She’s as heroic in her persistence as her work is intimate, burrowing as it does into a kind of private reserve. During those same years, Baron endured two nervous breakdowns and three cancer surgeries, and yet the energy driving the work never feels spent. The show’s 40 collages, all the size of a sheet of notebook paper or smaller, and five box-like assemblage sculptures date from 1969 to 1987. Give her works - now on view at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach - close attention and you too will find yourself lost in them, huddled over them, tracing paths through their tight, musty spaces. In the two decades leading to her death in 1987 from breast cancer (she was 61), Baron created prolifically, tenaciously and with modest brilliance. Literal connections between Baron’s psychic state and the character of her art go far in accounting for the work’s visceral urgency, but her collages are ultimately more far-reaching than was her relatively confined adult life. Rarely does one shape venture out on its own and float freely in space.

Drawn shapes and swatches of cloth and paper abut and stack like building blocks, each placed carefully next to or above another. It’s understandable, then, that her art would seem slightly obsessive, hermetic, and it becomes easy to imagine her in the quiet space of the night, huddled over her kitchen table or in her attic studio, patching together scraps of frayed cloth and crinkled paper, drawing letters and numbers and figures across them in fine, high-strung lines.īaron’s tentativeness in life took form in her work. She was known to suffer from anxiety and depression, severe enough at times that she feared venturing out of the house. It’s not hard to visualize Hannelore Baron making her small, absorbing collages.

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