Research Catalog

Title

Eva Hesse : longing, belonging and displacement / Vanessa Corby.

Author

Corby, Vanessa

Publication

London : I. B. Tauris, 2010.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

Hesse, Eva, 1936-1970

Description

xviii, 250 p., [8] p. of plates : ill. (some col.); 24 cm.

Summary

From the Publisher: In the ten years between 1960 and 1970, German-born American artist Eva Hesse produced one of the most compelling art practices of the twentieth century. Her death in 1970 has been a profound loss for contemporary art but the creative legacies of her practice continue to impact upon today's artists. In this book, Vanessa Corby presents a fascinating new analysis that starts from and circles back to two drawings made by Eva Hesse in 1960-61. Written from the position of a painter, the book develops a novel art historical method to consider the manner in which artistic protocols and processes negotiate and transform culturally mediated historical experience. Hesse's encounters with the work of Rico Lebrun, the growing cultural significance of The Diary of Anne Frank, and the capture and trial of Adolf Eichmann are each situated in relation to the artist's processes of picturing in order to supplement and shift current understanding of Hesse's art practice. Corby aims to show that the artist's work emerged in parallel with the recognition of the event now named 'the Holocaust' in American culture. Thus this groundbreaking text does not claim that Hesse's work is about the Holocaust. Instead, it positions her artistic practice and sense of identity as an artist as the product of a desire to belong, a longing precipitated by her initial displacement caused by forced emigration from Germany in 1939, and a longing re-invoked by the specific cultural and political contexts of 1950s and 1960s America.

Series Statement

New encounters. Arts, cultures, concepts

Uniform Title

New encounters (London, England)

Alternative Title

Longing, belonging and displacement

Subject

• Hesse, Eva, 1936-1970 > Criticism and interpretation
• Women artists > United States
• Jewish artists > United States
• Holocaust survivors > United States
• Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) > Germany
• Desire in art
• Displacement (Psychology) in art

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [239]-246) and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

List of illustrations -- Acknowledgements -- Series preface -- Introduction -- 1: Skipping text, reading pictures -- 2: Addendum : hemispheres and loose ends -- 3: Cultural memory, trauma and absented history -- 4: Wives, daughters and other(ed) differences -- 5: Longing, belonging and displacement: Evan Hesse's Art-working 1960-1961 -- In place of a conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.

ISBN

• 9781845115432 (hbk.)
• 1845115430 (hbk.)
• 9781845115449 (pbk.)
• 1845115449 (pbk.)

LCCN

^^2010537051

OCLC

• 502422086
• SCSB-10669004

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library