Datebooks, 1964/65

In 1964-5, Eva Hesse lived with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, in Kettwig-on-the-Ruhr, Germany, at the invitation of a European art collector.

During this time, as she did throughout most of her life, Hesse kept diaries and made extensive notations in datebook calendars.

These two datebooks, published for the first time as facsimile editions, are accompanied by a third volume that includes an essay on their significance in the artist's career as well as full transcriptions and annotations.

The "1964/65 Datebooks" impart astonishingly rich personal details about the artist's life: whom she met and where, which books she read, and which films and exhibitions she had seen and what impression they made on her.

Hesse's notations also reveal invaluable insights into the German art scene of the mid-1960s, her transition from working with drawings and painting to sculpture, her often conflicted artistic ambitions, the stresses of her marriage, and the difficulties of returning to Germany, a country she fled as a child with her parents in 1938 in order to escape the Nazis.