‘No Title’ (1960) is part of a group of paintings dubbed ‘Spectre’ by Luanne McKinnon, which Hesse made when she was 24. At the time Hesse had just graduated from Yale School of Art, under the tutelage of Josef Albers and Rico Lebrun — one a former Bauhaus director, the other a classical trained painter. Moving on from the conflicting nature of her tutors, Hesse found the outside art world teetering on Abstract Expressionism, while Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns were nudging it toward Pop and Conceptual Art.
‘The hell with them all,’ she wrote in her journal a few weeks before her graduation. ‘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.’
And paint she did, making about 50 oils on canvas and Masonite in the course of a year. She was living in the West Village, in her first real apartment, squeezing in studio hours around various part-time jobs. She was in therapy too, processing the events of her extraordinarily difficult childhood from fleeing Nazi German, to her parent’s divorcee and ultimately her depression prone mothers suicide. A series of tortured apparitions emerged from her brush: big, skeletal heads pressed up against the picture plane, or smaller wraiths dancing or fighting, reminiscent of works be Wilhelm de Kooning, Alberto Giacometti or Arshile Gorky. She handled the paint with abandon, but restricted her palette to smoggy greys and yellows, enlivened by the occasional flash of orange or magenta.
‘No Title’ is a vulnerable canvas, using experimental brushstrokes and thick impasto; the painting depicts two loosely rendered figures positioned in lushly painted vacant pictorial space. These willowy sylphs portray an apparent disconnection between one body and another, and yet, the pictorial drama of the works would be incomplete without the presence of each figure. The palpable space or separation between the two figures may have been Hesse’s way of negotiating the relationships of the couple, whether it be the dyad of mother and child; the bond of siblings or of husband and wife. As Helen Molesworth noted the eeriness of the paintings has less to do with their subject matter than with Hesse’s ‘vacillating movement between flesh and paint, line and abstraction, figure and ground.’
The ‘Spectres’, over all, are incredibly private works; Hesse made them for herself and did not show them during her lifetime. She literally painted her Self out, these works are a manifestation of her own introspection of coming to terms with herself through form and material and commencing her position as an artist. Even now, looking at them can feel a bit intrusive. But by watching Hesse ‘paint herself out,’ we can see just how, and with what difficulty, she navigated her way into the art world and embraced her burgeoning maturity.