baroque esthetic of the original Laokoon with its flowing lines—soft and fluid—is transformed into a dry, skeletal tower that goes nowhere.”73 Smithson later noted his affinity with Hesse, recalling that “I was counter to the prevailing minimal situation myself and she had some of that in her work, but it derived from a biological organism, a kind of mummification.”74 Smithson pointed to the canceling of “soft and fluid” flowing lines of the original Laocoön, sensuous qualities of living bodies, almost erotic in nature, in a passionate struggle for life, imprisoned in a sculpture devoid of anthropomorphism. For Smithson and Bochner, Hesse’s sculptural forms read as devitalized, atrophied, and mummified, terms that suggest passage from an animated state to an inert manifestation of the ravages of time, yet retaining a latent erotic force. These romantic descriptions endowed Hesse’s sculptures with a narrative about the aftermath, or perhaps fossilization, of Eros, invoking its presence by establishing its absence in “atrophied . . . private parts” and the like.

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This formulation illuminates Hesse’s interest in reading through Minimalist restraint and absence—in essence, these descriptions recognize her sensitivity to Minimalism’s “fossilization” or rejective stance in her act of fusing Minimalist order with a symbolic, vestigial presence of sensuous expression. Lippard’s description of Metronymic Irregularity II in the Eccentric Abstraction brochure also emphasizes its paralyzed status, tying it to Hesse’s contradictory use of form: the work “adopted a modular principle native to the structural idiom” that belies “an intensely personal mood” in a sculpture where “energy is repressed, or rather imprisoned.”75 As Lippard later noted in reference to the “structurists,” “One aspect of [Hesse’s] work these artists liked so much was that it was so different from their own.”76 The interdependence of the sculpture Hesse produced in 1966 and 1967 within the structurist milieu was a dialectical situation. Her “so different” work threw the artistic stance of LeWitt and others into relief, visibly containing the expressive, sensuous qualities systematically excised, or invoked through absence, in the structurist idiom and discourse.

The 10 On the same day that Eccentric Abstraction opened on West 57th Street, an exhibit of Minimal art, The 10, organized by Smithson and Virginia Dwan, opened at the Dwan Gallery upstairs in the same building. Smithson recalled a “crosssituation between ‘Eccentric Abstraction’ and ‘The 10’” that “set off a dialectic,” an “interplay of consciousness,” resulting in a “very fertile period” for Hesse.77 Many of the Dwan “ten” were “structurists” and close associates of Hesse, including LeWitt, Smithson, Andre, and Morris. This moment was fraught with tensions of many sorts; Virginia Dwan had declined LeWitt’s suggestion to show Hesse’s work, a blow to Hesse because “my whole world is in Dwan.” The competitiveness of the art world and Hesse’s sense of her outsider status among an ambitious male avant-garde was evoked quite specifically by Dwan. Hesse felt like “a non-artist among Virginia. . . . They all forget me. . . . This includes Sol, Fig. 54 Eva Hesse, Laocoön, 1965–66. Acrylic, paint, cloth-covered cord, wire, papiermâché over plastic plumbers’ pipe. 130 × 23¼ × 23¼ in.

yes loyal Sol. He neglects me socially with Virginia. I too am forgotten. Yes, even Sol,” she complained in her journals after a dinner party held by the Smithsons in the fall of 1966.78 The “Dwan look” was “spare and clean”; Hesse’s art was not. As Dwan recalled later, “My artists were LeWitt and [Carl] Andre. . . . My eyes weren’t ready for Hesse at that point.”79

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Though many of the same artists were involved, the installation at Dwan was far more formally subdued than Primary Structures (see fig. 46). Color, which had been a major factor in McShine’s show, was largely eliminated at Dwan. The show was dominated by white, black, and metal surfaces—the anodized aluminum of Judd’s wallpiece, LeWitt’s aluminum open structure coated with baked white enamel that was a component of Serial Project #1, Set A, a black painted steel relief by Smithson that represented a mathematical progression, and a white plywood structure by Morris. Jo Baer’s acrylic and oil paintings with black internal frames surrounding pristine white fields and Agnes Martin’s nearly monochrome grids also contributed to the Minimal aesthetic. The title of the show carried over the quietude and restraint of the art within: simply ten artists, a slight nod to the importance of numerical sets.80 Virginia Dwan’s recollection of The 10 reveals an important and typically bypassed context for the show in the climate of anxiety and social unrest in New York, in particular, race riots in Harlem and rising anger over the war in Vietnam. She describes the genesis of the “Dwan look” in a remarkable passage from an unpublished interview: I loved the Ten show. I just couldn’t bear seeing it come down. It really answered a need for me, and the direction, the flavor, the tenor, the philosophy of that show seemed to be a kind of contemplative quality and very quiet. It was a very quiet show. . . . The Sixties, of course, which we’re well into at this point, were such a high energy period. Vietnam had become really such an angry issue and, for the first time perhaps, Americans were questioning whether they really were on the side of the right and there were a lot of demonstrations going on in universities—all those sorts of things that you and I remember. There were also riots in the summers here. I remember leaving my place to go away for the holidays in the summer and wondering if it would be all right because of what was going on while I was away, because there was a lot of high tension. So this show for me was like a sanctuary; seeing these works grouped together representing ten different artists and their approach was like going into a chapel or a place of meditation, or “contemplation” is the term I prefer. And I think that contemplative look which other people have seen is simply minimal. Minimal implies that there is nothing there. [Laughs] But specifically to me the work is contemplative. It throws people back on themselves and gives a quiet opportunity for opening up and reflecting.

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Particularly in times like that I feel that kind of art is terribly significant and perhaps for all time, but it answered a real need for me and for others. So that came to be the look.81

The experience of Minimal art was, for Dwan, an inversion of the turbulent context outside the gallery walls. Asking of art to provide “a quiet opportunity” to reflect, to be thrown back upon oneself, a sanctuary within a climate of massive and increasingly violent social upheaval, perhaps explains why Dwan’s “eyes weren’t ready for Hesse,” whose work was an “intensely personal” expression of repressed or imprisoned energy. (As critic John Perreault wrote in 1968, her work induced “a kind of queasy uneasiness.”82) It would be incongruous to admit the body’s erotic and visceral forces—Hesse’s art of desiccated, mummified remains—within the Dwan chapel. I do not want to imply, like Thek, that Minimalism’s contemplativeness was a “lack,” that it was an aesthetic of denial. It is possible to also understand the Minimal ethos as acknowledgment, not at the level of politics or social engagement, but through a preservation of the subject. As Dwan articulates, for her the Minimal ethos was closely tied to the messy, human context of the 1960s: anger, tension, riots, demonstrations, questioning what was right. It “deals with the way you think about the world,” in Judd’s words. Contemplation requires the luxury of time and space, a remove from the world—privilege is, of course, implied—but acknowledgment, not denial, a dialectical openness to the world, defined many of the Dwan “ten.”

Repeating Absurdity “I must also learn to have work sent out. Not for non work theory but for permanence,” Hesse wrote in her journal after the hanging of Metronomic Irregularity II.83 It had been a debacle—the work fell off the wall when Bochner and LeWitt underestimated the weight of the hundreds of wires, and had to be remade. She regretted relying on friends who were not technicians to install her work and wanted to become more professional. Factory fabrication seemed like an option, though it would be a year before she made the move with her “Accession” series. In the meantime, she started to conceptualize her work using ideas swirling around in the wake of Primary Structures, including “The New Math,” Fibonacci numbers, and Set Theory. These tools were a productive means of

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experimentation for Hesse, not least for the opportunity to deploy humor and critique while participating in some of the many exhibitions revolving around these themes in 1966 and 1967. In December 1966, Bochner invited both Hesse and LeWitt to participate Fig. 55 Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art, 1966. Curated by Mel Bochner. Four identical loose-leaf notebooks, each with 100 Xerox copies of studio notes, working drawings, and diagrams collected and Xeroxed by the artist, displayed on four sculpture stands.

in his show curated for the School of Visual Arts (SVA), Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art. One of few exhibitions Hesse and LeWitt appeared in together in the 1960s, Working Drawings presented a somewhat exaggerated expression of prevailing artistic attitudes. The compendium of materials chosen by Bochner included artists’ notes and drawings, diagrams, and even receipts for materials that might (though not necessarily) be understood as works of art in their most elemental, conceptual instantiation. SVA’s new Xerox machine allowed Bochner to “serialize” the drawings, which, instead of being mounted on gallery walls, were compiled in binders and placed on a row of pedestals in the gallery, thus inhabiting an ambiguous status, not quite but maybe art (fig. 55).

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The low, white boxlike pedestals became Minimalist sculptures when placed in a neat row with only a black binder atop. Viewers appear hunched uncomfortably over the notebooks.84 “Reading” was thematized by this installaFig. 56 Xerox of Sol LeWitt Working Drawing, 1966. Page from Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.

tion, made an explicit act through the awkward position demanded of the viewer,

Fig. 57 Xerox of Eva Hesse Working Drawing, 1966. Page from Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art.

tion—a quantity of materials, a set of measurements, and so on.

who could not possibly stand there long enough to interpret the diagrams and mathematical sequences (or Judd’s simple receipt for materials) as objects in the world, artworks or otherwise. The presentation was a performative and even humorous gesture, yet it demonstrated something significant: an ethos of reading and conceptualizing left to the viewer who was given a kind of primary informa-

LeWitt contributed working drawings involving a frenzy of notes and calculations, in sharp contrast to the spare forms that resulted (fig. 56). Hesse’s contribution included a page containing a sequence of fractions representing a set of mathematical progressions (fig. 57). Encountering this page in isolation, the viewer would find it difficult to imagine an artwork. However, the set of fractions

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appears to have been the inception of an important sculpture produced the following year: Addendum (1967), selected by Bochner for his Art in Series show at Finch College Museum in 1967 (fig. 58). The droll “monochrome . . . neutral gray” papier-mâché coated wallpiece adopted the proportions of her working drawing, with slight modifications in scale.85 The 4 5⁄8-inch constant measurement became a 5-inch “semisphere”; the interval progressions remained the same—oneeighth, three-eighths, five-eighths, and so on. A seventeenth unit—an addendum—was added to the sixteen parts specified in the original working drawing. In a recorded statement for the Art in Series Acoustiguide, Hesse discouraged any allusive readings: “Explanations . . . are after the fact. The work exists only for itself. The work must then contain its own import.”86 She proceeded to read off the interval progressions from her working drawing: “ 1⁄8, 3⁄8, 5⁄8, 7⁄8, 1 1⁄8 . . .” in “the best detached and Minimal tone.”87 She described the semispheres, the unifying surface texture, and the flexible cord pulled through each unit. “The cord opposes the regularity. When it reaches the floor it curls and sits irregularly. The juxtaposition . . . realizes the contradiction of the rational series of semi-spheres and the irrational flow of lines on the floor. Series, Fig. 58 Eva Hesse, Addendum, 1967. Acrylic, papiermâché, unknown modeling compound, wood, rope. 84½ × 119¼ × 10 in. (variable).

serial, serial art, is another way of repeating absurdity.”88 Yet Addendum was notably different from other work in the show, including LeWitt’s machined aluminum structure. The relief’s origins in a “systematically determined process” gave way to autographic traces of artist’s fingermarks impressed in the papier-mâché surface.89 The “irrational flow of lines” and the repeated semisphere, associated with breasts in her notes and a recurring motif by that time, were

following pages:

informed by Hesse’s interest in the formal neutralization of erotic and sensuous

Fig. 59 Eva Hesse, No title, 1966. Acrylic, cord, papier-caché, plastic (?), wood. 7½ × 7½ × 4 in. Verso: “for Sol,” “Eva Hesse, 1966.”

properties through dialogues with Lippard about the possibility of “erotic abstrac-

Fig. 60 Eva Hesse, No title, 1966. Acrylic, cord, papier-caché, unknown modeling compound, Masonite. 9 × 9 × 2 in.

tion.” Subjective and sensuous associations were planted and denied. At the close of 1966, Hesse had presented small gifts to Bochner and LeWitt, two of her closest friends, at a Christmas party hosted by the sculptor Ruth Vollmer. Each received reliefs of concentrically laid cord on plywood boards, painted a flat gray as if single, enlarged units of Addendum.90 The semisphere of LeWitt’s relief was higher, the top of the spiral mound reaching three inches— more pointedly erotic, its anatomical suggestion pushing the limits of abstraction— while Bochner’s was relatively flat, with a more stable geometric association (figs. 59, 60). They were semispheres and breasts—a revisiting of the “breast jobs”

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she had written about to LeWitt from Germany, employing a similar concentric twine technique as that used for Ringaround Arosie and 2 in 1 a year and a half earlier. LeWitt had wanted to see this work, and now he was gifted with a small, monochrome version. Bochner had already described Hesse’s forms as “atrophied organs or private parts,” and as if to isolate that fragment of his review, he too had his own. These reliefs were a playful rejoinder to Lippard’s advocacy for elusive forms in Eccentric Abstraction: “Ideally, a bag remains a bag and does not become a uterus, a tube is a tube and not a phallic symbol, a semisphere is just that and not a breast.”91 In 1975, after Lippard’s “feminist awakening,” she reneged on this statement, declaring that “the time has come to call a semisphere a breast if we know damn well that’s what it suggests.”92 Yet historically, the elusive forms were a means of power, a way of asserting a symbol of experience while avoiding the gendered prohibitions of the moment, and doing so with a wink. Such elusiveness allowed participation rather than marginalization. The cords of Addendum “fall to the floor and get all tangled up in each other,” John Perreault noticed in his art roundup for the Village Voice in December 1967.93 The title of his column borrowed a quote from Hesse: “Repeating Absurdity.” The critic singled her out in his discussion of Art in Series. Only Hesse “sees, questions, and in a way relishes the absurd implications of this new cliché,” he wrote. The other work, including LeWitt’s open framework structure, was plagued by “mathematical romanticism,” a development that “appalls and bores me.” If this work was meant to simply illustrate mathematical progressions, then “this is merely a new kind of literary art. I doubt, however, this is the case.” The question of what this art might be if not merely “literary” was left hanging as Perreault went on the discuss Peter Saul, whose latest paintings “wallow in the sexual nightmares beneath the surface of Vietnam and all wars in general.” In the New York art world in 1967, the concept of absurdity could contain art that “exists only for itself” and nightmarish Day-Glo paintings of the repeated absurdity that is war.

In “The Aesthetics of Silence,” published in the “Minimalism” issue of Aspen alongside LeWitt’s Serial Project #1, Susan Sontag defended the new Minimal art against charges of “anti-humanism.” It was in fact deeply engaged, she felt: “psychologically, distance often is involved with the most intense state of feeling,

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in which the distance or coolness or impersonality with which something is treated measures the insatiable interest that thing has for us. The distance that a great deal of ‘anti-humanist’ art proposes is actually equivalent to obsession.”94 Though Sontag may have had in mind the reliquaries of her close friend Thek, within the context of the “Minimalism” issue, LeWitt was equally implied. “Structurist” art deployed the transparent means of math and other “systematically determined processes” to generate forms in place of “subjective” methods in order to avoid instructing the viewer on what to feel, how to react. It was an ethos of nonmeaning. “Sight arbitrary . . . exists outside personal views,” Hesse jotted down in her notes at a Yale symposium in which LeWitt, Smithson, Judd, and Morris were participants.95 To focus on perceptual encounter through forms derived from mathematical concepts attempted an alternative to the falsely personal appeal. Perceptual phenomena were not personal; perception could allow both distance and engagement at a time when artists were under pressure to parse the operations of their work in response to politics and the world. Could art be something and yet nothing?

