CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/2/2019

Be amazed by 'Eva Hesse: Oberlin Drawings'

Featured spread is from Eva Hesse: Oberlin Drawings. An extraordinary 2019 title, this 428-page collection of more than 350 drawings in the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College is a two-inch-thick brick of a book with creamy, matte paper and exquisite reproductions. "Rather than saying that drawing expresses Hesse's deepest feelings," Briony Fer writes, "maybe we could say that it was a way of articulating her frustration—that is, the shortfall between the wanting and the having, the thwarting and the satisfaction, that is vital to creative life. In this sense the need to draw is—not so simply—the drive to carry on making work. Doing things on paper was not a substitute for doing supposedly more important things like make a painting or a sculpture—but what Hesse did because she was an artist (and not just a doodler)."