When an artist dies before they have fully achieved the critical place their work calls for, a necessary task begins, of sharing their work and creating critical and historical context. Susanna Heller: Beyond Pain, The Last Drawings, compiled, edited, and published by two of Heller’s oldest and dearest friends, artist Marlene Dumas and art historian Suzanne Styhler, is the first step in that task of celebrating and contextualizing Heller’s work. Dumas’s husband and Heller’s decades-long friend the painter Jan Andriesse was central to the project, though sadly he himself did not live to see it completed. This book is an introduction to a remarkable artist, and it is a celebration of the power of drawing as a medium of intimate communication.
The writings in Beyond Pain, most written specifically for this book, range from the personal and autobiographical to the art historical and critical. It begins with Heller’s sister the Canadian poet Liane Heller’s intimate and touching depiction of the life of the sisters in childhood, navigating their culturally rich yet emotionally cold home, a situation also mentioned in Styhler’s titular text which provides a linear yet vivid biography, illustrated by personal photos and useful documentation of key paintings and major drawings. Art historical and critical perspective is offered by essays by Dutch museum director Jetteke Bolten-Rempt and Heller’s long-time friend and champion the art historian Matthew Teitelbaum, for many years Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, as well as the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. They contextualize Heller’s work and focus on Heller’s capacity to bring into painting intense exterior and interior sensations and appearances.