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Chapter 4

It Is Something, It Is Nothing, 1968–69 “Separate ‘things,’ ‘forms,’ ‘objects,’ ‘shapes,’ etc., with beginnings and endings are mere convenient fictions: there is only an uncertain disintegrating order that transcends the limits of rational separations,” Robert Smithson wrote in “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects,” in the September 1968 issue of Artforum.1 His essay was about earthworks, though not the monumental, permanent alterations of remote sites still in the offing, like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative (1969–70) or his own Spiral Jetty (1970). Rather, Smithson’s essay prefigured a gallery exhibition: Earth Works opened at the Dwan Gallery in October. Earth was a medium, but more than this, earthworks was a state of mind. Smithson called for “the fall of the studio,” imagining works of art that were embedded in the space and time of the world, and inseparable from the mind of the artist. A “society that values commodity-type art” constructed “rational illusions” to invent objects that exist outside of time and apart from the artist’s mind. But “when a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed from something into nothing . . . it ceases being a mere object and becomes art.”2 The fall 1968 exhibition season in New York was a moment of disintegrating order: impermanent work that was erased or destroyed at the conclusion of its display, and work that staked out spaces of nonmeaning beyond existing aesthetic and intellectual frameworks. “It is something, it is nothing,” Eva Hesse wrote of the work in the only solo exhibition of her sculpture in her lifetime.3 Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers opened at the Fischbach Gallery on 29 West 57th Street as Earth Works closed downstairs at Dwan. As Hesse pushed the status of the Fig. 61 Sol LeWitt, Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value, 1968. Black-andwhite photographs mounted on board, 12 11⁄16 × 10½ in.

object toward an elusive state that could mean nothing, LeWitt made a drawing on the wall of the Paula Cooper Gallery that was painted over after just one week. Hesse participated in two landmark shows of “anti-form”—one at the John Gibson Gallery, and another, Nine at Castelli, which was organized by Robert Morris for Leo Castelli’s uptown warehouse, marked by an ethos of the “humbled, gratuitous, thrown away.”4

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Spatial and experiential dimensions—remoteness and immediacy, concept and bodily encounter, estrangement and intimacy—telescoped within the same exhibitions and even the same works of art. LeWitt’s contribution to Earth Works was a booklet titled A Report on a Cube That Was Buried at the Visser House in Bergeyk, Holland, on July 1, 1968. The work, also known through a photogrid titled Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value (fig. 61), was documented with photographs of the artist, the small stainless steel cube, the Visser family, the fabricator of the cube, the shovel, the cube being buried, and the filled hole. Though the narrative was relayed in indexical terms, the secrecy of the work, animated by a private meaning, was an indication “that the conceptual can be sensual” to critic John Perreault.5 Unlike the cubes of Serial Project #1 with mapped interiors, Buried Cube would always withhold something from the viewer. Buried Cube was an earthwork, sited in the common space of the world, as were Heizer’s depressions and Walter De Maria’s etchings in the Nevada desert. These newly occupied distant sites were known through photographs published in Artforum or displayed on the walls of the Dwan Gallery. Earthworks were a media-dependent conceptual art, ideas and images as much as encounters with earth. At the same time, Claes Oldenburg’s Worm Earth Piece, a Plexiglas case filled with topsoil and night crawlers, was exhibited in Earth Works, and Morris gathered a great heap of dirt and debris from New York City, including scrap metal and a fair amount of cooking grease. It was a fragment of the surrounding urban system of building and waste with a powerful stench, possessing a visceral, stomach-turning materiality, as one imagines was the experience of seeing fat worms writhing in a clear case of soil. As cubes were buried and depressions dug in faraway places, art began inhabiting urban margins, likewise staking out an “alternative to the absolute city system,” as Heizer described his pursuit of sites beyond commercialized and policed spaces of the city.6 LeWitt’s “wall markings,” as they were first called, inaugurated Paula Cooper’s new space on the third floor of a factory building in SoHo, the first gallery to open in the manufacturing district south of Houston Street. Nine at Castelli occupied a vast, unheated space in Harlem—“a very rough neighborhood” where “Saturday visitors” ascended “in spite of the inconvenience and the dangers,” as Leo Castelli described perceptions of the site.7 New

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modes of experience, new definitions of art and the transmission of meaning, were the ambition of the art that inhabited these new spaces. Earthworks held this promise, certainly, but earthworks were only one expression of a broad transformation of the spatial, perceptual, and social functioning of art that also informed concepts such as “anti-form” and drawing on the wall. The hard industrial surfaces and geometries of Minimalism seemed historical by the fall 1968 season; to Artforum editor Philip Leider, Earth Works and Nine at Castelli together signaled “the closing out of what might be called ‘Phase One’ of the adventure that has been called ‘Minimal,’ ‘Object, or ‘Literalist’ art.”8 Or, in the German artist and critic Ursula Meyer’s cynical assessment, “While structural concepts affirmed man’s object mastery the drooping materials acknowledge the collapse of the great illusion.”9 A handful of the same artists in Primary Structures and The 10 at Dwan were now participating in these postMinimal developments. LeWitt, Smithson, Morris, and Carl Andre produced earthworks, and Morris organized Nine at Castelli. Artistic labor became visible and parsed in unprecedented ways. Work emerged from uncertainty and investigative processes, and permanence was replaced by contingencies of environment and encounter. “I remember I wanted to get to non art,” Hesse wrote in a statement for her installation piece Contingent (1969). “Non connotive, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort. . . . It is what is yet not known, thought, seen, touched.”10 “Non art” was an empty signifier; it meant nothing or everything, and it opened up onto the world in radical ways by rejecting existing criteria—not just formalism but the very idea of theoretical frameworks. Fixed meanings were impossible. “Nothing” was a powerful idea, both as a concept and in the sense of physical instability; experience and the contingencies of perception came into focus with work sited beyond the limits of art, bracketed only by the world.

Misconstruals A color photograph of Repetition 19 I (1967) appears on the postcard announcement for Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers, which opened in November 1968 (fig. 62). Though this particular sculpture was not included in the show, its larger, fabricated fiberglass successor, Repetition 19 III (1968), was featured (fig. 63). The postcard revealed the progression of the series from studio to factory, showing

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the earlier piece on Hesse’s studio floor, paint spattered nearby the diminutive, wobbly-looking white units. The first version had been made in the summer of Fig. 62 Eva Hesse, Postcard announcement for Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers at the Fischbach Gallery, 1968, with Repetition 19 I, 1967. Verso: “EVA HESSE, ‘REPETITION

1967, just as Hesse was beginning to experiment in her studio with rubbers and resins—viscous, semitranslucent materials diverted from industrial usage. Purposefully naive materials such as plaster and papier mâché (“childrens’ technique” Hesse jotted in a notebook) that had been prominent in her work in 1966 and 1967, paired with “Canal Street technology” like rubber hoses, washers, and wire, were becoming less prominent.11 Repetition 19 I combined familiar and new techniques and materials, formed of aluminum screening and papi-

NINETEEN, FIRST EDITION,’ 1967. EACH UNIT APPROXIMATELY 10” × 7”. FISCHBACH GALLERY, 29 WEST 57th ST., N.Y.C.”

Fig. 63 Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers. Fischbach Gallery, New York, November 1968. Foreground: Accession III (1968). Background: Repetition 19 III (1968). Left: Accretion (1968).

er-caché coated with polyester resin and, finally, several coats of white enamel Dutch Boy Diamond Gloss house paint (similar to what Hesse had used the previous year when helping LeWitt paint his modular structures in preparation for his show at the Dwan Gallery). The shiny, smooth, white enameled units—Hesse “even sanded some of the drips,” she wrote to a friend—prompts an association with LeWitt’s contemporaneous, now industrially fabricated white enameled units, particularly given that Repetition 19 I was made at a time when Hesse and LeWitt were seeing each other daily.12 Also in dialogue with LeWitt’s contemporaneous work, Repetition 19 I was a permutational piece, though the permutations it represents are not rule based like his but generated through the built-in inconsistencies of

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handcrafting soft, wet, and pliable materials. The screen, with its intrinsic flexibility and inadequacy as an armature, was easily dented, contradicting the regularity of the repeated cylindrical form. Repetition 19 I was followed by a “horrible failure,” a discarded second version—Hesse’s first attempt at factory fabricated fiberglass, and the results were far too uniform—and by the summer of 1968, her first successful fabricated fiberglass piece, Repetition 19 III, which appeared in Chain Polymers.13 As Hesse developed versions of Repetition 19 in 1967 and 1968, LeWitt was developing a major permutational piece for his second solo show at Dwan’s New York gallery in February 1968. The entire show consisted of a single installation titled 47 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes (1967), a series of forty-five-inch-high white enameled aluminum stacks, each representing a permutation of open and closed cubes within units of three, aligned in sets along a white metal strip (fig. 64). (The series was remade in steel as a smaller variation with freestanding stacks.) The forms were determined by a mathematician (who later discovered two more variations, causing LeWitt to extend the series to forty-nine units) in what was LeWitt’s most complex piece to date. To try to connect the small forest of stacked cubes, each unique within the set, to a stated rule was not an easy or pleasurable assignment for the viewer. “With enough vigilance and enough rigor one can render them meaningful by making them integers of a logical system—a system whose own lucidity will permeate the lifeless skin of otherwise dead forms, filling them with meaning,” Rosalind Krauss wrote in Artforum. For Krauss, such an exercise in meaninglessness was akin to Rauschenberg’s combines that had “again and again undertook to flush into the open, to expose, the essential meaninglessness of images.”14 Almost in passing, Krauss alluded to a fundamental paradox within LeWitt’s installation, referencing an ongoing critical debate over the anthropomorFig. 64 Sol LeWitt, 47 ThreePart Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 1967. Enamel on aluminum. 45 × 300 × 195 in. Installation view, Dwan Gallery, New York, 1968.

phism of minimal forms: “Stationed along the strip like so many members of a regiment,” she wrote, “the stacks of cubes appear rooted to the ground and responsive to gravity the same way the viewer’s body is.”15 This “earthbound” orientation, paradoxically, “appears to be the most important thing about them” while at the same time, an entirely irrelevant fact at “irremediable odds” with the system of logic represented.16 In other words, the whole physical manifestation of white stacks, lined up like a members of a regiment, was a purely expressive

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feature unrelated to LeWitt’s representational schema. Krauss’s proposal bears emphasis: the scale, color, and other elements of the 47 Three-Part Variations were intuitive decisions made by the artist, quite separate from the logical statement they fulfilled, one that might take any number of expressions. By implication, then, might all form be argued to be irrelevant in the case of LeWitt’s structures, which could only be said to fully exist as “mental entities”? Such an argument, Krauss noted archly, would be philosophically naive.17 The units of Hesse’s Repetition 19 III are bashed and caving, yet upright, inviting associations of individuality and persona that LeWitt’s “dead forms” do not. Yet the forty-seven white units, stacks with open panels that can be peered into, have a certain correspondence with the anthropomorphism of Hesse’s Repetition 19 series. As if in answer to Krauss’s description of LeWitt’s stacks “stationed like so many members of a regiment,” to Lippard, the defiantly irregular units of Hesse’s Repetition 19 III were “like schoolchildren in uniforms, or prisoners, or young trees in a nursery.” In response to the constraints of environment and the homogenizing effect of uniform, “they carry within them their exuberant individuality.”18 Both sculptures are voids, empty structures—the white strip connecting LeWitt’s units was “an abstract connective tissue—like the words ‘after’ or ‘between’ for which there are no corresponding objects in the world,” Krauss wrote.19 The absurd logical sequence, or the random number nineteen, were empty grammatical or numerical devices. As forms, these stacked units and variegated cylinders were the product of intuitive artistic processes, yet both artists withheld the specific nature of any content as the central operation of the work. Are 47 Three-Part Variations and Repetition 19 III really anthropomorphic? Soldiers and students? Both Hesse and LeWitt were agnostic to specific individual responses. All the artist could know was that the form would be perceived; the individual nature of perception and the comprehension of the idea could not be anticipated and was a matter of necessary indifference. LeWitt’s “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” published in 1969, emphasized the contingencies of perception and the dialectical relationship of perception and the work of art: 19. The conventions of art are altered by works of art. 20. Successful art changes our understanding of the conventions by altering our perceptions.

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21. Perception of ideas leads to new ideas. 22. The artist cannot imagine his art, and cannot perceive it until it is complete. 23. The artist may misperceive (understand it differently from the artist) a work of art but still be set off in his own chain of thought by that misconstrual. 24. Perception is subjective. 25. The artist may not necessarily understand his own art. His perception is neither better nor worse than that of others. 26. An artist may perceive the art of others better than his own.20

The transmission of content was a chain of subjective reactions. For LeWitt, misconstrual and misperception were productive. Misreadings lead to new artworks and new ideas. After all, the ideas that the artist institutes within a piece are no more valid than those perhaps very different ideas generated through the perceptions of others. Both Hesse’s cylinders and LeWitt’s stacks would become filled with specific associations many times over—a productive dynamic of misperception and misconstrual generated by the subjective perception of the viewer. Adrian Piper responded to LeWitt’s 47 Three-Part Variations with several works that engaged the problem of comprehension and intersubjectivity, both coolly conceptual and charged with a politicized anthropomorphism. Walking into the Dwan Gallery and discovering 47 Three-Part Variations in 1968 was Piper’s “single most profound educational experience,” after which she “felt freed not only from the technical and formal constraints of figurative art, but also from my preconceptions about what art had to be.”21 Initially, she created Sixteen Permutations of a Planar Analysis of a Square (1968), a photostat enlargement in negative of diagrams and text exploring variations on a square in three dimensions, as well as a model. The work adapts LeWitt’s use of a mathematical puzzle to generate form from a source outside subjective experience.22 As with LeWitt, the irrational is never far away—Piper’s systematically derived content is likewise a pointless closed system inflected with the idiosyncrasies of form. Much later, her installation Out of the Corner (1990) replicated the tri-part cubic stacks of 47 Three-Part Variations in a seventeen-unit piece (fig. 65). The white cubes are black, and the top cube of each unit is a video monitor featuring the face of a

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different white actor who tells the viewer, matter-of-factly, “Some of my female ancestors were so-called ‘house niggers’ who were raped by their white slavemasters. If you’re an American, some of yours probably were, too.” Institutional chairs, those that might be found in bureaucratic spaces—one imagines a prison, or government office—are overturned in front of each stack. The chairs are a defensive barricade: they indicate that the body is not welcome, and also tell Fig. 65 Adrian Piper, Out of the Corner, 1990. Seventeen-channel video installation, color, sound, 26 min., with seventeen monitors, sixteen pedestals, table, twenty-three chairs, and sixty-four gelatin silver prints. Dimensions variable.

of loss, the body that was once there. The white enamel skin of LeWitt’s 47 Three-Part Variations becomes itself a reference to whiteness as a fictional construct of race. Piper, one of LeWitt’s close friends starting in 1968 and an early drafter of his wall drawings, understood the openness of the cubes that Krauss had strangely (mis)construed as “lifeless skin of otherwise dead forms.” Out of the Corner supplants LeWitt’s abstract logical premise with another kind of lucid meaning. The voids of Repetition 19 were likewise quickly associated with the body, gender

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in particular—in 1970, Cindy Nemser “saw both the masculine and feminine in it.” The units were “erections” and female “containers,” both “male and female symbols,” concrete associations issuing from Nemser’s proto-feminist politics that Hesse flatly denied.23 The work could only operate as “nothing.”24 Anything else would instruct the viewer rather than inform, as LeWitt distinguished different modes of content, clues to which were indicated by form. I do not mean to suggest that Hesse or LeWitt anticipated or elicited the sort of content others would invoke through their work. Rather, that “nothing” itself was a status, a productive stance in relation to the world, and one that was predicated on the indeterminate but probing subjectivity of the person comprehending the work of art. “Nothing” was not disavowal or abnegation, but an opening, the possibility of altered perception and discarded conventions.

For Peace LeWitt had been considering drawing on the wall for some time, an extension of the Johnsian logic of his early 1960s pieces: “It goes back to the Jasper Johns thing that made me do three dimensional work . . . in order to do something two dimensional it had to be done directly on the wall.”25 His return to a drawing practice in 1968 was initially prompted by Seth Siegelaub’s book-as-exhibition project The Xerox Book.26 Seven artists—LeWitt, Robert Morris, Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Joseph Kosuth, Lawrence Weiner, and Douglas Huebler—were each assigned twenty-five pages. LeWitt conceived a permutational series based on the four linear directions that would express all combinations of vertical, horizontal, and bisecting diagonal lines drawn within a square, joined in sets and subsets of four. Much like 47 Three-Part Variations and Serial Project #1, the work for Siegelaub’s book, Drawing Project 1968, mapped a series of permutations within a narrow set of possibilities, premised on transparent logic. Finally, in the fall of 1968, LeWitt decided “what the hell,” responding to Doug Chrismas’s invitation for a show at Ace Gallery in Los Angeles in December: “‘Yeah, I want to do some drawings on the wall.’ I even surprised myself when I first said it.”27 But before the Ace show took place, he was asked by Paula Cooper to contribute a piece for a show at her new gallery on Prince Street (fig. 66). The occasion was Lucy Lippard and the painter Robert Huot’s benefit exhibition for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which ran for just

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a week at the end of October. LeWitt was among fourteen artists representing a range of conceptual and minimal strategies, including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and Jo Baer, all of whom LeWitt had exhibited with as part of the Dwan “ten.” Billed as “the first benefit exhibition of non objective art,” it represented a “protest against the potpourri peace shows with all those burned dolls’ heads,” Lippard told the New York Times, adding that “[a]n increasing number of abstract artists have found it morally necessary to protest the political climate, their art-for-arts’ sake position notwithstanding.”28 How could minimal and conceptual art represent a stance of protest? “The artist wonders what he can do when he sees the world going to pieces all around him,” LeWitt had stated in June 1968, in response to a questionnaire from the Italian art magazine Metro. “But as an artist, he can do nothing except be an artist.”29 Yet the act itself could represent a kind of protest or antiestablishment position. LeWitt had considered the implications: “‘The walls were the newspaper of the people’ for political slogans” as well as the “social/economic idea. . . . [W]hen I first did wall drawings, I did not think that it was possible to sell them—therefore they were out of commerce.”30 He drew two four-foot squares directly on a wall at Paula Cooper, two parts of the Drawing Project 1968, each square subdivided into sixteen squares representing combinations of straight and diagonal lines. Drawn by LeWitt himself with very hard pencil, and “very lightly so that [the lines] become part of the wall and do not destroy the wall plane,” the result was faint and “very difficult to photograph because of the pale line.”31 This, also, had social implications, related to the mode of perception and viewership: “One had to look closely to read the lines and therefore contend with the work and hopefully read and understand it.”32 This kind of apprehension— contemplative, considered, prolonged—implied an experience that was the antithesis of what reading had become in a commercialized, sloganeered, mass media environment. The first wall drawing was negligible as a physical object, just a tracing Fig. 66 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #1, 1968. Detail—one of two 48-inch squares. Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.

