A bright, but brief star

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Eva Hesse traced a brief but brilliant trajectory as an art-world star in the 1960s but has remained largely unknown by a larger audience.

This intellectually thorough and emotionally affecting documentary aims to change that. First-time director Marcie Begleiter offers a deep dive into Hesse’s creative process and a detailed inventory of her influential work.

In a more general sense, Begleiter has crafted a moving examination of age, time and memory. Looking back to a particular moment in New York history, when things were a bit grotty but a painter could rent a half-block of loft studio space in lower Manhattan, she focuses on a generation of young, fearless, restlessly experimental artists.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2b8m9D0mK0

Many of the heedless kids featured in the super-cool black-and-white archival photos make repeat appearances in the present day as talking heads. Begleiter interviews, among others, art writer Lucy Lippard, sculptor Richard Serra, environmental artist Nancy Holt, Hesse’s former husband Tom Doyle, all now grey-haired and lined and maybe a little weary. Only Hesse herself, seen in those old photographs, remains forever young and beautiful, poignantly and passionately alive.

Through excerpts from her letters and journals (voiced by Selma Blair), we get a sense of Hesse’s personality — driven, intense, vivid, always drawing others to her.

But we get to know her best, perhaps, through her work. After making a breakthrough with expanded three-dimensional paintings, Hesse started working on revolutionary sculptural pieces that made use of found objects and new artistic materials such as plastic, fibreglass, electrical wire and latex. Hesse’s art sometimes started with the geometric grids of minimalism, but she would transform these rationalist structures into something organic, unpredictable, erotic, emotional — even a little absurd.

As we often see in biopics, this extraordinary creative peak coincided with a personal crisis. Even if you don’t know about Hesse’s life, you will recognize that something dark and threatening is on its way. It’s no surprise when we reach the ominous chapter title: “We realized something was wrong.”

The idea that art comes out of suffering can be a cheap romantic cliché, but Begleiter gives the relationship between Hesse’s art and life a specific and hard-headed examination.

Hesse was born into a German-Jewish family in Hamburg in 1936. At age two, she and her sister were sent out of the country on a Kindertransport train. Their parents managed to join them in 1939, but Hesse’s extended family was murdered by the Nazis, a trauma from which their already fragile mother never recovered.

These early horrors of family loss and historical tragedy cast shadows over her later life. She had bouts of crippling self-doubt and was beset by feelings of isolation and anxiety. Art became her way of working through this pain.

Hesse also struggled to make her place in what was then an aggressively masculine art world, to be counted among “the Big Boys,” as one commentator puts it. Consider Hesse’s wry summary of Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist text, The Second Sex: “I’ve always thought that women were up against it. Simone kind of agrees.”

Making her documentary debut, Begleiter can struggle with pacing. She sometimes relies too heavily on voice-overs and slightly arbitrary historical footage. But she captures the bright, brave aura of her subject.

As one friend says of Hesse: “Everything that happened to her, good and bad, empowered her.

“That’s the magnificence of art.”

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca