The writing avoids the confrontation with the painting’s expressionist and traumatic importance. It is in fact rather alarming that the desperate morbidity and hysteria of these works come down to the rather detached descriptions such as how they “capture a psychologically charged undercurrent.” The writing “technique” behind these formally detached descriptions – a somewhat academic verbiage that denys the rupture that these works express – is rather chilling. Are these howls of paint really seen as tamely inferior and politely formal as they are described? Words like the “attempt to achieve self contained harmony” couldn’t be more inaccurate. There is deep emotional disturbance at the heart of these paintings, which is what makes them radical – socially and culturally radical- and unable to fit neatly into the accepted stream of art world doxia within the accepted mainstream power structure – its assumed place in art history as it has been written, or rather rewritten.

In fact the paintings point to a powerful and brutal expressionist impulse that Hesse could have continued. They are evidence that she could have chosen the expressionist over the minimalist path in her art. Abstract Expressionism was still a strong movement in the early 60?s. This makes me conjecture whether her need to conform to the art world exigencies of that time overshadowed this option – that she chose one path over the other for this reason.

I could not have guessed the true depth of this upheaval, of real inner turbulence, from her minimalist works- or when when Danto describes her as coping “with emotional chaos by reinventing sculpture through aesthetic insubordination, playing with worthless material amid the industrial ruins of a defeated nation that, only two decades earlier, would have murdered her without a second thought.” But these paintings do make me think of that terror described- and the terrible psychological cost which she and her family paid and how it made her feel inside. Where is the mention of this? It seems the power of academia and the market driven imperatives of the art world have indeed trained it’s “technique” of what art’s narrative is supposed to be on its writers. Where is the individual intuition on the part of writers that is needed to break through this kind of control? What does it mean when the meaning is right on the surface of the art- and yet it is not seen?