of pale, ordered lines, some squares containing a dense network of intersecting lines, others a spare single row. Photographs reveal inconsistency within the squares—some sides darker, perhaps graphite smudges from the prolonged drawing process. They were not intended as salable objects. The price list alone indicates something of the degree to which LeWitt’s wall drawings represented a

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critique of the economics of art by rendering the art commodity inseparable from the artist’s time, measured and compensated “per hour” (fig. 67). There was no longer an object apart from the artist for hire. As Helen Molesworth has written, artists in the 1960s were under profound pressure to redefine themselves in response to the professionalization of the category of “artist,” the burgeoning contemporary art market, and the corporatization of American culture. Often Fig. 67 Annotated announcement for the Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam benefit exhibition, 1968.

they responded by “thinking through and acting out the profound transformations of late twentieth-century labor in their work,” Molesworth noted. Artists no longer saw themselves as “producing (in) a dream world but as workers in capitalist America.”33 As an expression of wage labor, LeWitt’s wall drawings drew attention to what Smithson called “a society that values commodity-type art,” making visible the relationship of labor and compensation to the product of

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art. This relationship of labor and compensation to the art commodity was almost always left opaque (how many hours it takes to make a sculpture or painting is rarely articulated), even as new forms of work and new relationships between the artist and labor practices had become central to minimal, post-minimal, and conceptual art. Drawing on the wall was hardly new. LeWitt’s wall drawings engaged a traditional format, from the fresco cycles of Giotto to Rivera’s celebrations of the proletariat. What caused LeWitt’s drawings to seem radical was their arrival within a culture of object making and speculative collecting, as the price list also reveals. Other than LeWitt’s work priced “per hour,” the entries are portable art commodities to be purchased and hauled off by a collector or curator. Beyond religious or social realist platforms, walls are decorative surfaces in private homes—wallpaper, or frescoes of lush Pompeiian gardens. Yet LeWitt’s faint pencil lines were not this, either. LeWitt’s strategy was something new within the realm of a speculative art world in which “whatever a painting goes for at Parke Bernet is really somebody else’s decision, not the artist’s decision. . . . [T]he value is separated from the artist, the artist is estranged from his own production,” as Smithson lamented a few years later.34 Certainly, the wall drawings would become adapted for collecting with certificates of ownership, but the artist continued to control the component of compensated labor necessary to install the work through the hire of trained draftsmen. Returning to the first context of the wall drawings at the Paula Cooper Gallery in October 1968, on the occasion of the Student Mobilization Committee benefit show, prompts consideration of how these drawings might have related to the sociopolitical environment—both protests against the war in Vietnam and, more broadly, the examination of the status of the individual under capitalism. 35 If the wall had previously been a space of art suited for declarative and didactic communication, what then did it mean to fill this surface simply with rows of pencil lines? In the spring of 1968, before and during the student movement in Paris, Daniel Buren undertook a campaign to plaster the walls of the city with wheat-paste posters printed with vertical white and blue lines, occupying sites designated for advertising. During the student riots, “it was the streets that the students turned into a signboard,” Mel Bochner has written.36 The graffiti slogans were shown in mass media across the Atlantic, and “their power was

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so immediate and aggressive, yet at the same time so poetic.” The wall was the site for “a dramatically open ended public conversation,” open to anyone with a can of spray paint, far more democratic than a canvas.37 “Walls are public and words on walls are there for whoever wants to read them,” the Dutch curator and art historian Coosje Kapteyn-van Bruggen noted in a 1970 reflection on LeWitt’s wall drawings.38 The wall drawings were premised on “an optimum possibility for communication. He invites to join in a game of which the contents are completely clear.” Most of all, Kapteyn-van Bruggen was moved by the impermanence of the wall drawings as an ethic of immediacy and “direct contact” with the viewer. The importance of immediacy caused art criticism to become unstable, contingent: “With the fading of the drawings and the scrubbing of the walls my words are wiped out too,” she wrote. Each exhibition “opens up everything again for a direct communication with his new work, which may call up new words, that may be wiped out in their turn.”39 The drawings’ fugitive nature contained the ideal of art as a fresh and live proposal, something inexorably temporal, its significance renewed with each installation. The autonomy of the subject—her own experience as the sole, unimpeachable source of meaning—was implied, significantly, in Kapteyn-van Bruggen’s understanding of the wall drawings and the unmediated encounter that they demanded. The drawings represented a democratic gesture of accessibility and directness, implying no specific political orientation or degree of cultural literacy.

The Materiality of Matter “I would like this work to be non-work. This means that it would find its way beyond my preconceptions,” began Hesse’s artist’s statement for Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers.40 The exhibition title immediately signaled the importance of the fiberglass resin and latex she had been using for the past year, referring to the molecular structure of these media. Using both fiberglass and latex allowed her to vacillate between hard and soft materials. While much of her previous work had integrated a planar support of wood or Masonite, the approach of casting latex and fiberglass resin created new categories of things: strange, unknown objects that retained familiar, loosely geometric forms—balls, cylinders, boxes. “Wry limp ‘toys,’” one reviewer called them.41 Hesse herself wanted to be

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surprised. “It is my main concern to go beyond what I know and what I can know,” she wrote.42 Chain Polymers contained several large-scale fiberglass “serial” pieces that were installational in nature: Accretion, fifty hollow tubes propped in an irregular row against the wall, creating a diagonal across the architectural join of floor and wall; Repetition 19 III, the “crumpled dejected wastebaskets” likewise made of semitranslucent fiberglass, arranged in an informal, irregular grouping; and Sans II, a five-unit wallpiece of “waffle-like boxed sections” that extended Fig. 68 Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers. Fischbach Gallery, New York, November 1968. Foreground: Accession III (1968). Background: Sans II (1968).

over thirty-five feet—a grid, yet the walls of each compartment were lumpy, irregular, and even labial in the parting and joining of undulating, uneven edges (figs. 63, 68).43 “Miss Hesse divides, subdivides and aligns as if she is a hard-core serialist, but then the creased and rippling viscous contours, and the light-catching lumpiness of the surfaces or ‘structural’ walls undermine that ostensible methodology,” wrote Emily Wasserman in her review for Artforum.44 The undermining

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Wasserman saw in Hesse’s sculptural engagement with Minimalism was, by then, a well-established trope, but also a limiting frame for understanding the complex ways in which this work drew upon the viewer’s perceptual engagement to generate meanings. John Perreault, writing in the Village Voice, saw this subversion too, attaching it to a deeply psychic assault: “Having one of these pieces would be like having a very, very neurotic pet, a threat to visitors, but completely dependent upon its owner’s perceptual attentions to hold it together and keep it from slipping away into nothingness.” The work, he added almost unnecessarily, “causes very complicated emotions in the viewer . . . a stringent consciousness or self-consciousness of our bad habits of identification and psychological projection.” Perrault meant his conflicted responses to demonstrate that Hesse was “an important artist” producing aggressive and challenging work “impossible to resolve on any merely intellectual level and therefore disturbing, tough, and a meaningful assault.”45 The reception of Chain Polymers indicated Hesse’s status as a provocateur, her work marked by visceral and psychic forcefulness in the face of Minimalism. The environmental-scale fiberglass pieces in Chain Polymers were contrasted by an intimate display on a countertop in the back room of the Fischbach Gallery (fig. 69). Small, framed gouache paintings responded impressionistically to the “Accession” boxes: the machined exteriors hid interiors lined with a seemingly infinite number of tiny plastic tendrils, requiring examination at close range. Several of her “test pieces” were stacked and arranged on the counter, and others were placed within a small glass-and-metal pastry case. Placing the small objects made from rubber, latex, mesh, plaster, and other materials in a case had initially been LeWitt’s idea. He had purchased a case on Canal Street to display six test pieces given to him by Hesse, including, on the middle level, a latex test piece for Repetition 19 spouting loose coils of surgical tubing (fig. 70). On the bottom level, two shallow latex “boxes” held cakes of plaster and wax. On the top, a cuff was formed of latex and cloth tape, and folded latex-coated screening was pinned like a shirt collar. These strange, irregular objects—Bochner once described the test pieces in cases as looking “something Fig. 69 Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers. Fischbach Gallery, New York, November 1968.

like plastic vomit. The side of her work that alludes to the body as a sewer system”—are set off in the formal display case, with its gleaming industrial surfaces.46 At every level the works allude to an external industrial context,

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through their materials diverted from industry and their status in preparation for larger, fabricated works, as well as through the term “test piece” itself.47 The box also alludes to LeWitt’s work, and not simply because it is a fabricated structure. The idea of an enclosing box, particularly one enclosing artworks by another artist, was a familiar formation in LeWitt’s œuvre. Nine Boxes (discussed in chapter 1), and the perforated box containing a sculpture made by Grace Wapner inscribed on the bottom “The most important thing is on the inside” (see fig. 2), are examples, as are, less directly, even the instances in which LeWitt contained Muybridge-style photographs inside painted boxes (see figs. 26, 27). LeWitt’s case containing Hesse’s test pieces, and the three subsequent cases purchased and arranged by Hesse, might be understood as conversations between the artists, locating Hesse’s test pieces within the context of LeWitt’s long interest in the tensions of vision. The visual access withheld in his previous boxes is granted here, yet the strange textures and substances of Hesse’s test pieces with their ties to the body—plastic vomit and the like— and defiance of description or concrete referents also make clear the limits of visual encounter. Chain Polymers was a beginning and an end. Accession III sat at the center of the gallery, a fiberglass cube filled with plastic extrusion that looked back to Hesse’s “Minimalism,” in dialogue with LeWitt’s enclosing “Muybridge boxes” of the early 1960s (see fig. 68). LeWitt later associated Hesse’s use of fiberglass with the onset of distance between the two: “When she started using fiberglass she started to look for people who knew about it, she found these assistants she worked with the fiberglass on, and I had no knowledge of that, so I Fig. 70 Eva Hesse, No title, 1968. Glass and metal case, six objects (mixed media). 14½ × 10 × 10 in. Top: latex, cloth tape; latex, metal screen, pins. Middle: latex, cotton, rubber (3 × 3½ × 40½ in. test piece for ‘Repetition 19’); latex, mesh, rubber. Bottom: latex, plaster; latex, wax.

wasn’t of very much help to her at that time. And I didn’t see her socially either.”48 LeWitt was traveling to Europe frequently by 1968 and was becoming close with a group of Amsterdam-based conceptualists, including Jan Dibbets. His steelframe structures had been fabricated in Holland since late 1966. The gallerists Konrad Fischer in Düsseldorf and Heiner Friedrich in Munich were promoting his work, and he was becoming more prominent in Europe than in the United States. Significantly, Perreault tied Hesse’s work in Chain Polymers to the new development of “anti-form.” His description of the immediacy of Hesse’s sculptures—their demand of focused perceptual engagement, without which they would “[slip] away into nothingness,” registered the temporal immediacy

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and instantaneity that seemed to infuse static objects in the fall 1968 season, objects meant to slip away, to become buried, to fade, to sag, to crumble. This temporality was not so much a “dematerializing” of art—Lippard and John Chandler had imagined the object’s obsolescence, as the studio became a study with the rise of “a highly conceptual art”—as it was an entropic dissolve in which an organized proposition became chaos. To borrow words from Richard Serra’s Verb List (1967–68): “of gravity, of entropy, of nature, of grouping, of layering.” For Hesse, the “Materiality of Matter,” as Perreault titled his review of Chain Polymers, was irrevocably important, yet this was not the same as permanence or stability. The work was there and not there, in both a psychic and physical sense.

The “New Pollock” Even before it opened, Nine at Castelli, the exhibition organized by Morris for Castelli’s uptown warehouse, was anticipated as the season’s definitive statement; Philip Leider predicted in the New York Times that it “may very well become a landmark event.”49 As LeWitt recalled, “[Hesse] felt that especially around [the] Castelli warehouse show [that] she had every right to believe she’d be regarded as one of the major people in that direction since she’d been working that way so long.”50 Nonetheless Morris did not include her among his original roster of artists. In LeWitt’s recollection, upon learning of the show Hesse asked him to speak with Morris on her behalf. At LeWitt’s prompting, Morris agreed that the omission of Hesse was an oversight and that “her art couldn’t be dismissed.”51 Yet both Leider and the critic Max Kozloff—the latter would publish a substantial review of the Castelli warehouse show in Artforum—deemed Hesse’s work “not anti-form enough—she was really bitter about all that,” recalled LeWitt again.52 Hesse’s treatment rankled LeWitt enough that he brought it up again in the context of his own retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1978. “When the time came for the kind of work that Eva Hesse was doing (a reaction to Minimalism, it was called “anti-form,” whatever that may be) to be officially recognized, she was relegated to a minor role.”53 Hesse’s participation in Morris’s show, with its emphasis on physical processes and industrial materials, brought gender into focus and registered the degree to which her sculpture differed from notions of “anti-form” exemplified by Serra and Morris. Labor was again a theme, though in a quite different sense

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than LeWitt’s recasting of artistic labor with his wall drawings. Rather, labor was demonstrated through the leavings of process in the case of Serra’s notorious lead splashing and latex scatter pieces celebrated by critics for their evocations of aggressive action (figs. 71, 72). Jackson Pollock was an oft-cited reference in writings on “anti-form,” though the import of Pollock did not signal a reacceptance of the terms of Abstract Expressionism. In his 1968 essay “Anti Form,” Morris parsed this distinction: “Of the Abstract Expressionists, only Fig. 71 Richard Serra, Splashing, 1968. Installation view, Nine at Castelli, Castelli Warehouse, New York, December 1968.

Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of the work.” Pollock prefigured post-minimalist investigations of materiality as the only Abstract Expressionist to “go beyond the personalism of the hand to a more direct revelation of matter itself.”54 Barbara Rose went further, proposing a performative connection between Pollock’s painting and the “distributional,

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anti-formal, anti-illusionist, conceptual, process, or body art” that succeeded Minimalism in 1968, suggesting that these developments “were inspired by the larger than life blow-ups of Namuth’s Pollock photographs that accompanied the 1967 MoMA retrospective.”55 The photographs offered what Rose later called a “fullness of informational content,” glossing the drip paintings with Pollock’s intensely physical mode of execution in which, contrary to minimalist outsourcing, he labored in his studio to the point of depletion.56 The matter of gender, encoded through privileged forms of masculine labor and the iconic figure of Pollock, led Lippard to conclude, regarding “anti-form,” that “the critical neglect of Hesse’s achievements and refusal to take her as seriously as the other artists can probably be ascribed to the fact that as a woman, she couldn’t be ‘the new Pollock.’”57 Hesse contributed two latex sculptures to Nine at Castelli: Aught and Augment (both 1968) (fig. 73). Their presence was at odds with much of the other work in the show. Both pieces maintained rectilinear stability and were self-contained. They did not contain traces of action, like Serra’s splashed lead, or destroy form, as with Serra’s rent and scattered latex. Aught and Augment did not represent a transformative physical state, as the Italian artist Giovanni Anselmo’s steel canister of water that was gradually absorbed by long tufts of cotton and transferred to the gallery floor; Serra’s prop piece animated by potential collapse, giving form to the force of gravity; or Stephen Kaltenbach’s felt floorpiece that was rearranged daily (see fig. 72). Aught comprises four latex-coated canvases stuffed with rope and plastic drop cloths pinned to the wall at their corners. The sagging panels that threatened to, eventually, peel off the wall under their own weight were a passive presence. Echoing the distressed geometry of Aught, the complementary floorpiece Augment is a pancake-thin stack of nineteen sheets of latex-painted canvas, each dog-eared sheet advanced several inches to reveal Fig. 72 Installation view, Nine at Castelli, Castelli Warehouse, New York, December 1968. Foreground: Giovanni Anselmo; middle ground: Stephen Kaltenbach; background: Richard Serra.

a band of the underlying sheet. The minimal volume and structure of the latexed canvases, and the “outlines” surrounding each individual unit atop the next, foreground pictorial linearity as much as sculptural presence. With its negligible relief quality, Augment’s most salient feature is the turned-back top layer that, like a turned bed-sheet, creates a pocket of space at the fold. Hesse’s refusal to assert mass or volume, along with Augment’s placement on the floor, contributed to its delicacy, as did the pale flesh tones and gently rippled edges of the latex. Its

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prone and passive presence surely amplified—and was amplified by—the gestural acts and temporal unfolding of other sculptures in the warehouse. Serra’s latex scatter piece at Castelli was an invulnerable heap of torn and mangled latex rubber, arranged seemingly without any organization or care, a mass of debris. His other installation, Splashing, molten lead hardened in splatters, targeted precisely the interstitial space exposed in the placement of Aught and Augment, the juncture of floor and wall. “By effacing the line where the wall rose up perpendicular to the floor, Serra was obscuring a marker for our orientation in interior space, claiming that space as the ground for a different kind of perceptual experience. Our difficulty with Splashing was in trying to imagine its very possibility of continued existence in the world of objects,” Douglas Crimp recalled of the challenges posed by Splashing for both the experience of art and the status of the object.58 Serra, as had LeWitt by drawing on the wall at Paula Cooper six weeks earlier, attempted to dismantle the limits that conventionally bounded aesthetic and perceptual experience. Though Serra both identified and disidentified with Pollock, pointing out later “the Pollock ethic is more a dance, this is more work,” it was Serra’s success at this dismantling that invoked Pollock more than any affinity with Pollock’s drips or process.59 (LeWitt’s wall drawings, too, drew comparison with Pollock: “LeWitt’s move was catalytic, as important for drawing as Pollock’s use of the drip technique had been for painting,” wrote MoMA’s drawing curator Bernice Rose in 1978.)60 Far from enacting an epistemic shift in the status of the object, Aught and Augment were meant to be boring, emphatically so. As Hesse described the four-paneled Aught, “It’s like banal—then saying it four times.” When asked by her interviewer, Nemser again, “Do you have an impulse to satirize?” Hesse replied, I think so. I think that piece does and I think that other piece that was on the floor does too. It was the same mats just repeated over and over and over again. . . . I think that piece is strikingly ridiculous and that is its best quality. They are very large and they sit there.61 Fig. 73 Eva Hesse, Aught, 1968; Augment, 1968. Installation view, Nine at Castelli, New York, 1968.

