Laocoön

During an eighteen-month stay in Germany in 1964 with her husband, sculptor Tom Doyle, Eva Hesse turned her attention to sculpture for the first time. She returned to New York in 1965 and began work on Laocoön late that year. Constructed with a plastic pipe armature-with which she was assisted by sculptor Ray Donarski-Hesse cut and glued each of Laocoön's stacked cubes by herself. She covered the pipes with cloth and papier-mâché, and painted them gray. Hesse made her "snakes," as she called them, by wrapping wires first with cloth and again with thinner wire before painting them.

Laocoön stands about eight feet high and took many months to complete. Hesse made both preparatory drawings for the sculpture and continued to make drawings after it was completed. The title refers to the famous Hellenistic sculpture (now in the Vatican Museums) of the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons caught in the twisting, suffocating grip of pythons sent by the gods. Hesse visited Rome in 1964, and described in her datebook her visit to the Vatican Museums on September 19.

In 1967, Professor Ellen Johnson invited Hesse to come to Oberlin as a Visiting Artist. Hesse arrived in January 1968 for a two-day visit and brought along new work. Johnson later wrote, "when she brought out a whole stack of recent drawings, they were so beautiful that the Museum asked permission to exhibit them." In 1970, the year of Hesse's death, the AMAM acquired Laocoön, the first Hesse sculpture acquired by a museum. Made in 1966, this key work-never exhibited publicly during the artist's lifetime-is today considered one of Hesse's most innovative and important sculptures.