hot­ter than Hesse

Now that the tem­per­a­ture has returned to nice nor­mal Con­necti­cut num­bers not in the triple dig­its, I can look at this pho­to and rec­og­nize that Avery is actu­al­ly MELT­ING! And my poor friend Sarah Webb! Of course, it was her idea to meet up in the city, but when we sched­uled the vis­it back in, gee, May, who knew it would be 105 degrees in New York that day! Just awful. But the rea­son for our vis­it was worth the hell­ish tem­per­a­tures. The Eva Hesse show at the Jew­ish Muse­um was, Sarah and I agreed, the sin­gle best and most sig­nif­i­cant exhi­bi­tion we have ever been to. She is, of course, the co-author of our book, “Sin­gu­lar Women,” which we wrote togeth­er over sev­en years, the most reward­ing project of our careers. Undoubt­ed­ly our feel­ings on this mat­ter are col­ored by the fact that our work, and our emails about the project, were shared in equal mea­sure by dis­cus­sions of the com­plete­ly remark­able things our baby daugh­ters, then tod­dler daugh­ters, then school-age daugh­ters and Sarah’s baby son, were doing, plus in those days we knew what each oth­er was cook­ing for din­ner every sin­gle night and exchanged many, many recipes and din­ner par­ty sto­ries. But still, Eva Hesse is huge for both of us. Much of Sarah’s own art­mak­ing is inspired by Hesse, and I myself have taught Hes­se’s work in count­less sem­i­nars, one at Christie’s devot­ed to her. And so many of the artists whose work appeared at my gallery, and grace the walls of our homes, shows the lin­eage of her influence.

So there we were, in the swel­ter­ing, beyond tor­rid heat, con­trast­ed by the near-arc­tic tem­per­a­tures of the muse­um itself and the cafe where we had lunch. It was won­der­ful and touch­ing to catch up with Sarah, to hear about her daugh­ter’s exploits. We rem­i­nisced about the ded­i­ca­tion of our book: some­thing like this. “To our daugh­ters, who with their inno­cent ques­tion, ‘Can men be artists too?’ showed that fem­i­nism has indeed achieved its goals.”

From there we head­ed to Tribeca, frankly dri­ving slow­ly to take advan­tage of the air con­di­tioned car! But even the heat could not spoil din­ner with my friend Alyssa and her kids Annabelle and Elliot, at our old neigh­bor­hood haunt, “Roc.” Roc­co him­self was there in all his Ital­ian charm, and it was sim­ply won­der­ful, and so heart­warm­ing, to be back. Avery spent the night with Annabelle and I repaired to John’s mid­town hotel for a nice ren­dezvous! Being back has taught me this much: you in fact CAN go home again!

Three cheers for Eva Hesse, and all the artists who make life a bit more than just liv­ing. And sweat­ing, for that matter!