The mats didn’t do anything but “sit there,” while the other works in the show were able to “recover and hold on to process” as the end form of the work. The passivity of Augment in this context did not go unremarked. Perreault hinted at something passive-aggressive: “Hesse’s latex mats are cruel and bland,” he

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wrote in the Village Voice.62 Leider wrote in the New York Times simply that “Eva Hesse, a genuinely engaging artist, should have shown stronger work.”63 Max Kozloff and Grégoire Müller juxtaposed the passivity of Hesse’s entries with the raw forcefulness of Serra’s pieces. Müller commented that “Serra’s production in spattered lead (one of the strongest pieces in the show) is related to the Expressionist ‘gesture.’” Hesse’s “lovely” work was likewise “not completely intelligible without reference to the vocabulary of Abstract painting” but, unfortunately, “not above occasional lapses into sentimentality.”64 Within the lexicon of art history, “lovely” and “sentimental” are code for the decorative and effeminate. While Kozloff praised Serra’s “violent” and “authentic” latex scatter piece and lead splash piece—his latex possessed a “gaminess” and “hide-like authenticity” in which one could sense “an inherent violence”—the critic was “not as convinced” by Hesse’s “slightly more picturesque versions of minimal sculpture.”65 Morris’s appropriation of Castelli’s uptown warehouse, a former garage, as an exhibition space was a repudiation of the sanitized gallery institution; outsized and potentially destructive works like Serra’s lead splash piece simply “could not have been shown” in his downtown gallery, Castelli recalled.66 The visible traces of Serra’s labor evoke the famously paint-splattered floors of Pollock’s studio, and imply the former utilitarian status of the warehouse, imagining the residue of automobile fluids that once stained the floor and whitewashed walls. Hesse’s installations did not address the visibility of labor or process, and as self-contained objects without the dramatic charge of flung matter, they did not imply a challenge to art and perception. Though the latex pieces of Serra and Hesse started with similar materials, Serra’s work recorded an aggressive execution; a narrative of forceful action clung to his display of tattered remains. The meticulous order that Hesse applied to dog-eared sheets of latex was a kind of preserving that rejected declarative process.67 The fastidious processes behind Hesse’s works were mainly invisible, invested in craft and a gradual building up and transformation of materials. Flinging lead is perfunctory, as is tearing sheets of latex, both acts predicated on brevity of execution—molten lead will harden, and torn latex can be rendered only so far. While Serra’s works were demonstrative records of action, Hesse’s work was done in private, and made not to look like work at all.

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Human Characteristics The Castelli warehouse show, with the debut of Serra’s notorious lead Splashing and the tenor and intensity of the critical buzz it generated, revealed little of why Hesse’s sculptures might be of interest. Yet Hesse was developing a reputation for the inert, ambiguous bodily associations of her work, which she had begun to realize in large-scale, installation formats. What one prominent voice dismissed as “picturesque minimalism,” another described as “existential . . . complex objects which connect to our lives, yet have no meaning outside themselves.”68 Curator Marcia Tucker’s description captured a quality of intimate familiarity and simultaneous withdrawal, in which Hesse’s objects refused to attach to specific referents. “In her fiberglass buckets, rubber wrappings and translucent curtains, she has been concerned with ‘making something which is nothing yet becomes something,’” Tucker wrote.69 Similar to LeWitt’s conceptual strategy, it was a matter of engaging without instructing, leaving judgments to a viewer whose subjective associations were incidental to the artist, offering clues in the most open-ended sense: evoking the body, but no body in particular, a precultural body without inscriptions of identity, even gender. Everyone’s body, or simply the condition of having a body. As curator James Monte, Tucker’s colleague at the Whitney, characterized Hesse’s work, alluding to her Castelli warehouse pieces, “What first appeared to be an aesthetic of impoverishment, frozen between layers of latex or plastic” gave way to a very different quality. With time, Monte discovered “a unique animus which is anthropomorphic in quality if not intent. Her work alludes to human characteristics such as the softness of skin, the swell of a muscle or the indeterminate color of flesh fading under clothing after exposure to the summer sun.”70 The body Monty describes is not female or male, not young or old. We might, decades hence, think of this as a depoliticized body that does not exist within a symbolic order, and be tempted to inscribe gender, culture, and historical specificity. But the body alluded to by Hesse’s art was prefeminist; it might best be called a “conceptual” body, universal and not particular, experience abstracted from the individual. As LeWitt’s mathematical formulae produced work predicated on a universal accessibility, so Hesse’s sculptures limned the condition of embodiment in its broadest terms. Carl Andre recalled once telling Hesse, in response to her frustration at being told that her work wasn’t “sexually explicit

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enough”: “Your work is not about what sex looks like. Your work is about what lovemaking feels like.”71 It was a matter of offering the possibility of feeling and experience over a statement of facts about anatomy or anything else, and as such, was a gesture predicated on the independent, contingent subjectivity of the viewer. Hesse’s vast curtain Expanded Expansion (1969), a forty-foot drapery of latex-coated cheesecloth supported by hand-formed fiberglass poles, was included in Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, curated for the Whitney Museum by Tucker and Monte (fig. 74). As Wasserman described the installation in Artforum, “Hesse . . . drapes rubberized gauze over fiberglass poles in a tall gawky curtain which has a strangely anthropomorphic look.”72 To know the work through photographs, an “anthropomorphic” quality is hardly evident, but to stand next to the ten-foot-high flesh-toned curtain, with its vertical presence, elicited this association. A second piece, originally called Connection, was a different take on installation: a long fiberglass “rope” hung from the Whitney’s coffered ceiling to spool into an irregular spiral on the flagstone floor. Both works, as well as later suspension pieces such as the untitled “rope piece” (1970), expressed a new attunement to spatial experience, the encounter of the work as one moved through an environment altered by the presence of the sculpture. As Tucker explained, this phenomenological intensity was a break from formalism: “Through experience, through the direct experience of the body . . . formal aesthetics and emotive criticism were being replaced by the phenomenological.”73 With Hesse’s work, this break with formalist privileging of vision, common to most minimal and post-minimal art, could become a psychic, somatic engagement that implied erotic experience.

“Attitudes” Despite its dismissal by critics, Hesse’s floorpiece Augment made the cut when Swiss curator Harald Szeemann arrived at the Castelli warehouse show to select Fig. 74 Eva Hesse, Expanded Expansion, 1969. Installation view, Anti-Illusion: Process/Materials, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, May 1969.

work for his eclectic review Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form— Works—Concepts—Processes—Situations—Information. “Eva Hesse. She is an old acquaintance,” Szeemann noted in his journals. He had met Hesse when hosting a show of Tom Doyle’s work at the Kunsthalle Bern and remembered, “As early as 1964, she had already created first examples of ‘soft sculptures’ in Germany. . . . She has since achieved great freedom with regard to materials and

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the use of these in the presentation of her art.”74 Along with Augment, Vinculum II, Hesse’s floor-to-wall chain of latex squares and cord, and Sans I, the diminutive and vertical predecessor of Sans II, appeared in the crowded Grand Hall (fig. 75). Bill Bollinger’s oversized steel and rubber tubing hairpins lay prone just a few inches away, and works by other New York contemporaries were in the vicinity— Allan Saret’s wire tumbleweed, Frank Lincoln Viner’s melting slab of plastic, and Richard Tuttle’s canvas wallpiece. Elsewhere, Serra’s Belt Piece (1967)—jumbles of black rubber straps and neon affixed to the wall in a series of knots—along with a lead splashing were “major works in the show.” Beuys packed the juncture of floor and wall with hundreds of pounds of commercial margarine. Oldenburg hung oversized clothing in a corner with his soft Ghost Medicine Cabinet (1966). Lawrence Weiner surgically removed squares of plaster from the surface of a wall, a kind of subtractive “drawing” or “sculpting” adhered to the institution, and a Swiss artist executed LeWitt’s series of squares, variations of lines, using hard pencil on the wall. LeWitt’s drawing was an expanded version of what he had executed at Paula Cooper in 1968, with all four squares of Drawing Series I, II, III, IV (1968) inscribed on a bumpy plaster wall (fig. 76). The show’s catalogue (modeled after a Rolodex or address book to emphasize banality) contained an essay by sculptor/critic Scott Burton, “Notes on the New,” which attempted to synthesize the diversity of work on display: “earthworks and organic-matter art,” “procedural or ‘process’ art,” “conceptual or ideational art,” “geometric abstraction,” and more, allowing broad “attitudinal” connections between a Beuysian outlook along with Italian Arte Povera and the new tendencies that had cropped up in New York in the fall of 1968. The artists were selected on the basis of “the extremity to which [an aesthetic position] is taken.” As Burton told readers, “This exhibit includes some of the most extreme art ever produced.” The extreme represented by Hesse’s work was “an almost Fig. 75 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form— Works—Concepts— Processes— Situations— Information, Kunsthalle Bern, 1969.

Expressionist pathos” that was “part of the modernist temperament that is Romantic,” while LeWitt’s wall drawings were compared to “both a great Italian mural and graffito: if they do not exist in a fixed relationship to their environment, they do not exist at all. LeWitt’s work, unlike Andre’s, cannot be altered in any way without being destroyed.”75

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Szeemann had initially hesitated when he met with LeWitt and saw drawings on his visit to New York in December 1968. “The question is whether artists who ‘collaborated’ on the Minimal Art exhibitions should also be included in my exhibition. Did the ‘attitudes’ only lead to soft forms?” Szeemann made a critical decision by including LeWitt and Andre, not distinguishing between reductive notions of “hard” and “soft.” “Sol LeWitt’s wall markings actually have an as ephemeral quality as Serra’s Splash Piece,” he concluded.76 When Attitudes Become Form represented a freedom and fluidity of ideas and work that bled together at the time: Beuys’s margarine, Serra’s molten lead, LeWitt’s pencil marks, Hesse’s latex mats, Oldenburg’s soft toiletries, all understood to emerge from something casually psychic and social, a subjective response to the world. It was the ideal of art without beginnings or ends, when form reflected something as ephemeral and personal as attitudes, yet was also a catalytic force, undoing and remaking art. Nothing and yet something.

Fig. 76 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form— Works—Concepts— Processes— Situations— Information, Kunsthalle Bern. Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing, 1969. Pencil. Draftsman: M. Raetz.

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Conclusion

Depth, 1970 The catalogue for Sol LeWitt’s midcareer survey at the Gemeentesmuseum Den Haag in 1970 presents reflections on the artist penned by seventeen individuals, an expression of the artist’s belief that “there is no correct perception, only personal ones. It is like the story of the blind men and the elephant—my work is the elephant and the people who perceive it are the blind men.”1 The catalogue reveals LeWitt’s art through a spectrum of views, including the dissimilar (and not uniformly positive) critical readings of Rosalind Krauss and Coosje Kapteynvan Bruggen, side by side with contributions from artists, friends, and his Dutch fabricator. Carl Andre’s simple statement “Sol is our Spinoza” and a drawing from Dan Flavin and family dedicated to “dear durable Sol” are among the constellation of ideas and friendships from which LeWitt’s structures and wall drawings emerged in the 1960s. The catalogue represents a model of community that rejected the postwar American ethos of individualism manifest in Abstract Expressionist lore—a model that has extended to the economic support of legions of artists and art students who draft LeWitt’s wall drawings, allowing them to be realized anew for future generations. Like the photographs of tables discussed in this book’s introduction, the Gemeentemuseum catalogue documents the interdependent, intersubjective nature of art within this milieu—the idea that art is emergent from a community, exists within a specific time and place, and generates new experience through individual encounter. LeWitt’s conceptualism was an art of personal perceptions. When Eva Hesse was asked to contribute to LeWitt’s Gemeentemuseum catalogues she responded with two pieces of writing: a stylized, circular statement that was published, and another frank, personal assessment that remained private (figs. 77, 78). Together, the statements offer a portrait of Hesse’s LeWitt, in turns concealing and revealing. The published version adopts the opacity of Fig. 77 Eva Hesse, reflection on Sol LeWitt from Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1970).

a Gertrude Stein poem with its performative repetition and gradual revelation. The artist himself is not in view, only “your work.” The repeated “I have seen” specifies her own perceptual encounter as the basis for her judgment. “Now we have grown to see it,” Hesse concludes, shifting from the individual to the collective, and admitting the long process of understanding LeWitt’s work.

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“More than ten years of friendship” begins the unpublished reflection, though this is crossed out as if to retract a too-personal context. Still, Hesse seems intent to reveal LeWitt’s work from the vantage of their friendship. In this reflection her friend and his art are inseparable, though the two are also at odds. LeWitt’s stark conceptual strategies are impenetrable: “I cannot know your world. You write the systems, You set up the grids. You note 1, 2, 3, 4. I see them. Your order their order. Units, straight, cubes, columns—tough stances, strong.” Yet Fig. 78 Eva Hesse, draft of unpublished reflection on Sol LeWitt, 1970.

Hesse understands something highly personal, even vulnerable, within these stances—“I see the fragile sensitivity . . . the you which is and should be there.” The heart of the meditation comes at the end:

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The strength of vision and soul is there, it must. we are left ultimately with a visual presence. Why deny that. Can’t deny that. It’s what we are left with. A visual presence. Depth: that too we must be left with. Sol, there is depth and vision. a presence. art.

