Hesse’s Lewitt Table & Lewitt’s Hesse Table

a black and white photo of eva hesse, a young white woman with dark straight hair lying on a velvet divan in an art studio, with her arms at her sides, and she is covered with what looks like cord or spaghetti. above her is a ziggurat-shaped sculpture sticking out from the wall. at the bottom of the image is a clutterd coffee table, painted white with a grid on it, and a buch of stuff. hermann landshoff took this pic for harper's bazaar, and kirsten swenson used it on the cover of her 2015 book on hesse, irrational judgments — Eva Hesse photographed by Harper’s Bazaar’s Hermann Landshoff in her Bowery studio, 1968-69

After the immediate bafflement of whatever Eva Hesse is covered with, I find my eye rushing to the isolated, geometric certainty of Robert Smithson’s untitled ziggurat sculpture. And only then does it head to the cluttered table, filled with items obscuring a painted grid, which turns out to be a gift from Hesse’s friend, Sol Lewitt.

Anna M. Chave made a close read of the objects, works, studies, and models on the table in her 1996 book, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe. I’m gonna be real, right now I’m here for the table itself, and mostly for the table it replaced.

a black and white photo of geometric artworks in a gallery, including a table-shaped sculpture painted with a grid of squares, with three open cubes on it, a 1964 work by sol lewitt — Installation view of Sol Lewitt’s Table Piece with Three Cubes, 1964, since destroyed, at Kaymar Gallery, published in Irrational Judgments

In 1967, Hesse made Washer Table out of a low-slung, plywood table that had been given to her by Lewitt. It began as part of a Lewitt table/sculpture he made for a group show in 1964. After that show—curated by Dan Flavin—Lewitt tried it in another sculpture, then cut it down to coffee table height and gave it to Hesse. She, in turn, covered its grid-painted surface with thousands of rubber washers and a sheet of glass, and gave it back.

It’s recognized as one of Hesse’s first sculptural objects now, and one of the first to use rubber, but Hesse herself considered the placement of around 5,700 washers to be a form of drawing. Lewitt explained to art historian Kirsten Swenson that Hesse “only used the surface of the table as a drawing surface before returning it to me.”

a black and white photo of sol lewitt's loft, with a low glass topped coffee table on an old wood floor, in front of a low bench with some pillows and a bookcase behind. the coffee table has a bunch of stuff neatly lined up across it, but it is actually, or eventually, an artwork by eva hesse — Eva Hesse’s Washer Table, 1967, in a 1968 photo of Sol Lewitt’s studio from the Lewitt Archive, as published in 2015 in Irrational Judgments by Kirsten Swenson

The timeline is not clear here, but the table sure is. Swenson opens her 2015 book, Irrational Judgments: Eva Hesse, Sol Lewitt, and 1960s New York, with this 1968 snapshot of Washer Table being used as a table in Lewitt’s Hester St. studio. It, too, is covered with studies, models, objets, tchotchkes, an ashtray arranged, as Swenson puts it, “as if fixed to points on an invisible grid.”

a taupe walled townhouse gallery with a wrought iron stair rail along the back has a cluster of framed drawings on one wall, and a dark grey square table-like sculpture on the hardwood floor, washer table by eva hesse is covered with 5700 rubber washers. the craig starr gallery showed it in 2011 — 2011 installation view of *Washer Table* in *Eva Hesse & Sol Lewitt* at Craig Starr Gallery

The tchotchkes—and the glass—were gone by 2011, when Washer Table was shown at Craig Starr Gallery in 2011, in a Hesse/Lewitt exhibition curated by Veronica Roberts. Amy Whitaker has a nice account of visiting the show on art21, and meeting Lewitt’s widow and Hesse’s sister.

Eva Hesse, Washer Table, 1967, 8 1/2 x 49 1/2 x 49 1/2 in., rubber washers, painted wood, metal, silver gelatin print in the Eva Hesse Archive, Allen Art Collection, Oberlin College

Among the Eva Hesse Archive at Oberlin’s Allen Art Museum [donated by Hesse’s sister Helen Hesse Charash] is the best photo of Washer Table. Where it looks even less painted than in Lewitt’s studio. In fact, it looks downright unpainted. Lewitt had already painted or stripped it at least twice, and some time after 1968, it seems someone painted it again.