This Map Shows How Artists Built New York

Sol LeWitt wrote Eva Hesse letters and postcards, challenging her to push forward with her art through bouts of uncertainty and doubt. By the end of her short career, Hesse, a profoundly important postwar sculptor who died in 1970 at the age of 34, may have influenced LeWitt’s work every bit as much as he tried to guide hers.

“Converging Lines,” an exhibit of both artists’ sculptures, drawings, and paintings now on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art, shows how both artists benefited mutually from their close friendship. While LeWitt’s work developed as rigorously rule-bound and orthogonal during the 1960s, Hesse’s sensuous, organic take on Minimalism continued to manifest in LeWitt’s drawings and paintings—in the form of “not straight” lines—until his death in 2007.