It is not surprising that this reflection was not submitted for publication. It seems to contravene the very substance of art made by ideas that are machines. Calling out “depth” and “visual presence” at the core of LeWitt’s art, Hesse identifies her own values for art, and her belief that LeWitt’s art originates from the same

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fragile, sensitive depths as her own. In LeWitt’s words, “As my work progressed, it followed her advice more and more, although I didn’t see her later rejected version until much later.”2 Hesse died on May, 29, 1970, after three operations for a brain tumor that she was first diagnosed with in April of 1969. LeWitt was in Paris, installing a show at Galerie Yvon Lambert that he dedicated to Hesse, creating a wall drawing for her. Wall Drawing #46: Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, uniformly dispersed with density covering the entire surface of the wall was first drafted on May 31, 1970. “Dear Enno, Eva Hesse has died in New York. She was my best friend and a great artist. I want to dedicate my show in The Hague to her and on the first page of the catalogue to say ‘this exhibition is for Eva Hesse,’” LeWitt wrote to the curator Enno Develing, requesting that a reproduction of Wall Drawing #46 appear on the first right-hand page facing the dedication (fig. 79).3 The drawing was created as “a bond between us, in our work” the not-straight lines representing “her influence on me.”4 As LeWitt would later put it, “I used a not-straight-line mimicking her strings,” referencing the coursing strings, wires, and ropes of Hesse’s oeuvre.5 The freefalling lines of Wall Drawing #46 capture the vagaries of chance and the artist’s hand so central to Hesse’s œuvre, signifying presence and “fragile sensitivity, the you which is and should be there.” This rendering of/for Hesse recalls the wild, coursing lines of Metronomic Irregularity II that emerged from a fixed “neutral” space of the grid. The shadows cast on the wall by the cotton-covered wires of that wall piece are specifically evoked by the quality of lines in Wall Drawing #46, though the orientation is shifted ninety degrees, assuming a visual association with hair growing on a body, something anthropomorphic, something with “a certain ick to it,” as LeWitt described the quality Hesse pursued.6 It was the first of LeWitt’s exhibited wall drawings to incorporate freehand lines. LeWitt described the drawing further as “black lead and freehand (no straight lines) vertical lines, very many.”7 In the execution of Wall Drawing #46, strings are stretched from floor to ceiling to create vertical points of reference for the drafter, who then draws lines freehand, determining the length and density him- or herself. Typically, these “very many” lines “not touching” are so compressed that, despite LeWitt’s instructions, they do in fact intersect and even appear to entangle at points. Self-contradiction is intrinsic to Wall Drawing #46: as

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a matter of course, the clarity of a rational set of instructions collapses into failure and chaos. The personalism of the hand is the central element of this drawing. Whereas other drawings might have several drafters working at once, LeWitt preferred that a single drafter execute Wall Drawing #46 in its entirety. The freehand lines carry the signature of an individual, wavering or extending just so. The drawing, in this way, also evoked Hesse’s art, where the mark of the artist’s hand and her presence in the work’s making were often critical. Yet this intimacy Fig. 79 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #46, 1970. Detail, from Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1970).

is also undone by the sheer vastness of the drawing that typically fills large walls. (For instance, a long-term installation of Wall Drawing #46 at Dia:Beacon in Beacon, New York, drafted in 2006, is nearly sixteen feet high and over twenty feet wide.) The minutiae of tiny quavers, hooks, and snags in the freehand lines come into focus at eye level, yet extend into a sublime accumulation as the eye

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scans the monumental wall, becoming something other: a document of psychic and physical endurance. Although LeWitt, by 1970, was routinely using drafters to execute the drawings—“The draftsman perceives the artists’ plan, then reorders it to his experience and understanding”—he acted as his own draftsman for the first installation of Wall Drawing #46 in Paris.8 Through the “meaningless activity” of drafting a drawing, the drafter enters a dialogue with the wall. Boredom is inevitable, but eventually the drafter “finds peace or misery. The lines on the wall are the residue of this process. Each line is as important as each other line. All of the lines become one thing. The viewer of the lines can see only lines on the wall. They are meaningless. That is art.”9 Executed as an act of mourning and remembrance, Wall Drawing #46 demonstrates loss of control and surrender to the errant, disorderly consequences of drawing thousands of lines by hand, marked by fatigue, tedium, and, finally, peace or misery. Though the drawing evokes Hesse’s art through formal imitation, this act itself was a means of becoming immersed in Hesse’s process that so often involved excessive rote actions (as the placing of washers, or the threading of tubing in the “Accession” boxes), a personal and physical investment that could mean something or nothing. As if to fill in for Hesse’s absence, LeWitt’s hand takes on the obsessive repetition and irregular spontaneity of Hesse’s response to order. The freehand drawing also made public the act of freehand drawing that LeWitt had done daily since childhood yet was, by the mid-1960s, confined largely to private studio activity. Other than LeWitt himself, Jo Watanabe, who lived upstairs from LeWitt’s Hester Street loft starting in the late 1960s, has been the most frequent drafter to execute Wall Drawing #46. Watanabe recalls that instinct was especially important in executing this drawing. “‘Don’t work too hard’ Sol always said. I thought that meant don’t work too hard and try to rationalize, understand things with logic. This is visual art we are doing. What’s mostly important for visual art is instinct. People make errors in executing LeWitt’s drawings because they work too hard trying to understand what Sol meant.”10 Irrational judgments were behind the best wall drawings—following one’s intuition or instinct to a pointless conclusion. Even within this codified practice, something as individual as instinct was the necessary element, and not the instinct of the artist, but that of others. Depth was arrived at from not working too hard to make meaningless lines. That was art.

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Notes Introduction 1. The table displays one of Hesse’s early experiments with latex in preparation for the work Schema (1967). LeWitt quoted in Sol LeWitt (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1970), n.p. 2. Sol LeWitt, letter to the author, dated December 27, 2004. 3. Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 90. 4. Sol LeWitt, postcard to Eva Hesse, dated July 1 (1968) from the Netherlands. The manufacture of Hesse’s table never occurred, but the idea suggests a status for the work more akin to actual furniture. Eva Hesse Archives, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. 5. For a detailed account of Buried Cube, see Paula Feldman Sankoff, “Sol LeWitt,” in Christophe Cherix, ed., In & Out of Amsterdam: Travels in Conceptual Art, 1960–1976 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2009), 100. 6. Eva Hesse journal dated November 22, 1964, Eva Hesse Archives. 7. Alicia Legg, ed., Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 114. 8. “About Eva Hesse: Bochner Interviewed by Joan Simon” in Mignon Nixon, ed., Eva Hesse (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 44. 9. Mel Bochner, “Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?” October 130 (Fall 2009): 135. 10. Sol LeWitt, undated notebook with essay entitled “A Statement on Wall Drawings,” Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conn.

11. Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 38. 12. Ibid., 43. 13. Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” 0 to 9 (New York: January 1969): 3–5, published subsequently in Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art (Coventry, England) (May 1969): 11–13. Sentence three was reworded by 1978; see Alicia Legg, Sol LeWitt, 168. 14. I thank Janet Passehl for suggesting that the significance of the logic as a concept for LeWitt by the 1970s may have prompted this rewording. 15. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art, 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 115. 16. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Random House, 1983), 104. 17. Dorothy Miller, ed., Sixteen Americans, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 22. 18. Sol LeWitt, interview with Saul Ostrow. Transcript quoted in Sol LeWitt: 100 Views (North Adams, Mass.: MassMoCA, 2009, in association with Yale University Press), 87. 19. LeWitt has stated in interviews that he met Hesse through Slutzky while working at I. M. Pei, e.g.: “While I was working at I. M. Pei, I met Eva Hesse and Robert Slutzky who had studied with Albers. I decided that I would make color and form recede and proceed in a threedimensional way.” Interview with Andrew Wilson in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts

(Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 125. However, LeWitt could not have met Hesse through a Yale contact in 1955, since Hesse was not enrolled at Yale until 1957. Lucy Lippard, a reliable chronicler, reports that LeWitt and Hesse met through Harvey Becker in the summer of 1960. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 14. Also see Veronica Roberts’s essay “Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt” in Roberts, ed., Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt (Austin and New Haven: Blanton Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2014). Roberts believes that there is ample evidence for an introduction by Slutzky. 20. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings, July 1974, Archives of American Art Oral History Project. http://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-sol-lewitt-12701. 21. See Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). 22. Eva Hesse, transcript of interview with Cindy Nemser, January 1970, Eva Hesse Archives. 23. Ibid. 24. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings. 25. Sol LeWitt, interview with Hazel de Berg, National Library of Australia, March 27, 1977, transcript, p. 13,278. 26. Gary Garrels, ed., Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 25. 27. Sol LeWitt, interview with Sharon Zane, May 12, 1994, Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, New York, transcript, p. 4. 28. Mel Bochner, “Outside the Box: Mel Bochner and John

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Baldessari on Sol LeWitt,” Artforum International 45, no. 10 (Summer 2007): 101–2. 29. Sol LeWitt, interview with Hazel de Berg, p. 13,279. 30. Sol LeWitt, interview with Sharon Zane, p. 10. 31. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 18. 32. D. [Donald] J. [Judd], “Don Berry, Eva Hesse, Harold Jacobs,” Arts magazine 35 (April 1961): 60. 33. Eva Hesse, interview with Cindy Nemser. 34. Ibid. 35. Sol LeWitt, interview with Hazel de Berg, p. 13, 279. 36. Ethelyn Honig, letter to Lucy Lippard, 1974, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 37. Marcia Tucker, telephone interview with the author, November 21, 2004. 38. Anna Nosei Weber and Otto Hahn, “La Sfida de Sistema,” Metro no. 14 (June 1968), reprinted in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 83–85. 39. Tom Doyle, conversation with the author at the artist’s home in Roxbury, Conn., August 4, 2005. 40. Ethelyn Honig, telephone conversation with the author, June 15, 2013. 41. Honig, quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, 19. 42. Eva Hesse, letter to Sol LeWitt, March 1965. The original letter is housed in the Sol LeWitt Collection. A nearly verbatim draft appears in Hesse’s journal, Eva Hesse Archives.

43. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “Eva Hesse and the Lure of ‘Absurd Opposites,’” New York Times (May 10, 1992). 44. Kynaston McShine, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, exh. cat. (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), n.p. The exhibition ran from April 27 through June 12, 1966. 45. Ibid. 46. Lucy Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” reprinted in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), 100–108. 47. Eva Hesse, quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, 127. 48. New York Times (August 31, 1967). 49. The case is Weeks vs. Southern Bell, U.S. Fifth Circuit, 1969. The decision ruled that it was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act to bar women from jobs that involved lifting more than 30 pounds. 50. Lucy Lippard, press release for Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers, 1968. Fischbach Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Marcia Tucker, in James Monte and Marcia Tucker, eds., AntiIllusion: Procedures/Materials, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968), 30. 51. Tucker, Anti-Illusion, 30. 52. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 83 53. Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966” Aspen, nos. 5 and 6 (1967). 54. Eva Hesse, press release for Trio, Owens-Corning

Center, 1970. Fischbach Gallery Records, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 55. Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Lippard, Changing, 257. 56. Sol LeWitt, letter to the author, December 27, 2004. 57. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement in Elayne Varian, Art in Process IV, exh. cat. (New York: Finch College Museum of Art, 1969), n.p. 58. Philip Leider, “New York,” Artforum 8, no. 6 (February 1970): 70. 59. Sol LeWitt, letter to the author, December 27, 2004. 60. Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966.” 61. Hesse is posing for Hermann Landshoff, fashion photographer for Bazaar, documentarian of the Jewish expatriate intelligentsia (his subjects ranged from Albert Einstein to Saul Steinberg), and brother of her close friend Ruth Vollmer. This is one of many “absurdist” poses captured by Landshoff. 62. James Meyer provides a compelling reading of Landshoff’s photograph in a discussion of Hesse and Smithson. He guesses that the image on the wall is a poem by Andre. See James Meyer, “The Logic of the Double,” Artforum (February 2008): 251–57. 63. Anne Middleton Wagner has discussed the individual objects arranged on this table in her book Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 194–95. The test pieces distributed around the table would eventu-

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ally find a permanent home in glass-and-steel display cases, first purchased by LeWitt on the Bowery. The definitive account of Hesse’s test pieces is Briony Fer, Eva Hesse: Studiowork (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009). 64. A detailed description of the contents of Hesse’s studio table is given in Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women), 194–95.

Chapter 1 1. Sol LeWitt, interview with Andrew Wilson, Art Monthly, no. 184 (March 1993), reprinted in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 123. 2. Ibid. 3. Eva Hesse, quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 14. 4. Eva Hesse, Yale University notebook, dated October 24, 1958, Eva Hesse Archives, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. 5. Eva Hesse, quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, 12. 6. Jeffrey Saletnik, “Josef Albers, Eva Hesse, and the Imperative of Teaching,” in Tate Papers 7 (April 2007). http:// www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tate-papers/josefalbers-eva-hesse-and-imperativeteaching. 7. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). 8. Hilton Kramer, “Month in Review,” Arts magazine 32 (April 1958): 52. 9. Anthony Candido interview with Veronica Roberts, July 18, 2013. I am grateful to Roberts

for sharing her notes and partial transcript of this conversation. 10. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings, July 1974, Archives of American Art Oral History Project. http://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-sol-lewitt-12701 11. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 83. 12. Josef Albers, “The Origin of Art,” in Josef Albers: Homage to the Square, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), n.p. 13. Josef Albers, Interaction of Color (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 2. 14. Eva Hesse, personal writings, 1959, Eva Hesse Archives. 15. Eva Hesse, Yale University notebook, dated April 15, 1959, Eva Hesse Archives. 16. Kramer, “Month in Review.” 17. Hesse also studied painting with Bernard Chaet, but judging from her student notes, Lebrun appears to have been more influential. 18. Eva Hesse, Yale University notebook, dated October 24, 1958, Eva Hesse Archives. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. This is the only body of her early work to receive sustained scholarly attention, albeit in a Freudian vein that reads these works through the tragic dimensions of Hesse’s life. Curator E. Luanne McKinnon has dubbed these paintings “spectres,” to describe “what I felt was the matrix of Hesse’s thought: the real and unreal phantasms of the mind, threatening or terrifying in nature, or faint, imagined fig-

ures.” E. Luanne McKinnon, Eva Hesse Spectres, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 8. 22. Eva Hesse, journal entry from 1961, Eva Hesse Archives. 23. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 14. 24. Samuel V. Dunkell, “Art without Pretty: Eva Hesse Doesn’t Belong in the Suicide Quartet,” San Francisco Chronicle (February 3, 2002). 25. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 13. 26. The “terror-inspired images” of Oliveira and Francis Bacon were shown at Alan Gallery in September 1959; see Dore Ashton, “Art: Seasonal Warm Up,” New York Times (September 9, 1959). A solo show of Nathan Oliveira opened there in October 1960; in March 1960, Joan Brown had her first solo exhibition in New York, at the Staempfli Gallery, and was featured later that year in a show entitled Young America: Thirty American Painters under Thirty Six at the Whitney Museum. In addition to New Images of Man at the Museum of Modern Art, Giacometti and Dubuffet were included in numerous gallery shows in New York in 1959 and 1960, including a solo show of Giacometti’s paintings and sculpture at World House Gallery in January 1960, Dubuffet’s paintings and graphic work at World House Gallery in October 1960, as well as Dubuffet’s figural sculpture in conjunction with the debut of Robert Rauschenberg’s Monogram (1959) at Castelli Gallery in April 1959. 27. Eva Hesse, transcript of interview with Cindy Nemser, January 1970, Eva Hesse Archives. 28. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 14.

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29. Peter Selz, “Introduction,” New Images of Man, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 11–15. 30. William Rubin, “New Images of Man,” Art International 3, no. 9 (1959): 1–5. 31. Selz, “Introduction,” 100. 32. Joan Brown, quoted in Karen Tsujimoto et al., The Art of Joan Brown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 57. 33. Willem de Kooning, quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 102. 34. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Random House, 2011): 5. 35. Nancy Spero, quoted in Brigitte Reinhardt, ed., Nancy Spero: Woman Breathing (Berlin: Edition Cantz, 1992), 38. 36. Eva Hesse, letter to her father, dated 1951 or 1952, Eva Hesse Archives. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Tom Doyle, interview with the author at the artist’s home in Roxbury, Conn., August 4, 2005. 40. Eva Hesse, journal entry from 1961, Eva Hesse Archives. 41. Ibid. 42. Tom Doyle, interview with the author, August 4, 2005. 43. Ibid. 44. Ethelyn Honig, letter to Lucy Lippard, 1974, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 45. Valerie Peterson, review of Eve Hesse: Recent Drawings, ArtNews 62 (May 1963): 19.

46. This was revealed in research conducted on the occasion of the 2002 retrospective of Hesse’s work organized by Elisabeth Sussman for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Elisabeth Sussman, ed., Eva Hesse, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 129. 47. Albers, Interaction of Color, 6. 48. Ibid. 49. Ethelyn Honig, quoted in Lippard, Eva Hesse, 19. 50. Sol LeWitt, interview with Hazel de Berg, National Library of Australia, March 27, 1977, transcript, p. 13,273. 51. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 218. 52. Sol LeWitt, interview with Sharon Zane, May 12, 1994, Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, New York, transcript, p. 6. 53. Dorothy Miller, ed., Sixteen Americans, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), 58. 54. Ibid., 22. 55. Mel Bochner, quoted in Lucy Lippard, “Intersections,” in Olle Granath, ed., Flypunkter/ Vanishing Points (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1984), 18. 56. D. [Donald] J. [Judd], “Jasper Johns,” Arts magazine 34 (March 1960): 57–58. 57. Ibid. 58. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings. 59. Paul J. Smith, Amusements Is . . . , exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Contemporary Crafts, 1964), n.p. 60. Veronica Roberts has performed the definitive research on LeWitt’s Nine Boxes. See

her essay “Opening LeWitt’s Early Boxes,” in Roberts, ed., Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt (Austin and New Haven: Blanton Museum of Art and Yale University Press, 2014). 61. Only the names of the contributors were listed in the Amusement Is . . . exhibition catalogue, not the identity of the objects or the relationship of the contributors to LeWitt. 62. Brian O’Doherty, “Art: AvantGarde Deadpans on Move,” New York Times (April 11, 1964). 63. Zevi, Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, 124. 64. Dan Graham, “Muybridge Moments: From Here to There?” Arts magazine (February 1967): 24. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. G. R. Swenson, The Other Tradition, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1966), 35. 68. Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 293. First published in Art in America (October–November 1965): 57–69. 69. The “peephole” in LeWitt’s Muybridge boxes can also be called an “aperture” in a work that “has to do with lenses, with optics, and what happens as the figure fills the frame. It is a piece about perception,” as Jock Reynolds characterized Muybridge I when it was censored from the 1991 exhibit Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography. Elizabeth Broun, director of the National Museum of American Art, had removed

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the work from the traveling show on grounds that “peering through successive peepholes and focusing increasingly on the pubic region invokes unequivocal references to a degrading pornographic experience.” Broun’s reaction was hyperbolic and keyed to the culture wars of the moment, a live matter for a branch of the Smithsonian. Barbara Gamarekian, “Show Closing Demanded at Washington Museum,” New York Times (July 13, 1991). 70. Ethelyn Honig, letter to Lucy Lippard, 1974. 71. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings. 72. Tom Doyle, interview with the author. 73. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 23. 74. Yaddo Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. 75. David Weinrib, interview with James Meyer for Meyer’s “Non, Nothing, Everything: Hesse’s ‘Abstraction,’” in Sussman, Eva Hesse, 76 n. 52. 76. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 22. 77. Sol LeWitt, interview with Hazel de Berg.

