“Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt”
When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays, 1 to 5 p.m. Sundays through May 18
Where: Blanton Museum of Art, 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
Tickets: $5-$9 (Free on Thursdays)
Information: 512-471-7324, www.blantonmuseum.org
Upcoming
What: Art critic Lucy Lippard on her friendship with Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt
When: 1 p.m. Saturday
Tickets: Free with museum admission
Some 39 replicated postcards line a gallery wall in “Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt,” the sublime exhibit now at the Blanton Museum of Art that illuminates the fascinating friendship of two major post-war American artists.
When not rubbing elbows in the heady creative climate of 1960s Lower Manhattan, Hesse and LeWitt corresponded, encouraging each other in their artistic pursuits — or simply amusing each other.
“I hope this doesn’t scare you,” LeWitt wrote to Hesse in 1967, sending her a bizarrely funny postcard of an ancient Egyptian mummified bull.
Organized by Veronica Roberts, the Blanton’s curator of modern and contemporary art, “Converging Lines” features more than 50 artworks by the two artists, including many that have not been publicly exhibited for decades.
Commanding prominent placement in the exhibit are five of LeWitt’s wall drawings — large drawings executed by other artists according to LeWitt’s almost elliptical instructions.
For “Wall Drawing #46” — featured in the Blanton exhibit — which LeWitt made in honor of Hesse after her premature death at age 34 in 1970, LeWitt wrote: “Vertical lines, not straight, not touching, uniformly dispersed with maximum density covering the entire surface of the wall.”
While art historians have long pointed out the influence that LeWitt had on Hesse, little recognition has been given to the reciprocal influence Hesse had on LeWitt, who died in 2007 at age 78 and whose career as a key practitioner of minimal and conceptual art is much recognized.
Roberts hopes “Converging Lines” illuminates the creative reciprocity between Hesse and LeWitt.
“Part of my impetus to do this exhibit was to make sure people understood that Hesse had a profound impact on LeWitt’s work,” Roberts said. “They each made each other better artists.”
LeWitt and Hesse are often considered opposites.
LeWitt challenged the notion of what art can be by suggesting that the concept or idea is more important than the art object itself. Simplified, neutral shapes — most notably the cube, but also grids and squares and circles — became the basic modular units for much of his artistic output. And his oft-cited quote, “the idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” is upheld as a manifesto for conceptualists.
Hesse’s paintings and sculptures, on the other hand, are indelibly linked to the body with biomorphic forms and organic edges, everything handmade and personal.
Hesse is often labeled “post-minimalism” while LeWitt is often regarded as the archetype of minimalism.
Both born to Jewish parents, Hesse by all accounts was an extrovert while LeWitt was more circumspect. Hesse immigrated to the United States in 1939 after her family fled Nazi Germany. LeWitt was the only son of Russian-Jewish immigrants who settled in Hartford, Conn., where he was born.
Both landed in New York in the 1950s, drawn to the city’s percolating avant garde creative community at the time.
And in an odd bit of Austin serendipity to the Hesse-LeWitt friendship, Robert Slutzky, a former architecture professor at the University of Texas, first introduced Hesse and LeWitt in the late 1950s. (Slutzky and LeWitt worked for famed architect I.M. Pei at the time.)
By the early 1960s, Hesse and LeWitt were living blocks away from each other in Lower Manhattan along with a burgeoning circle of creatives, including Donald Judd, Robert Smithson and Dan Flavin, among many others.
And in spite of the differences in their artistic processes and styles, Hesse and LeWitt developed a close friendship, one that reveals itself in their correspondence. (The two never had a romantic relationship, though LeWitt admitted having a crush on Hesse after they first met.)
Roberts points out that LeWitt was alert to how difficult a female artist had it in the male-dominated art world.
LeWitt “recognized how sexist the art world was,” Roberts says. “He saw how his smart female colleagues suffered from the blindness of curators and collectors at the time.”
Roberts includes in the exhibit a five-page letter LeWitt wrote to Hesse in 1965 when she was in Germany for a 15-month residency, during which she had doubts about the sculptures she was making.
“Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out,” LeWitt starts his letter. “Stop it and just DO!”
Though for “Converging Lines” Roberts neatly pairs artworks by Hesse and LeWitt to demonstrate the aesthetic conversations the two artists maintained despite their different artistic approaches, including the letters and postcards illuminates something else equally important, she says.
“I’m interested in how our friendships feed who we become,” Roberts says. “And when you have amazing champions — like the way Eva and Sol championed each other — you can do better things and achieve more.”
And for two artists categorically described as cerebral, the postcards reveal a somewhat unknown side to both artists.
LeWitt “had a great sense of humor and loved absurdity. They both did. And that sense of fun is really in evidence in the postcards,” Roberts says. “People miss out on the humor in Sol’s work and in conceptual art in general.”
When Hesse died of a brain tumor on May 29, 1970, LeWitt immediately conceived of “Wall Drawing #46” in her honor for an exhibit in Paris opening mere days later. For the first time in his work, LeWitt used “not straight” lines, a tribute to Hesse’s more organic forms. LeWitt filled a 9-foot-by-9-foot wall with delicate, wavy lines in graphite pencil, marking the first time the artist left his linear logic behind, an impulse that continued to ricochet throughout his work for the rest of his career.
LeWitt kept “Wall Drawing #46” in his personal collection, including it in nearly every major exhibition of his work.
“I wanted to do something at the time of her death that would be a bond between us, in our work. So I took something of hers and mine and they worked together well. You may say it was her influence on me,” LeWitt later explained.
That influence appears in “Wall Drawing #797” from 1995 — a visual frenzy of irregular red, yellow and blue marker — also included in the Blanton exhibit. (The Blanton hired 39 UT art students to create the LeWitt wall drawings for the exhibit.)
Roberts conceived of a Hesse/LeWitt exhibit several years ago, mounting a smaller version at a New York gallery several years ago. After joining the Blanton staff in early 2013, Roberts expanded her research to organize the current exhibit.
Roberts first worked with LeWitt in 2000 when the artist was mounting a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Roberts was charged with hiring all the draftsman needed to create several of LeWitt’s wall drawings. Last year, Roberts consulted with UT’s public art program on the installation of “Wall Drawing #520,” a geometric composition of floating cubes in rich colors, at the new Dell Computer Science Hall and Bill and Melinda Gates Computer Science Center.
But Roberts’ first encounter with LeWitt instigated a professional friendship between the two that continued until the artist died in 2007. At LeWitt’s invitation, Roberts served as the director of research for the “Sol LeWitt Wall Drawings Catalogue Raisonné,” the definitive catalog of the almost 1,300 wall drawings the artist conceived.
And Roberts and LeWitt exchanged postcards, too.
Thus the inclusion of the 39 postcards she uncovered in Hesse's archive at Oberlin College. (As a digital component to the exhibit, the Blanton created a Tumblr blog featuring many of the postcards LeWitt sent to Hesse at converginglinesbma.tumblr.com.)
“Sol sent copious numbers of postcards to everyone he knew,” says Roberts. “Every morning no matter where he was, he’d sit down and dash off a stack of postcards. He just loved to do it.”
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