What Hesse, the Painter, Taught Hesse, the Sculptor.

The art world tends to see Eva Hesse as an Athena-like figure, an adult from birth. Hesse was just 34 when she died of a brain tumor, leaving behind a prodigious body of work that continues to inform contemporary sculpture. Yet as the Brooklyn Museum's exhibition ''Eva Hesse Spectres 1960'' makes clear, Hesse wasn't always so self-possessed. The show's 19 paintings of shadowy figures predate her signature works, the arrangements of cloth and latex and wire that scrambled and softened the standard Minimalist vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]