Chapter 2 1. Lucy Lippard, “The Third Stream: Constructed Paintings and Painted Structures,” Art Voices 4, no. 2 (Spring 1965): 45. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid., 47–49. 4. Sol LeWitt, interview with Andrew Wilson in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 124. 5. Ibid.

6. Eva Hesse, transcript of interview with Cindy Nemser, January 1970, Eva Hesse Archives, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. 7. Sol LeWitt, letter to the author, December 27, 2004. 8. Lucy Lippard, Changing: Essays on Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), 15. 9. Tom Doyle, letter to Sol LeWitt, November 11, 1964, Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conn. 10. Eva Hesse, journal entries dated July 1, 1964, and November 16, 1964, Eva Hesse Archives. 11. Tom Doyle, conversation with the author at the artist’s home in Roxbury, Conn., August 4, 2005. Doyle, on the other hand, was eager to head back to the country where he had spent fifteen months in the army from 1946 to 1947. Stationed in Marburg, coincidentally where Hesse’s father had attended law school, he was an actor in what he describes as a propaganda unit that put on educational skits for incoming troops. The soldiers drank, told stories of combat, and played sports. Doyle’s memories of Germany were overwhelmingly positive. The army had given him “a great job” full of camaraderie and purpose for which he was primed by a childhood fascination with the Civil War. Unable to afford college otherwise, when he returned to the United States in 1948, Doyle earned a B.A. and an M.F.A. at Ohio State University on the G.I. Bill, studying under Roy Lichtenstein. 12. This loss and displacement exacted a brutal toll that included the suicide of Hesse’s mother, Ruth Marcus Hesse, in 1946, when Hesse was ten years old. Helen Hesse Charash was

interviewed by Vanessa Corby for her article on Eva Hesse’s Jewish identity. Vanessa Corby, “Don’t Look Back: Reading for the Ellipses in the Discourse of Eva Hess[e],” Third Text 57 (Winter 2001–2): 37. 13. This would turn out to be a lasting connection for Hesse. In 1969, Szeemann included Hesse in his landmark exhibit When Attitudes Become Form, in Bern and London. 14. Pierre Restany, “The Nouveaux Réalistes Declaration of Intention” (Milan, April 16, 1960), in Le Nouveau Réalisme, trans. Martha Nichols (Paris: Union Générale d’Éditions, 1978), 281–85. 15. The exhibit of forty-two Gorky drawings was organized by Frank O’Hara for the Museum of Modern Art and sponsored by Cold War–era Congress for Cultural Freedom. Ellen Johnson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Hesse mentions the Gorky show in her datebook, November 8, 1965, Eva Hesse Archives. 16. Art historian Ellen Johnson determined that Picabia’s drawing Prostitution universelle was on view at the Yale University Art Gallery while Hesse was enrolled. Ellen Johnson Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 17. Eva Hesse, letter to Sol LeWitt, April 2, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection. 18. Eva Hesse, letter to Rosie Goldman, April 1, 1965, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 19. Tom Doyle, conversation with the author at the artist’s home in Roxbury, Conn., August 4, 2005.

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20. Ellen Johnson, Eva Hesse: A Retrospective of the Drawings, exh. cat. (Oberlin, Ohio: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College), 18. 21. Eva Hesse, letter to Sol LeWitt, April 2, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection. 22. Ibid. 23. Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International 9, no. 2 (March 1965): 46.

35. Tom Doyle, conversation with the author at the artist’s home in Roxbury, Conn., August 4, 2005. 36. Ibid. 37. Tom Doyle and Eva Hesse, letter to Sol LeWitt, no date, Sol LeWitt Collection. 38. Eva Hesse, letter to Sol LeWitt, April 20–24, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection.

26. Sol LeWitt, letter to Eva Hesse, April 14, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection.

39. Hesse’s poses suggest the pedestrian dance of Yvonne Rainer and Robert Morris, implying an integration of the body of the artist as artwork. Hesse attended a performance of Robert Morris and Yvonne Rainer at Galerie Schmela, Düsseldorf, in October 1964.

27. Journal entry dated March 1965, Eva Hesse Archives.

40. Sol LeWitt, letter to “Tom & Eva,” July 20, 1964.

28. Sol LeWitt, letter to the author, December 28, 2004.

41. Sol LeWitt, interview with Sharon Zane, May 12, 1994, Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, New York, transcript, p. 8.

24. Ibid. 25. Eva Hesse, letter to Sol LeWitt, April 2, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection.

29. Sol LeWitt, letter to “Tom & Eva,” July 20, 1964, Eva Hesse Archives. 30. Eva Hesse, letter to Rosie Goldman, April 1, 1965, Lucy Lippard Papers. LeWitt’s letter reveals his investment in Hesse and presages the significant role he would play in fostering the bold statements made by her “mature” sculpture when she returned to New York. 31. Eva Hesse, letter to Ethelyn Honig, March 1965, Lucy Lippard Papers; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1989), 448. 32. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 718. 33. Eva Hesse, letter to Ethelyn Honig, March 1965. 34. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 683.

42. Sol LeWitt, letter to “Tom & Eva,” July 20, 1964. 43. Ibid., and Alicia Legg, ed., Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 52. 44. Sol LeWitt, letter to “Tom & Eva,” July 20, 1964. 45. Most of this exploratory work would be destroyed or repurposed—part of a table piece from late 1964 was given to Hesse and used for Washer Table, and another became Hesse’s studio table. Some extant structures remained in the hands of friends, as Wapner’s wallpiece or an openbox wallpiece painted in jagged black and white patterns traded to Doyle.

46. Sol LeWitt, letter to Eva Hesse, April 14, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection. 47. Dan Graham, interview with Sabine Breitwieser for Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, November 1, 2011, transcript, p. 4. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. Lucy Lippard, “Intersections,” in Olle Granath, ed., Flyktpunkter/Vanishing Points (Stockholm: Moderna Museet, 1984), 12; Dan Graham, “Homes for America,” Arts magazine 41, no. 3 (December 1966–January 1967): 21–22. The resulting project, Homes for America, was projected as a slide show for an exhibition in 1966 and published in Arts magazine in the form of an illustrated essay. 50. Smithson’s first solo show was to be held at the John Daniels Gallery, but the gallery was closed following LeWitt’s exhibition. For an in-depth discussion of the artistic and conceptual currents surrounding the Daniels Gallery, see Rhea Anastas, “Minimal Difference: The John Daniels Gallery and the First Works of Dan Graham,” in Bennett Simpson and Chrissie Iles, eds., Dan Graham: Beyond (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009), 111–26. 51. Robert Smithson, “The Crystal Land,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 8. 52. Lippard, “Third Stream,” Art Voices, 48. 53. Lucy Lippard, “Sol LeWitt: Nonvisual Structures,” Artforum (April 1967), reprinted in Lippard, Changing, 166.

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54. A. [Anne] H. [Hoene], “In the Galleries: Sol LeWitt,” Arts magazine 39, no. 10 (September— October 1965): 63–64. 55. Anastas, “Minimal Difference,”115, and note 10. Graham interviewed with Anastas on April 11, 2000. 56. J. J., “Sol LeWitt,” ArtNews 64, no. 3: 18. 57. A. [Anne] H. [Hoene], “In the Galleries: Sol LeWitt,” 64. 58. Lippard, “Third Stream,” Art Voices, 48. 59. Dan Graham, “Of Monuments and Dreams,” Art Voices 1, no. 12 (March 1967): 62. 60. Robert Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 13. 61. Ibid. 62. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings, July 1974, Archives of American Art Oral History Project. http://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-sol-lewitt-12701. 63. Ibid. This quote is from a letter by Sol LeWitt to Wadsworth Athenaeum curator Andrea Miller-Keller, “Excerpts from a Correspondence, 1981–1983,” Zevi, Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, 114. 64. Smithson, “Entropy and the New Monuments,” 15. 65. Dan Flavin, quoted in Michael Govan and Tiffany Bell, Dan Flavin: The Complete Lights, 1961–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 212. 66. Wylie Sypher, quoted in Lucy Lippard and John Chandler, “The Dematerialization of Art,”

in Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), 257. 67. Ada Louise Huxtable, “Something Awry: Three New Buildings Pose Big Problems,” New York Times (December 22, 1963). 68. “The Skyscraper Factory,” Newsweek (September 18, 1967): 98. 69. Warhol’s “factory,” located on E. 47th Street between 1962 and 1968, comes to mind here as another usage of the “factory” concept for intellectual or artistic labor. 70. “Skyscraper Factory,” 98. 71. Ibid. 72. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 80. 73. Sol LeWitt, “Ziggurats,” Arts magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 24–25. 74. Quoted in Moira Roth, “An Interview with Robert Smithson,” in Eugenie Tsai, ed., Robert Smithson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 85. 75. Legg, Sol LeWitt, 77. 76. Graham quoted in Anastas, “Minimal Difference,” 111–26. 77. Virginia Dwan, interview with Charles B. Stuckey, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, March 21–June 7, 1984, transcript, p. 80. 78. The reliefs were retrieved in 1970, after Hesse’s death, by Donald Droll, director of Fischbach Gallery, with which Hesse was by then associated. Letters requesting the shipment of the reliefs to Fischbach are in the Fischbach Gallery Papers, Archives of American Art.

Chapter 3 1. Mel Bochner, “Primary Structures,” Arts magazine 40, no. 8 (June 1966): 32–33. 2. Ibid. 3. Lippard was slated to be the show’s co-curator before McShine left MoMA for a post at the Jewish Museum, taking the show with him. “Kynaston and I were close friends and had started to work on the show with MoMA when he got the job at the Jewish Museum and took it with him. From then on we just talked about it but it was his show.” Lucy Lippard, email to the author, December 12, 2013. Lippard discusses the relationship between Primary Structures and her “Third Stream” essays in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist in Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating (Zurich: JRP / Ringier, 2011), 250. 4. Kynaston McShine, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, exh. cat. (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966), n.p. The exhibition ran from April 27 through June 12, 1966. 5. James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 23–24. 6. McShine, Primary Structures. 7. “It’s wild . . . I have many critics believing in me before I have really shown. . . . Mel says he has heard much talk about my work.” Eva Hesse, quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 70. 8. Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, interview with Lucy Lippard on the subject of Eva Hesse, 1972. Lippard’s unpublished transcript-style notes

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from this interview are in the Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 9. LeWitt sought “more than our closeness he wants total complete relationship” but Hesse, drawing on the Freudian templates used in her therapy sessions, was troubled by “Sol as FATHER IMAGE!” Hesse’s journal, Summer 1966, Eva Hesse Archives, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. 10. Transcript for “The New Sculpture,” symposium on Primary Structures, May 2, 1966, Jewish Museum, Lucy Lippard Papers. 11. Lucy Lippard paraphrasing Donald Judd in “An Impure Situation (New York and Philadelphia Letter),” Art International 10, no. 5 (May 1966): 64. 12. Bochner, “Primary Structures.” 13. In late 1969, Hesse composed a private verse to LeWitt on the occasion of his exhibition at the Hague Gemeentemuseum. Eva Hesse Archives. 14. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 80. 15. Alicia Legg, ed., Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 59. Art historian James Meyer has documented LeWitt’s transition from the “bulky” and “asymmetrical” Daniels Gallery structures to “the open geometries and blinding whiteness of the Dwan works” in James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 201–2. 16. Legg, Sol LeWitt, 62.

17. Hilton Kramer, “Art: David von Schlegell at a Happy Standstill, Other Current Shows Are Summarized,” New York Times (May 21, 1966).

30. Rosalind Krauss, “LeWitt in Progress,” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 249.

18. Mel Bochner, “Sol LeWitt,” Arts magazine 49, no. 9 (September–October 1966): 61.

31. LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966.”

19. Ibid. 20. Robert Smithson, “Towards the Development of an Air Terminal Site,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 54. 21. The essay “Sol LeWitt: Two Structures” first appeared in the self-published Dan Graham: End Moments (1969), n.p. 22. Robert Smithson, “Sol LeWitt: Dwan Gallery Press Release, 1966–1967,” in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 335. 23. Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 4: 89. 24. Carl Andre, “Interview with Phyllis Tuchman,” Artforum 8, no. 10 (June 1970): 56. 25. Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966” Aspen, nos. 5 and 6 (1967). 26. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Aspen, nos. 5 and 6 (1967). 27. Sol LeWitt, “Serial Project #1, 1966.” 28. Ibid. 29. LeWitt quoted in Legg, Sol LeWitt, 79.

32. Sol LeWitt, unpublished interview with Lucy Lippard, transcript, no date [ca. 1971], p. 1, Lucy Lippard Papers. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 80. 36. Alain Robbe-Grillet, “New Novel, New Man” (1961), reprinted in For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1998), 137–38. 37. Smithson in Flam, “Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art,” 80. 38. Sol LeWitt, letter to Eva Hesse, April 14, 1965, Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conn. 39. Eva Hesse, transcript of interview with Cindy Nemser, January 1970, Eva Hesse Archives. 40. Cindy Nemser, ArtTalk (New York: Scribners, 1975), 208. Wherever possible I quote from the original transcript of Hesse’s interview with Nemser. In this case, the original transcript is very fragmented and Nemser’s transcription is faithful to the ideas Hesse was expressing. 41. Lippard, “An Impure Situation,” 64. 42. Ibid. 43. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 216 n. 15.

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44. See Scott Rothkopf, “Gene Swenson: Banned and Determined,” Artforum 40, no. 10 (Summer 2002): 142–44, 194. 45. Michael Todd, email exchange with the author, June 18, 2014. 46. Ibid. 47. G. R. Swenson, The Other Tradition, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute for Contemporary Art, 1966), 35. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid., 34–35. 51. Quoted in Richard Flood, “Paul Thek: Real Misunderstanding,” Artforum 20 no. 2 (October 1981): 49. 52. Ibid. 53. Hesse wrote about getting high for the first time with Thek and Todd on Fire Island. Parts of her description are similar to how she described her art: “Light, airy, free, possibilities, all kinds, nothing closed, nothing empty, all their, all kinds, openings, length, width, depth, indeterminate reasons, disqualifying factors.” Journal dated June 5, 1966, Eva Hesse Archives. 54. Joe Raffaele, letter to Eva Hesse, n.d. [1966]), Eva Hesse Archives. 55. Lucy Lippard, “Eros Presumptive,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art (New York: Dutton, 1968), 210. 56. Swenson, The Other Tradition, 35; Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” 110–11. 57. Swenson, The Other Tradition, 35. 58. Lucy Lippard, “The Women Arists’ Movement,” reprinted in Lippard, The Pink Glass Swan:

Selected Essays on Feminist Art (New York: New Press, 1995), 238.

72. Hesse traded Smithson the much smaller, vertical Metronomic Irregularity I (1966).

59. Hesse’s notes are in the Eva Hesse Archives. Lippard’s “Eros Presumptive” was first published in The Hudson Review, Spring 1967.

73. Smithson, “Quasi Infinites,” 28–31.

60. “Eccentric Abstraction,” reprinted in Lucy Lippard, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), 100–108. 61. Mel Bochner, “Eccentric Abstraction,” Arts magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 58. 62. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 70. 63. Ibid., 83. 64. Ibid. 65. Hilton Kramer, “And Now, ‘Eccentric Abstraction’: It’s Art, But Does It Matter?” New York Times (September 25, 1966). 66. Arthur C. Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 43–45. 67. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Michael Kimmelman, “Eva Hesse and the Lure of ‘Absurd Opposites,’” New York Times (May 10, 1992). 68. Sol LeWitt, quoted in “Uncertain Mandate: A Roundtable Discussion on Conservation Issues,” in Elisabeth Sussman, ed., Eva Hesse, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 297–98. 69. Ibid. 70. Bochner, “Eccentric Abstraction,” 58. 71. Robert Smithson, “Quasi Infinites and the Waning of Space” Arts magazine 41, no. 1 (November 1966): 28–31.

74. Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, interview with Lucy Lippard on the subject of Eva Hesse, 1972. Lippard’s unpublished transcript-style notes from this interview are in the Lucy Lippard Papers. 75. Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” 100. 76. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 83. 77. Robert Smithson, unpublished interview with Lucy Lippard on the subject of Eva Hesse, 1972. Lippard’s unpublished notes in the Lucy Lippard Papers. 78. Eva Hesse journal entry, 1966, Eva Hesse Archives. 79. Virginia Dwan, interview with Charles Stuckey, April 18 and May 2, 1984, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; second quote from Michael Kimmelman, “The Forgotten Godmother of Dia’s Artists,” New York Times (May 11, 2003). 80. The show was organized by Dwan with the assistance of Smithson, but his role was minimized after artists resisted his involvement. “Dwan recalled that the contributors could not agree on a coherent theme or statement,” James Meyer reported based on an interview with Dwan. The artists rejected Smithson’s involvement, producing as a joke a button with the phrase “Smithson is not my spokesman” after a letter in Artforum by Donald Judd containing just this phrase in response to Smithson’s essay “Entropy and

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the New Monuments.” See James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Politics in the 1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press), 303 n. 187. 81. Virginia Dwan, interview with Charles Stuckey, April 18 and May 2, 1984. 82. John Perreault, “The Materiality of Matter,” Village Voice, November 28, 1968, p. 19. 83. Eva Hesse journal, dated September 1966, Eva Hesse Archives. 84. James Meyer discusses the discomfort of the viewer and the process of decoding entries in “The Second Degree: Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to Be Viewed as Art,” in Richard S. Field, ed., Mel Bochner: Thought Made Visible, 1966–1973 (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1995), 96. 85. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement for Art in Series, Finch College Museum, November 1967, Eva Hesse Archives. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. and Lippard, Eva Hesse, 96. 88. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement for Art in Series, Finch College Museum, November 1967. 89. Mel Bochner, “The Serial Attitude,” Artforum 6 (December 1967): 28. 90. Bill Barrette mentions that these sculptures were gifts to Bochner and LeWitt, given at a Christmas party thrown by Ruth Vollmer in 1966. Barrette also notes that the reliefs are inscribed on the verso in gray paint “M. B. E. Hesse, 66” and in ink, “for Sol, Eva Hesse, 1966.” Bill Barrette, Eva Hesse

Sculpture (New York: Timken, 1989), 94–95.

Robert Morris,” New York Times (December 22, 1968).

91. Lippard, “Eccentric Abstraction,” 110.

9. Ursula Meyer, “The De-Objectification of the Object,” Arts magazine 43, no. 8 (Summer 1969): 20.

92. Lippard, “The Women Artists’ Movement,” 83. 93. John Perreault, “Art: Repeating Absurdity,” Village Voice (December 14, 1967): 18–19. 94. Susan Sontag, “The Aesthetics of Silence,” Aspen, nos. 5 and 6 (1967). 95. Eva Hesse journal, December 1966, Eva Hesse Archives.

Chapter 4 1. Robert Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (1968), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 112. 2. Ibid. 3. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement, 1968, Eva Hesse Archives, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio. 4. Max Kozloff, “9 in a Warehouse,” Artforum 7, no. 6 (February 1969): 40–41. 5. John Perreault, “Art: Long Live Earth,” Village Voice (October 17, 1968): 17. 6. Michael Heizer, quoted in Smithson, “A Sedimentation of the Mind,” 102. 7. Leo Castelli, interview with Paul Cummings, May 14, 1969, and June 8, 1973, Archives of American Art Oral History Project, http://www.aaa.si.edu/ collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-leo-castelli-12370. 8. Philip Leider, “‘The Properties of Materials’: In the Shadow of

10. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement, in Elayne Varian, Art in Process IV, exh. cat. (New York: Finch College Museum of Art, 1969), n.p. 11. Eva Hesse, loose notebook pages, 1968, Eva Hesse Archives. 12. Eva Hesse, quoted in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York University Press, 1976), 106. 13. Ibid. 14. Rosalind Krauss, “Sol LeWitt at Dwan Gallery,” Artforum 6, no. 8 (April 1968): 57–58. An installation photograph, caption, and the artist’s brief description of 47 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes is included in Alicia Legg, Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978). However, Krauss refers to the piece as 46 Three-Part Variations on 3 Different Kinds of Cubes. 15. This debate was most vehemently and contentiously voiced in Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 12–23. 16. Krauss, “Sol LeWitt at Dwan Gallery.” 17. Ibid. 18. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 108–9. 19. Krauss, “Sol LeWitt at Dwan Gallery.” 20. Sol LeWitt, “Sentences on Conceptual Art,” in 0 to 9 (New York, 1969); and published subsequently in Art-Language: The Journal of Conceptual Art (Coventry, England, 1969).

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21. Adrian Piper, Out of Order, Out of Sight, vol. 1: Selected Writings on Meta-Art, 1968– 1992 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 29. 22. For a detailed account of Piper’s early responses to LeWitt’s Dwan installation, see John P. Bowles, Adrian Piper: Race, Gender, and Embodiment (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2011), 47. 23. Eva Hesse, transcript of interview with Cindy Nemser, January 1970, Eva Hesse Archives. 24. Hesse’s work has famously elicited dramatizations of form— Anna C. Chave’s discussion of the “mottled and yellowing skin” and the “extruded and exposed female genitalia” that Hesse’s fiberglass and latex serial pieces evoked for her—and likewise powerful defenses of the “matter of fact understatement” of Hesse’s sculpture. For this important, historical debate on the subjective and historically contingent nature of art vision, see Anna C. Chave, “A Girl Being a Sculpture,” in Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Anne Middleton Wagner, “Another Hesse,” October 69 (Summer 1994): 49–84; and Anna C. Chave, letter to the editor, October 71 (Winter 1995):146–48. 25. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings, July 1974. Archives of American Art Oral History Project. http://www.aaa. si.edu/collections/interviews/ oral-history-interview-sol-lewitt-12701. 26. Anna Lovatt provides a helpful account of the circumstances leading to LeWitt’s first wall drawing in “Ideas in

Transmission: LeWitt’s Wall Drawings and the Question of Medium,” Tate Papers, no. 14 (October 1, 2010). http:// www.tate.org.uk/research/ publications/tate-papers/ideastransmission-lewitts-wall-drawings-and-question-medium.

Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, and the exhibition’s reception, see Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 140, 144–45.

27. Sol LeWitt, interview with Paul Cummings, July 1974.

36. Mel Bochner, “‘Why Would Anyone Want to Draw on the Wall?’” October 130 (Fall 2009): 137.

28. Lippard, quoted in Grace Glueck, “A Party that Includes You Out,” New York Times (October 27, 1968). 29. Anna Nosei Weber and Otto Hahn asked several conceptual artists, including Dan Graham, whether “the present language of art research in the United States can be said to contest the system” in Metro no. 14 (June 1968), reprinted in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 83–85. 30. Sol LeWitt, undated notebook with reflection titled “A Statement on Wall Drawings,” Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conn. 31. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Legg, Sol LeWitt, 95. 32. Sol LeWitt, undated notebook with reflection titled “A Statement on Wall Drawings.” 33. Helen Molesworth, “Work Ethic,” in Work Ethic (Baltimore and State College, Pa.: Baltimore Museum of Art and Pennsylvania State University Press), 27. 34. “Conversation with Robert Smithson” (1972), in Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 262. 35. For an account of LeWitt’s participation in the exhibition to benefit the Student

37. Ibid. 38. Coosje Kapteyn-van Bruggen statement in Sol LeWitt (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1970), reprinted in Zevi, Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, 173–74. 39. Ibid. 40. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement, 1968, Eva Hesse Archives. 41. M. I., “Eva Hesse,” ArtNews 67 (November 1968): 14. 42. Eva Hesse, artist’s statement, 1968. 43. M. I., “Eva Hesse,” 14; Emily Wasserman, “Eva Hesse,” Artforum (January 1969): 60. 44. Wasserman, “Eva Hesse,” 60. 45. John Perreault, “The Materiality of Matter,” Village Voice (November 28, 1968): 19. 46. “About Eva Hesse: Bochner interviewed by Joan Simon” in Mignon Nixon, ed., Eva Hesse (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), 42. 47. Briony Fer has noted that “[t]erms like ‘prototype’ and ‘test piece’ come from the language of industry and they bring Hesse’s work closer to the concerns of minimal art. They are part of a language of product design.” Briony Fer, Eva Hesse: Studiowork (Edinburgh: Fruitmarket Gallery, 2009), 42.

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48. Sol LeWitt, interview with Dodie Kazanjian, 2001, Calvin Tompkins Papers, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 49. Leider, “‘The Properties of Materials.’” 50. Sol LeWitt interview notes, Lucy Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Sol LeWitt, quoted in Legg, Sol LeWitt, 114. 54. Robert Morris, “Anti Form,” Artforum 7, no. 8 (April 1968): 34. 55. Barbara Rose, “Namuth’s Photographs and the Pollock Myth,” in Barbara Rose, ed., Pollock Painting (New York: Agrinde, 1980), n.p. 56. Ibid. 57. Lippard, Eva Hesse, 137. 58. Douglas Crimp, “Redefining Site Specificity,” On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 151. 59. Serra quoted in Andrew Blum, “A Serra Sculpture Emerges from Its Tomb,” New York Times (November 23, 2003). 60. Bernice Rose, “Sol LeWitt and Drawing,” in Legg, Sol LeWitt, 31. 61. Eva Hesse, interview with Cindy Nemser. 62. John Perreault, “Art: A Test,” Village Voice (December 19, 1968): 19. 63. Leider, “‘The Properties of Materials.’” 64. Grégoire Müller, “Robert Morris Presents Anti-form: The Castelli Warehouse Show,” Arts 43, no. 4 (February 1969): 29–30.

65. Max Kozloff, “9 in a Warehouse.” 66. Leo Castelli, interview with Paul Cummings, May 14, 1969, and June 8, 1973. 67. See Briony Fer’s detailed description of Aught and Augment in Elisabeth Sussman, Eva Hesse, exh. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 86. 68. James Monte and Marcia Tucker, eds. Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1969), 44. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid., 10. 71. Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts, 1959–2004, ed. James Meyer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), 107. Meyer explains that this dialogue was written as a correction to Meyer’s misquotation of Andre in Sussman, Eva Hesse. 72. Emily Wasserman, “PROCESS, Whitney Museum,” Artforum 8, no. 1 (September 1969): 57. 73. Marcia Tucker, telephone interview with the author, November 21, 2004. 74. Harald Szeemann, “How Does an Exhibition Come Into Being?” Painting, Object, Film, Concept: Works from the Herbig Collection (New York: Christie’s, 1998), 40–41. 75. Scott Burton, “Notes on the New,” in Live in Your Head, exh. cat. (Bern: Kunsthalle, 1969), n.p. 76. Szeemann, “How Does an Exhibition Come Into Being?” 40–41.

Conclusion 1. Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1970), 21. 2. Sol LeWitt, letter to the author, dated December 27, 2004. 3. Sol LeWitt, exh. cat., Gemeentemuseum, 22. 4. From a letter by Sol LeWitt to Wadsworth Athenaeum curator Andrea MillerKeller, “Excerpts from a Correspondence, 1981–1983,” in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 109. 5. Sol LeWitt, undated notebook with essay entitled “A Statement on Wall Drawings,” Sol LeWitt Collection, Chester, Conn. 6. Sol LeWitt, interview with Dodie Kazanjian, 2001, Calvin Tompkins Papers, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 7. Sol LeWitt, exh. cat., Gemeentemuseum, 22. 8. Sol LeWitt, “Doing Wall Drawings,” originally in Art Now 3, no. 2 (1971). Reprinted in Adachiara Zevi, ed., Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts (Rome: I Libri di AEIOU, 1994), 95–96. LeWitt says here that “the artist can act as his own draftsman.” 9. “The Draftsman and the Wall . . .” Sol LeWitt, exh. cat. (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Art Museum, 1970), reprinted in Zevi, Sol LeWitt: Critical Texts, 93. 10. Jo Watanabe, conversation with the author in Brooklyn, N.Y., November 20, 2013.

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Illustration Credits The photographers and the sources of visual material other than the owners indicated in the captions are as follows. Every effort has been made to supply complete and correct credits; if there are errors or omissions, please contact Yale University Press so that corrections can be made in any subsequent edition. Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio, The Fund for Contemporary Art and gift from the artist and Fischbach Gallery, 1970. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth: fig. 54. The Art Institute of Chicago, gift of Arthur Keating and Mr. and Mrs. Edward Morris by exchange, April 1988. Photo: Susan Einstein, courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth: fig. 50.

© The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth: figs. 3 (Alvin Holm photo, Philadelphia, 1958), 14, 17 (Adam Clayton, Dublin, May 2000), 19 (Alexandra Charish, Los Angeles, 1991), 53 (Rudolph Burckhardt photo, New York, 1966), 70 (Abby Robinson photo, New York), 73. Jasper Johns, False Start, 1959. Oil on canvas. © Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY: fig. 21. Kolodny Family Collection, © The Estate of George Paul Thek; courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo Orcutt & Van Der Putten: fig. 52. Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Purchased in 1992. © Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft, Zürich, Jean-Pierre Kuhn: fig. 28. Gretchen Lambert (photo): figs. 2, 49. Courtesy Sofia LeWitt: fig. 39.

Mel Bochner and Lizbeth Marano, New York. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth: fig. 60.

The LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut: figs. 1, 4–6, 20, 22, 23, 26, 33, 40–43, 47, 61.

Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Photo courtesy Sofia LeWitt: fig. 66.

The LeWitt Collection, Chester, Connecticut, 1976. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth: fig. 59.

Detroit Institute of Arts: fig. 9. Courtesy Tom and Jane Doyle: fig. 18. Courtesy Dwan Gallery Archives: figs. 45, 46, 48, 64. John A. Ferrari (photo): figs. 62, 68. Ursula Hauser Collection, Switzerland. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth: figs. 16, 30, 35. Eva Hesse Archives, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Ohio: figs. 37, 78 (recto and verso).

Lucy R. Lippard Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution: fig. 67.

Norah Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University, Logan, Utah. Charter Member Endowment Purchase, © Estate of Rico Lebrun. Photograph by Andrew McAllister: fig. 15. Private Collection, New York: fig. 29. Shunk-Kender © Roy Lichtenstein Foundation: figs. 71, 72, 75, 76. Sol LeWitt (The Hague: Gemeentemuseum, 1970): figs. 77, 79. Tate, London, 1979. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Tate/Art Resource, New York: fig. 58. Manfred Tischer (photo). © Manfred Tischer Archives: fig. 34. © Manfred Tischer Archives: fig. 36. Courtesy Michael Todd: fig. 51. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of the Peter Norton Family Foundation 94.38. Photography by Sheldan C. Collins: fig. 65. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Anni Albers and the Josef Albers Foundation, Inc. © 2014 The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: fig. 12.

Schematic representation published by Multiples, Inc., New York, in 1970: fig. 27. Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, Archiv Landshoff: fig. 10. Museum of Modern Art, New York, fractional and promised gift of Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr., 2005. © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Photo: Abby Robinson, New York: fig. 32.

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abstract Expressionism: Hesse and, 12, 13, 18, 23–24, 29, 35–38, 59; LeWitt and, 16, 23–24, 33; Pollock and, 153. See also specific artists and exhibitions “Aesthetics of Silence, The” (Sontag), 128–29 “Against Interpretation” (Sontag), 10 Albers, Josef: art, 28, 30, 32–33, 47, 65; color theory, 11, 32; Hesse, LeWitt influenced, 4–5, 10, 11, 16, 29, 30–34, 46; pedagogical method, 4–5, 30–32 Amusement Is. . . (exhib.), 54, 176(n61) Anastas, Rhea, 85 Andre, Carl: art, 69, 93, 94, 98, 100; and Hesse’s work, 7, 159–60; on LeWitt’s work, 167; poem, 27; and various exhibitions, 119, 141, 143 Anselmo, Giovanni, 154, 155 Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials (exhib.), 160, 161 Appell, Luba, 54 Autobiography (LeWitt), x, 1 Baer, Jo, 100 , 120, 143 Barthes, Roland, 98 Beauvoir, Simone de, 19, 40, 62, 73–74 Becker, Harvey, 11, 29 Bell, Larry, 69 Beuys, Joseph, 162, 164 Bochner, Mel: on antiwar graffiti, 145–46; Art in Series show, 124; on artistic intention, 6–7; and Hesse and LeWitt’s work, 5, 19, 116, 117; Hesse’s table photographed, 26, 27; on Hesse’s work, 6, 128, 148; on Johns’ “0 through 9,” 50; on LeWitt’s work, 16, 95, 96–98; and Primary Structures, 93, 94, 121; and Working Drawings, 19, 122

Bollinger, Bill, 162, 163 Brown, Barbara, 56–58, 57 Brown, Joan, 35, 37, 38, 175(n36) Buchloh, Benjamin, 8–9 Buren, Daniel, 145 Burton, Scott, 162 Butor, Michel, 78, 82, 101 Chandler, John, 23, 152 Charash, Helen Hesse, 2, 63–64, 177(n12) conceptual art, LeWitt on, 8–9, 22–23. See also specific artists and exhibitions Cooper, Paula, 141. See also LeWitt, Sol, works of: Drawing Project 1968 Crimp, Douglas, 157 “Crux of Minimalism, The” (Foster), 7–8 “Crystal Land, The” (Smithson), 83 Dada, 68 Daniels Gallery, LeWitt installation in, 59, 82–89, 83, 84, 85, 90–91 Danto, Arthur, 114–16 de Kooning, Willem, 35–37, 38, 41 De Maria, Walter, 61, 132 dematerialization, 23 Dewey, John, 30, 34 Doyle, Tom: on the Bowery artists, 18; in Germany, 62, 63, 65, 177(n11); on Hesse’s art, 62, 66; and Hesse’s reliefs, 76; and LeWitt, 43, 54, 59, 68, 69, 73; Lippard and, 69; marriage, 16, 19, 41–43, 59, 73, 91, 94; sculpture, 42, 43, 44, 93 Dubuffet, Jean, 35, 37, 175(n36) Duchamp, Marcel, 58, 65 Dunkell, Dr. Samuel, 35 Dwan, Virginia, 4, 91, 119–21, 181(n80) Dwan Galleries, LeWitt works in, 92, 95–104, 119–20, 134, 136–40 Earth Works (exhib.), 4, 131–33 Eccentric Abstraction (exhib.), 19, 21, 91, 112–17, 119, 128

