The George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann

George Lindemann Journal by George Lindemann - "A Touching Connection" @wsj by Peter Plagens

'Accession V' (1968), by Eva Hesse The Eva Hesse Estate/ Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

Austin, Texas

Artists learning from each other via affectionate, reciprocal influence concerning art itself seems a bit of a bygone thing these days. Now it's all about the rocket to stardom of the right graduate school, career connections and sensational subject matter. So the story of the artistic friendship and mutual influence of Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse—told through actual works of art, and correspondence, including one long, lovely and crucial letter—is not only art-historically significant, but poignant. One hopes it will also be instructional.

All of this is abundantly evident in "Converging Lines: Eva Hesse and Sol LeWitt," the astutely conceived, enlighteningly installed and brilliantly documented exhibition of about 50 works of art and some ancillary material at the Blanton Museum of Art. (Austin is a wonderful city, and the Blanton is a fine museum, but it's a pity that such a valuable show is not, as of this writing, scheduled to travel.)

The downtown New York art world in 1960 did have its cliques, but in the waning days of Abstract Expressionism and the waxing ones of Pop Art there was a certain bohemian earnestness to the scene. It had gotten brainier, with sensuality grudgingly semiburied. Sol LeWitt (1928-2007), who'd attended the Cartoonist and Illustrators School (now the School of Visual Arts) and had been a graphic designer for Seventeen magazine, was an aspiring artist just getting into it. He was still working a day job in the architectural offices of I.M. Pei. A colleague and friend in the firm, the then-junior architect Robert Slutzky, happened to know a young artist named Eva Hesse (1936-1970), and introduced her to LeWitt. LeWitt was "wowed" by the pretty Hesse, but the sexual attraction was not mutual. Still, they became fast friends.

Hesse—born in Germany and a survivor of the war, her parents' divorce, and her mother's suicide—made it to and through Yale University School of Art's graduate program. Her aesthetic—which had an all-too-brief, five-year public exposure before she died of a brain tumor—was organic, personal, intuitive. It was viscerally connected to the body and emphatically expressed by the vicissitudes of her hand.

LeWitt's style of art—maintained through a long career that nevertheless began only with his first solo exhibition at age 36—was diametrically opposite. He abided by a priori, self-set rules, and confined himself in sculpture to variations on the cube and, in wall drawings, to ruled lines.

LeWitt—as can be readily deduced from his intellectualized art—was a cool, steady-as-he-goes kind of guy who in his work, as catalog essayist Lucy Lippard says, "kept a distance from emotional issues." Hesse—if you read between the hagiographic lines—was a bit of a load. "My life and art have not been separated," she said. She was constantly in therapy and was plagued by doubts about the irrepressible goofiness (lumpy shapes, birthday-party colors, odd attachments) of her art. When she went off to a 15-month residency in Germany with her husband, the sculptor Tom Doyle (who was the more well-known artist, with his wife included as a semicourtesy), she was having a tough time of it. LeWitt, with whom she'd kept up an apparently chaste friendship and artist-to-artist correspondence, wrote her there: "You have possibly forgotten your state of mind (I doubt it though). You seem the same as always, and being you, hate every minute of it."

LeWitt's April 14, 1965, letter to Hesse is, in fact, one of the great documents of postwar art. In it, he commiserates with her about artists' constant—and necessary—reappraisals of their work, about constantly feeling one can do better, and about the occasional need to make some defiantly bad art. But the core of LeWitt's letter is both marvelously specific to Hesse's problems and applicable to just about every struggling neophyte artist everywhere:

"Just stop thinking, worrying, looking over your shoulder wondering, doubting, fearing, hurting, hoping for some easy way out, struggling, grasping, confusing, itching, scratching, mumbling, bumbling, grumbling, humbling, stumbling, numbling, rumbling, gambling, tumbling, scumbling, scrambling, hitching, hatching, bitching, moaning, groaning. . . . Stop it and just DO!"

Partially under LeWitt's influence, but mostly at the behest of her own quirky temperament, Hesse progressed from such insouciantly composed abstract mixed-media works on paper as "No Title" (1963), to more gridded versions of the same, to fully gridded gouaches on paper, to such arguably feminist riffs on LeWitt's precise, white, birdcagelike skeletal boxes as the vaguely vaginal "Accession V" (1968). Her total oeuvre, of course, strayed far from grids and boxes into hanging, coiled and semiscattered works made with such un-LeWittian and conservator's-nightmare materials as latex, cord, rubber and papier-caché. It's for these that Hesse is more well-known, and only a few examples—for instance, an untitled hanging black sculpture from 1966 that looks like a child sausage tethered to its parent—are included in "Converging Lines."

Hesse's impact on the actual look of LeWitt's art is more slight, but nevertheless persistent. When he heard about her death, LeWitt was preparing an exhibition in Paris. "I was thinking about her work and me and my work, too ... I just did a piece that sort of encompassed both of them": "Wall Drawing #46: Vertical Lines, not straight, not touching, covering the wall evenly" (1970). It was the first instance of LeWitt's departing from straight lines. That influence from Hesse can still be seen in "Wall Drawing #797" (1995), in which an initial, wavering hand-drawn horizontal line high on the wall is copied, at close intervals underneath, in alternating marker colors, until there's no more room at the bottom. (All wall drawings by LeWitt are re-created anew for each exhibition.) In terms of a more general influence, however, Hesse's memory stayed with LeWitt for almost 40 years. A good case can be made that her brief artistic life had a profound effect on him, deepening an already gentle, humanistic demeanor. Indeed, LeWitt later named one of his daughters Eva.

A word about the show's catalog: It's one of the best I've ever seen. Its size (generous, but not clumsily large), weight (hefty but not uncomfortable), fonts, paper, interior images and cover illustration (a 1968 work on paper by Hesse that gracefully sums up the show's premise) are just about perfect. The essays—by the show's curator, Veronica Roberts; art historian Kirsten Swenson; and Ms. Lippard, the veteran critic—are informative and argot-free. Though a map showing exactly where noted artists of the time lived in Lower Manhattan isn't strictly necessary, it'll probably be nice to have on hand through the years. The "Converging Lines" catalog should be a model for museum publications to come.

Mr. Plagens is an artist and writer in New York.