Eve Hesse Spectres 1960 offers a rare opportunity to look and think carefully about one year in an artist’s career, in this case a very early one. E. Luanne McKinnon’s selection of nineteen paintings (all Untitled) from among the four dozen Eva Hesse made in 1960 offers a satisfying range of small studies and larger compositions, and their hanging within a single gallery at the Hammer allows for provocative overlaps and differences to come forward, leading the viewer confidently into the artist’s thought process. The unobtrusive wall texts that accompany some and not others of these so far rarely exhibited paintings encourage not engagement with historical context so much as interpretation of the work in the present.

The exhibition reveals that it is not fruitful to read Hesse’s early paintings through the lens of her later work—to spy in her muted, square canvases the circular squares, wrapped surfaces, and heavy bodily addendums that characterize the later sculptural language for which she is best known. Doing so would be an injustice to the sophistication with which she engages a set of painterly questions still urgent to someone who finished art school at the end of the 1950s. Yet, at the same time, the work reveals enough of a minimalist’s manner of working—in the pursuit of a system for managing the figurative, abstract, and textured terms that make up painting’s visual language, for example—that it warrants framing within a larger discursive matrix than that provided by the wall text at the opening of the exhibition, centered around the notion of the artist’s existential crisis. In the catalogue, one finds in Helen Molesworth’s wonderfully balanced essay the attribution of both “self” and “system” to Hesse’s practice. But the text on the wall at the Hammer encourages viewers to understand the work solely in terms of Hesse’s “existential challenge,” offering as explanation the biographical fact that in 1960 the young artist was facing life after graduate school. The paintings are a record of “an intense reckoning at the start of her career . . . more on a psychological level than a formal one.” However sympathetic one may feel to Hesse’s “struggle” to incorporate the influence of her teachers into her own practice, that effort in itself is mundane (what creative person hasn’t labored to find something to say?) and says little about the work. We do the artist and ourselves a greater service if we focus on what she came up with at the end of the day, rather than on how hard it was. It also unfortunately still seems necessary to point out that we do not as often make or hear such observations about artists who are men.

This is not to say, however, that tentativeness and ambiguity are not thematized in Hesse’s project. Her work’s foregrounding of texture, stroke, flat field, and edge shows that she is a modernist, and that, like many of her forbears from earlier in the century, her emphasis on medium opens the painting up to a vision or consideration of practice. Practice, for Hesse, is even more loose-ended and incomplete than it appears in the work of Monet or Kandinsky. Her painting takes place at the limits of solidity and legibility. It leans out into the nothing of ambiguity and fluidity, as if to see what will spring up to fill the space at the tipping point between negation and possibility.

Hesse’s figuration is undoubtedly closest to Willem De Kooning’s. The exhibition begins with a work that owes much in both form and color to so-called biomorphic abstractions by De Kooning such as The Marshes (1945). Hesse’s many figure pairs also recall De Kooning’s pairs of women. Indeed, what seems to be important in many of the paintings by Hesse on view is the exploration of two terms in relation, placed against or within a simple, abstract ground. Pairs of figures appear in no less than twelve of the exhibition’s paintings, and in nearly all of these, their points of connection are charged, either through the artist’s intense working or through the central position occupied by that joined area.

Through these couples, Hesse explored a wide variety of connective means. In some, loosely suggested, nearly abstract figures join at the arms or hands, dancelike. In others, limbs reach across wider distances. In others still, one figure’s edge abuts or presses tightly against another’s. In the case of the latter, the boundary is often especially nuanced, thick with layers and revealing thin edges of color not seen elsewhere in the painting. In one of the larger examples of a pair with a significant boundary between them, a full-bodied figure made up entirely of loose, “expressive” strokes wrestles with a hulking, grey humanoid plane. Each occupies foreground or background firmly, and yet where their two bodies meet the arm of the grey figure reaches back toward the head of the colorful figure, whose leg, in turn, reaches into the foreground where the grey figure presumably stands, as if to swipe its legs out from under it in one smooth move. The combative boundary between the two bodies thus becomes not only the site of dramatic relation but also the section that establishes the picture’s illusion of three-dimensional space.

Even when Hesse paints only a single figure, its boundary is usually pressed upon by another large, abstract form. Along one wall at the Hammer are three examples. A crescent-shaped “hat” far larger than any Napoleon would have worn looms absurdly over a yellow, worried face. In another, a minimal, masked head rendered in bandage-like strips of grey is contained within a dripping, grungy halo. In the third, a head and shoulders with visionless, asymmetrical eyes and a stamped set of red, Man Ray lips is crowded by a colorless cloud. Each of these paintings presents a personage burdened or counterbalanced by something else, something more formless than a face, but equally forceful. Thus whereas in sculpture Hesse would later find the means to fuse two conceptually opposed terms into a single object (a testicular breast, a drooping vertical, or an impressionable shell), painting, for her, seems to have required entities to maintain their integrity and difference to a much greater extent. On painting’s flat surface, for Hesse, two do not become one. In this she differs markedly from both de Kooning’s biomorphic abstractions, in which one form flows into another, primordial-soup-fashion, and from his pairs of figures, which are often identical or twinned.

Difference in Hesse’s painting of 1960 is importantly not conceived in legibly gendered terms. Rather, the figures often seem to differ along an axis with “skeletal” at one end and “fleshly” at the other. Hesse establishes the iconography of the skull in a large work depicting a single figure with a gray, bony, tapered-mushroom of a head, poised atop a set of more colorful shoulders. When the tapered head appears in other paintings, it is usually the cap to a slim bodily form consisting of a few strokes, often collapsed into a column along the painting’s edge. In these smaller panels, this figure is accompanied by another similarly reduced, but much more expansive, standing figure with contrastingly round breasts and belly. Sometimes the two are alienated, a plane of ochre wedged between them. In another example, the rounded figure seems to coax and bring the skeleton along. Difference, then, is established not through the bodily language of concavity versus protrusion, but, rather, that of armature and volume, structure and material, grid and accident. Hesse seems to have given such concepts, crucial to any painterly endeavor, figurative incarnations as she negotiated their relation more broadly in each painting as a whole.

McKinnon begins both the exhibition and the catalogue with a truly rich quote from the artist’s journals: “The hell with them all. Paint yourself out, through and through, it will come by you alone. You must come to terms with your own work not with any other being” (7). In light of the system so vividly on display in this concentrated exhibition and fully illustrated publication—one through which Hesse successfully developed a negative, figurative painterly language—it seems necessary to re-read her words and find their emphasis to be not on self-definition, but on the practice, the work, that provided a way out of individualistic agonies. For Hesse’s generation, after all, the work of art was to be, as Robert Morris put it, “less self-important.”