WHAT started as a modest compilation of known writings on art and Marxism by the art historian Hans Hess is turning into a four-volume collection of his work, including a series of illustrated lectures and recently uncovered unpublished writings along with material written for the amusement of children.

Hans Hess was born into a well-off family of cultured, enlightened and progressive-minded German Jews. His father Alfred, a staunch social democrat and admirer of the Soviet Union, owned Hess Schuh and by fortunate circumstance won the contract to provide boots for the Red Army in the mid-20s.

With good advice from curators and art dealers, Alfred was able to accumulate a representative collection of the art of the Weimar avant garde, most especially of Expressionist and Modernist inspiration.

Along with his mother, Tekla, a noted hostess, this enlightened family, sustained by the friendship of a wide circle of the cultural avant garde, with close links to the Bauhaus, provided an exceptionally stimulating milieu for the young Hess.

The family was well endowed with cultural capital as well as a representative collection of art works but the family fortunes did not survive the economic crisis which swept the capitalist world with exceptionally damaging economic and political consequences for Germany.

The family visitors’ book, published as a slim volume, Dank in Farben (Thanks in Colour), in 1957 by Piper Verlag with a commentary by Hess, includes drawing and salutations from a roll call of artists and writers, including family friends Lionel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Pechstein, Christian Rohlfs and Paul Klee.

His father died and after Hans Hess had travelled to the US and Paris, studying at the Sorbonne, he worked as an editor at the noted Berlin publishers Ullstein.

When, with the accession to power of the Nazis, Ullstein was “aryanised,” Hess was once again on the move and he his widowed mother found refuge in first France and then England.

In London, along with a distinguished collective of exiled German political and cultural figures, Hess was involved with the Free German League of Culture and the intellectually fertile anti-fascist diaspora justly characterised by Britain’s political police as “the largest communist sideshow in London.” 

After internment, along with many of his comrades, as an “enemy alien” he was allocated agricultural duties and Hess ended the war married to a fellow German emigree, Lillie Williams, and connected, by his remarkable mother Tekla, to Trevor Thomas, director of the Leicester art gallery who had offered him, even before the end of hostilities, a curatorial post.

Then commenced an immensely fertile period that included the publication of his authoritative books on Georg Grosz and Lyonel Feininger, both of whom he knew personally, a key curatorial post at York City Gallery and eventually he was appointed reader in the history and theory of art at Sussex.

A team from Manifesto Press, Ramune Kregzdyte, Corata Group, Paul Macgee, Marine Picard and Nick Wright, guided by Anita Halpin, the daughter of Hans Hess, have reconstructed from a treasure trove of recovered documents material that greatly adds to the already existing body of writings by Hans Hess.

The first volume gathers writings on Marxism, politics, ideology and art, anthropology and art, the role of the artist in industrial society, colour in painting and concludes with a richly illustrated text on art and the French Revolution.

The second volume demonstrates Hess’s complete command over the art of his own era. But more than that. He writes about the work of John Heartfield from a deep knowledge of both the man and his work; about the Bauhaus as an intimate of its main figures and a neighbour; on Dada and about art and utopia with a firm grounding in historical materialism and about 20th-century painting with a sharply discriminating eye.

A previously unpublished manuscript, written just before the second world war, analyses, from both practical experience and with sharp class politics, a compelling theory of political propaganda that is imbued with a passionate anti-fascism.

His lectures Modern Art in One Hour and Painting in the 20th Century have an appeal to both the specialist and to the general reader.

Hess, his Order of the British Empire notwithstanding, functioned as an ideologically and politically committed Marxist, actively engaged with communist students, the Communist University and the Communist Party’s Marxism Today under the editorship of James Klugman.

He submitted the changing taste of the bourgeoisie, the classical art of antiquity and the painters of both the late 19th century and early 20th century to an unremitting scrutiny that was informed both by a solid grounding, in the German manner, of Marxism; exceptionally wide scholarship and a refreshing iconoclasm that allowed him to challenge Marx himself, to dissect the workings of the art market and navigate the polarities of cultural debates within Marxism up until his death in 1973 without losing authority or compromising his unflinching materialism.

After some five decades of post-modernist theorising which often lost its materialist moorings, Hess, writing in the last half of the 20th century, turns us to a refreshingly grounded theory of art and an expert reading of the ways in which painting and painters functioned.

Limited edition hardback and paperback editions of both volumes are available to buy via the Morning Star shop: https://tinyurl.com/HHMorningStar.

A designer by trade, with 25 years’ experience, Paul Macgee manages Manifesto Press (www.manifestopress.coop).