Eva Hesse

"Art of the border of uncontrollability" and its maker are poignantly portrayed in Marcie Begleiter's documentary "Eva Hesse," using archival footage, interviews with artist friends and her sister Helen, as well as her diaries and calendar entries (read by Selma Blair).

A Jew born in Germany just as Hitler was coming to power, she, Helen and her parents were able to flee the country as the rest of her relatives were deported to concentration camps (she was three when her parents put her on the Kindertransport to London via Holland).

"Smart, articulate and beautiful," Hesse (pronounced Hess-uh) ended up in New York City when the art world was burgeoning, vital, experimental and yet to be "commodified." She hated Pratt, but loved the art school at Cooper Union, and began work at Seventeen Magazine when she graduated.

In a community of "happenings," she began to produce "messy, drippy, abstract" pastiches from different materials, many well-named creations moving into three dimensions off the canvas.

She married fellow artist, sculptor (and alcoholic) Tom Doyle (who converted to Judaism to please her father), and spent 1964 in an old Kettwig, Germany, textile factory creating "empowering" work, using found, leftover manufacturing materials. While prolific, she was still melancholic being in her homeland, revisiting some of her murdered relatives' old homes.

In 1964, the couple did the grand tour of European museums as "food for her eyes." Upon their return to the US, she began to "create a new universe of art," moving from "post-abstract expressionism, to a funny kind of surrealism, to minimalism," reaching "a point of no return," a friend notes.

Her "preface to feminist" output had "no curves, no color" and was "all about presentation." Hesse "got high on the ridiculousness of it." She enjoyed not being in control, having "the universe pull the strings [and many of her pieces included actual strings or string-like structures]; just step back and enjoy it."

She divorced flirtatious Tom, and her beloved father died in 1966 during a trip to Europe (her bi-polar mother had committed suicide when she was ten), which caused Hesse to become "obsessed with making it." During that period, her large-scale, 3D work was characterized as "rectangular systems with chaos, absurdity, humor and crudeness."

Male contemporaries continued to get more attention, shows, and support, and she just wanted to be considered an artist, not a woman artist: "excellence has no sex."

She shopped on lower Manhattan's Canal Street to procure industrial waste materials, which "lost their junky quality" in her hands. She would "play with the materials until their form had an impact." One contemporary notes, "her art was in the making; the artifact was the leftover." Hesse played with latex, Fiberglas, and polymers, and gravity's effect on them, inventing a new process of rubberizing cheesecloth to create "distinctive, fragile and tentative" pieces that collectors were starting to purchase and prominent galleries, such as the Whitney, were showing.

No one is sure whether her utilizing chemical components caused her brain tumor or not, but her frequent headaches finally brought her to the hospital, where she had multiple operations. Hesse made peace with "living in the moment," while creating flat, yet intriguing, Rothko-esque paper paintings during her recuperation.

The cancer returned, and she died in 1970 at age 35.

Forty-three years later, several retrospectives of her prolific and ground-breaking work have been mounted in Germany and London, where a patron observes her essence remains in her work: "The artist is embedded in what you're looking at."

Hesse considered her pieces ephemeral, since the materials she used might degrade. "Life doesn't last; art doesn't last," she said. "It doesn't matter."

But she does, and it does, and this film captures Hesse's important work for current audiences who might have missed her brief yet fecund period of thought-provoking productivity.

For screening information, visit http://www.evahessedoc.com