I'm halfway through Lucy Lippard's Eva Hesse, a book I've been meaning to read for years and one remarkable in its balance. Both biography and critical analysis, it's illustrated abundantly but in plain-paper black & white (it works); and, while there are many excerpts from Hesse's diaries and letters, the reader feels a level of privacy respected, perhaps because Lippard and Hesse were friends.

Much of what's been written about Eva Hesse has concentrated on the extremes and tragic aspects of her childhood and early death instead of her art. (She died of a brain tumor when she was 34, "at the height of her powers," though who knows how high she might have gone.) I appreciate that Lippard's book tells more about Hesse's growth as an artist and her everyday studio life, the making of drawings and sculptures, and about her struggles pursuing this life/career as a young woman in the 1960s.



some notes:
"There were miles of that string there. The string was what really got her going."
"You could date them by the way the color became less and less important."
"a vocabulary of shapes"
"absolutely straightforward and devoid of modulations"
"I use a word for its sound"
"No more haze"
"Plaster!... Its whiteness is right."
"You belong in the most secret part of you"
"leaving behind shadows"
"I saw her as a very interior person making psychic models."
"if there had been more time"