School Notes: School of Art
November/December 2011

An artist’s formative years

Four decades after the death at age 34 of Eva Hesse ’59BFA, the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art has mounted an exhibition of 19 oil paintings that Hesse created shortly after graduating from the Yale School of Art. Hesse (1936–1970) has become internationally renowned for sculptures she rendered beginning in the mid-1960s, but this is the first time that her early paintings have been on view. Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 presents a “young painter establishing her own creative identity,” according to the museum’s website, and features what the exhibition curator calls Hesse’s “spectre” paintings—referring to both the mood of the paintings and the artist’s examination of herself and her work. Eva Hesse Spectres 1960 is on view at the Brooklyn Museum through January 9, 2012.