Emery Roth and Sons, 89–90 “Entropy and the New Monuments” (Smithson), 86–87, 89, 181–82(n80) “Eros Presumptive” (Lippard), 112–13 erotic, the, 21, 108–13, 117–19, 124 Eva Hesse: Chain Polymers (exhib.), 26, 131, 133–36, 146–52, 147, 149 Eva Hesse: Recent Drawings (exhib.), 44–46, 45 factory fabrication, 18, 21, 44, 121, 136 Fahlström, Öyvind, 18, 44 figurative expressionism, 35–37 Flavin, Dan: art, 87, 89, 93, 94, 167; Kaymar show organized, 2, 54; and LeWitt, 2, 16, 54, 78, 167; and For Peace, 143 For Peace (exhib.), 141–45, 144 Foster, Hal, 7–8 Fried, Michael, 6 Friedan, Betty, 62, 73 gender and gender politics: and de Kooning’s women, 38; female artists and, 38–41, 59; and Hesse as artist, 5–6, 30, 40–41, 59, 62, 73–78, 152–53, 155, 158; in Hesse’s work, 19, 38–41, 39, 159–60; of labor, 21–22, 174(n49); marriage, 39, 40–41, 59 (see also under Hesse, Eva) Giacometti, Alberto, 175(n36) Gorky, Arshile, 65, 177(n15) Graham, Dan, 82–83, 183(n29); art, 82–83, 178(n49); and LeWitt, 5, 62, 78, 82, 91; on LeWitt’s work, 86, 87, 98; on Muybridge, 56 Greenberg, Clement, 9 Hartigan, Grace, 40 Heizer, Michael, 131, 132 Held, Al, 17 Hesse, Eva: and Abstract Expressionism, 12, 13, 18, 23–24, 29, 35–38, 59; artistic circles, 17–18, 43, 111–12, 119, 152, 181(n53); artistic

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ethos, 8; art training, 12, 29, 34–35, 175(n17); childhood and family, 2, 63–64, 76, 177(n12); on critics and her work, 179(n7); death, 24, 170; and gender/gender politics, 5–6, 19, 30, 40–41, 59, 62, 73–78, 152–53, 155, 158 (see also gender and gender politics); in Germany, 19, 45–46, 59, 62–78, 75, 79, 91, 178(n38); identity, 2–4, 40–41; influences, 15–16, 18, 34–37, 44, 46, 49 (see also specific artists); on LeWitt’s work, 16, 24, 95, 166, 167–69, 168, 169, 180(n13); marriage, 15–16, 19, 41–43, 59, 73, 91, 94 (see also Doyle, Tom); on nonart, 133, 146; photographs, 24–26, 25, 75, 79, 161, 174(nn61–62); psychotherapy, 35; and Sixteen Americans, 49; on structurist art, 129; studio, 16–17, 24–26, 25; studio table, 1, 25, 26, 27, 104, 174–75(n63), 178(n45). See also Hesse, Eva, works of; relationship of Hesse and LeWitt Hesse, Eva, works of: Abstract Expressionist paintings, 12, 13, 42, 43–44; “Accession” boxes (generally), 2, 58; Accession II, 20, 21, 22; Accession III, 135, 147, 151, 172; Accretion, 147; Addendum, 123–24, 125, 128; Aught, 155, 156, 157–58; Augment, 155–58, 156, 160; Chain Polymers exhibition, 26, 131, 133–36, 146–52, 147, 149; characteristics, 4; collages, 19, 30, 44–47, 45, 60, 66, 67; Connection, 160; Contingent, 10, 23–24; depoliticized body alluded to, 159–60; dialogue with LeWitt’s work, 95, 97, 133–36, 151; drawings exhibited (1961), 16, 17; Ear in a Pond, 75, 79; Expanded Expansion, 10, 160, 161; figural paintings, 34–35, 37,

38–41, 39, 175(n21); “Free Study with leaves,” 31, 46; gender/gender politics and, 19, 38–41, 39, 158, 159–60 (see also gender and gender politics); in Germany (1964–65), 19, 60, 63–78, 64, 65, 79, 91; after Germany (1965–67), 104–8, 106, 107, 111, 113–19, 115, 118; H + H, 76, 77; Hang Up, 105–8, 107, 114; intent, 7, 9, 10–11; Laocoön, 117–19, 118; Legs of a Walking Ball, 78, 79; LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 46 and, 170–72, 171; Long Life, 105; “mechanical drawings,” 19, 64, 65, 65–68, 67; Metronomic Irregularity II, 19, 114–17, 115, 119, 121, 170; move to three dimensions, 62–63, 69–78, 91; Ohne Titel (untitled collage), 60; process, 21–22, 23, 133–34, 172; Recent Drawings exhibition, 44–46, 45; Repetition 19 I (1967), 133–36, 134, 140–41; Repetition 19 III (1968), 21, 133, 135, 136, 138–41, 147; Ringaround Arosie, 69–70, 71, 74, 78, 128; “rope piece” (1970), 10, 160; Sans I, 162; Sans II (1968), 21, 147, 147; Schema, x, 1, 173(n1); self-portrait, 35, 37; Several, 113–17; and The 10, 119, 121; “test pieces,” 25, 26, 27, 30, 148–51, 149, 183(n47); 2 in 1, 74, 75, 128; untitled pieces related to Addendum, 124–28, 126, 127; Vinculum II, 162, 163; Washer Table, x, 1–4, 7, 22, 23, 81, 104, 173(nn1, 4), 178(n45); working drawings, 123, 123–24. See also Hesse, Eva; and specific exhibitions Hoene, Anne, 85, 86 Holt, Nancy, 94 Honig, Ethelyn, 17–18, 43–44, 58, 73 Huebler, Douglas, 141 Huot, Robert, 141 Huxtable, Ada Louise, 90

I. M. Pei (firm), 11, 15, 87–89, 88 “Impure Situation, An” (Lippard), 105–8 individual perception, 9–10 Interaction of Color (Albers), 5, 30–32, 31, 46 Johns, Jasper: art, 49–50, 51, 58; Hesse, LeWitt influenced, 29, 44, 47, 49–50, 61, 141 Judd, Donald: art, 61, 69, 87, 93, 94, 100, 120; on art and artists, 6, 50, 87, 94, 121, 181–82(n80); and Hesse’s work, 7, 16; “Kansas City Report,” 82; and For Peace, 143 Kaltenbach, Stephen, 154, 155 Kapteyn-van Bruggen, Coosje, 146 Kozloff, Max, 152, 158 Kramer, Hilton, 32–33, 96, 114 Krauss, Rosalind, 136 Landshoff, Hermann, photograph by, 24–26, 25, 174(nn61–62) Lebrun, Rico, 29, 34, 37, 38 Leider, Philip, 23–24, 133, 152, 158 LeWitt, Sol: in the 1950s, 12–16; on 1960s art, 7, 10–11; and Abstract Expressionism, 16, 23–24, 33; artistic circles, 16, 17–18, 29, 43; and the Chain Polymers exhibit, 148; commercial world left, 15–16, 29, 33; on conceptual art, 8–9, 22–23; as conceptual artist, 22–23, 33; and Doyle, 43, 68, 69, 73; ethos and personhood politics, 8; in Europe, 151; gender awareness, 6; on Hesse’s turn to three dimensions, 62; on his wall drawings, 143; identity, 2–4; influences, 16, 29–33, 49, 82 (see also specific artists); interest in structure, 59; on irrational judgments, 8–9; Kramer and, 33; and Metronomic Irregularity II, 19, 116, 121, 170; on narration, 56; other artists supported,

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17–18; on others’ minimizing of Hesse, 152; photographs, vi, 55, 84, 85, 130; on Sixteen Americans, 49. See also LeWitt, Sol, works of; relationship of Hesse and LeWitt LeWitt, Sol, works of: Abstract Expressionist paintings, 16; Autobiography, x, 1; boxes (1962–64), 54, 55; Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value, 4, 130; characteristics, 4; commercial design work, 87–89, 88; cubes (mid1960s), 58; Cube with Random Holes Containing an Object, 3, 3, 54, 82; Daniels Gallery installation, 59, 82–91, 83, 84, 85; “Dear Grace” (drawing), 85, 85; Double Modular Cube, 92, 95, 96–98; Drawing Project 1968, 141–44, 142; Dwan Gallery shows, 92, 95–104, 102, 103, 119–20, 134, 136–40, 137; figural paintings, 47–49, 48; 47 Three-Part Variations on Three Different Kinds of Cubes, 136–40, 137; Gemeentemuseum show, 166, 167, 170–72, 171; grids used, 59, 82, 92; Hesse’s dialogue with, 95, 97, 151; Hesse’s reflection on, 167–69, 168, 169; illustrations, 12; intent, 7, 9, 10–11; interactivity of viewer and, 61; Kaymar Gallery show, 2, 3, 81, 81; “Letter to a Boy” (illustration), 15, 15; Modular Floor Structure, 92, 96; “Muybridge” boxes (generally), 19, 55, 56–59, 86, 151; Muybridge I, 56–58, 57, 176–77(n69); Muybridge II, 56–58, 57; Nine Boxes, 54, 86, 151, 176(n61); Perrault on, 128; Run (1960), 50–51, 52; Run I (1962), 51, 53; Running Man, 48; Serial Project 1, x, 1, 25, 26, 27, 90,

98–104, 102, 103, 120; Seven-Part Variations on Two Different Kinds of Cubes, x, 1; sketches, 12, 14, 47–49; Street Scene, 12, 14; “structures” (1964–65), 81–82; subjectivity avoided, 24; Table Piece with Three Cubes, 3, 81; Table Structure (1964), 80, 81, 81 (see also Hesse, Eva, works of: Washer Table); Table Structure (with Stripes), 54, 55; three-dimensional paintings, 29; training and early work, 14; Wall Drawing 1, 142, 143; Wall Drawing 46, 170–72, 171; wall drawings, 10, 23–24, 116, 131–32, 140, 141–46, 142, 157, 162–64, 165, 170–72, 171; Washer Table base, 2, 3, 81, 81; white modular structures, 1, 21, 25, 26, 27, 92, 96–104, 97, 102, 103, 134; working drawings, 123, 123. See also LeWitt, Sol; and specific exhibitions Lippard, Lucy: on the dematerialization of art, 23, 152; Eccentric Abstraction exhibition, 19, 21, 112–17, 119, 128; on the erotic, 112–13, 128; on Hesse and LeWitt’s introduction, 173(n19); on Hesse as artist, 59, 155; Hesse’s association with, 17, 113; on Hesse’s works, 16, 22, 35, 105–8, 138; LeWitt’s association with, 16, 17; on LeWitt’s work, 86, 101; on paintingsculpture convergence, 69; and For Peace, 141–43; and Primary Structures, 93, 179(n3); on “third stream” art, 5, 61, 62–63, 69, 83, 87, 93 Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form... (exhib.), 24, 160–64, 163, 177(n13) Mangold, Robert, 17, 61, 78 Martin, Agnes, 120

mathematics, 121–22, 123–24, 136. See also specific artists McShine, Kynaston, 21, 63, 93–94, 179(n3). See also Primary Structures Meyer, Ursula, 133 Miller, Dorothy, 49 Minimalism: The 10 (exhibition), 119–21; Hesse and, 5, 113–19; LeWitt and, 5, 85–87; Sontag on, 128–29; Thek’s work and, 110–11. See also specific artists and exhibitions Molesworth, Helen, 144 Monte, James, 159, 160 Morris, Robert: abstract sculpture, 24, 58, 69, 87, 93, 94, 100; earthworks, 132; and Hesse’s work, 21; and Nine at Castelli, 131, 133, 152, 158 (see also Nine at Castelli); reliefs, 89; and The 10, 119, 120; and The Xerox Book, 141 Müller, Gregoire, 158 Museum of Modern Art: LeWitt and, 16; New Images of Man, 30, 37–38, 40, 49; Sixteen Americans, 30, 49–50 Muybridge, Eadweard, 47, 51, 54–56 New Images of Man (exhib.), 30, 37–38, 40, 49 New Realists, The (exhib.), 18 “New York Letter” (Lippard), 69 Nine at Castelli (exhib.), 131, 132–33, 152–59, 153, 154, 156 O’Doherty, Brian, 54 Oldenburg, Claes, 18, 108, 132, 162, 164 Oliveira, Nathan, 35, 37, 175(n36) Other Tradition, The (exhib.), 56, 108–11, 112 “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt), 33, 95 Perreault, John, 128, 132, 132, 148, 151–52, 157–58

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Petersen, Valerie, 44 Picabia, Francis, 68, 177(n16) Piper, Adrian, 139–41, 140 Pollock, Jackson, 24, 153–54, 157 Pop Art, 18, 44, 63, 70, 87, 110. See also Warhol, Andy Primary Structures (exhib.), 21, 63, 91, 93–94, 111, 121, 179(n3) Raffaele, Joseph, 94, 108, 109–10, 111–12 Rauschenberg, Robert, 49, 175(n36) relationship of Hesse and LeWitt: 1965–68, 19; artistic exchange, 4; “best friends,” 1, 17; correspondence, 68–69, 70–73, 72, 78–81, 80, 82, 104–5, 178(n30); deepened, 59, 68–69; growing distance, 151; Hesse piece given to LeWitt, 124–28, 126; Hesse’s reflection on, 24, 167–69, 168, 169; after Hesse’s separation, 94, 180(n9); Honig on, 17–18; introduction, 11, 29, 30, 173(n19); and LeWitt’s awareness of gender inequality, 6; tables exchanged, x, 1–2, 25, 26, 27, 178(n45) (see also Eva Hesse, works of: Washer Table; Hesse, Eva: studio table); and The 10, 119; and Wall Drawing 46, 24, 170–71 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 101–4 Roberts, Veronica, 54 Rose, Barbara, 58, 153–54 Rose, Bernice, 157 Roth, Richard, 90 Rubin, William, 37 Ryman, Robert, 16, 17, 54 Saletnik, Jeffrey, 30 Saret, Allan, 162, 163 Saul, Peter, 128 Scheidt, Arnhard, 62, 66, 68 “Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects” (Smithson), 131 Selz, Peter, 37

“Sentences on Conceptual Art” (LeWitt), 8–9, 138–39 Serra, Richard: art (generally), 24, 154, 155, 157–58, 162, 164; and Hesse, 21; Splashing, 153, 153, 157, 158; Verb List, 152 Seventeen magazine, 12, 15, 15 Shape and Structure (exhib.), 69 Siegelaub, Seth, 141 Sixteen Americans (exhib.), 30, 49–50 Slutzky, Robert, 11, 29 Smithson, Robert: art, 5, 27, 82–83, 93, 100, 120, 178(n50); on art as commodity, 144, 145; and Earth Works, 4, 131; essays, 82, 86–87, 89, 131, 181–82(n80); on Hesse’s work, 117; and LeWitt, 62, 82, 97, 104; and The 10, 119, 120, 181(n80) Sontag, Susan, 10, 128–29 Spero, Nancy, 40 Stella, Frank, 6, 9, 49, 61, 89 “structures” as art form, 61, 69. See also specific artists and exhibitions Swenson, Gene, 94, 108, 109–10, 112 Szeemann, Harald, 24, 65, 160, 177(n13). See also Live in Your Head

Viner, Frank Lincoln, 162, 163 Visser, Martin, 2–4 Vollmer, Ruth, 26 Wapner, Grace: LeWitt works for, 3, 54, 82, 85, 85, 178(n45); studio, 17, 43 Warhol, Andy, 15, 18, 44 Wasserman, Emily, 147–48, 160 Watanabe, Jo, 172 Weiner, Lawrence, 141, 162 Weinrib, David, 59 When Attitudes Become Form . . . (exhib.). See Live in Your Head Wiley, William T., 112 Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art (exhib.), 19, 122, 122–24, 123 Xerox Book, The, 141 Young America: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty Six (exhib.), 175(n36) “Ziggurats” (LeWitt), 18–19, 90

tables. See Hesse, Eva: studio table; Hesse, Eva, works of: Washer Table 10, The (exhib.), 100, 119–21, 181(n80). See also specific artists Thek, Paul, 94, 109–12, 111, 181(n53) “Third Stream, The: Constructed Paintings and Painted Structures” (Lippard), 61, 62–63, 83, 87, 93 Three Young Americans (exhib.), 16, 17 Tinguely, Jean, 65 Todd, Mike, 94, 109–12, 181(n53); Fetish II, 108, 109 Tucker, Marcia, 18, 22, 159, 160 Tuttle, Richard, 162, 163 Twombly, Cy, 44, 46

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