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Hans Hess: Picture these arguments

Nick Wright reflects on the life and work of the influential Marxist art historian and theorist HANS HESS, who died 40 years ago today

Hans Hess was one of that brilliant generation of anti-fascist refugees who so enriched Britain’s cultural life.

He gave students at the first communist school of art, organised in 1968 at the Marx Memorial Library, an object lesson in dialectical thinking.

I was among that generation of embattled students deeply involved in controversies about the structure and content of art and design education, and he commanded us to understand our practice as artists and designers and that the behaviour of the individuals within the structures in which we existed — and the way these institutions were constructed and operated — were deeply ideological phenomena.

He had a brilliant way of making the complex simple and then leading us to do our own thinking.

He argued that because each of us think with our own minds, the illusion that such thoughts were our own easily arose.

He insisted that the fact that each of us must speak with our own voice did not necessarily mean that the language we use is our own — very important insights for students struggling to find a visual language or investigating the meaning of images, or for those of us finding new ways to communicate with masses of people.

Hans Hess fled — first to Paris in 1933 after being purged from the publishers Ullstein on “racial” grounds — and then to London in 1935.

The son of Alfred Hess — a prosperous left-leaning footwear manufacturer who reputedly had supplied the Red Army with its boots — and Tekla Pauson, he was politically active in the emigre community here, a founder member of the Free German League of Culture and on the board of the publication Inside Nazi Germany.

His parents had been at the centre of a progressive circle of avant garde artists — Expressionist and Dadaist by tendency — and patrons of their work as well as sponsors of the Bauhaus.

His father died in 1931 and, with the nazis in power, his mother came to Britain via Switzerland.

In the course of these travels much of the work was lost or confiscated.

The family guestbook, published as a slim volume Dank in Farben (Thanks in Colour) in 1959 by Piper Bucherei with a commentary by Hess, includes drawing and salutations from a roll call of artists and writers including Lionel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Pechstein and Paul Klee.

Surviving the tribulations — like many German anti-fascists — of internment and deportation, as an enemy “alien” Hess returned to Britain and first lived in Leicester.

Later, for two decades up until 1967, he was the curator of the City of York Art Gallery before taking up the post of Reader in the history and theory of art at the University of Sussex.

A significant body of work, drawn from the family collection and supplemented by further acquisitions, is housed at Leicester’s New Walk Museum and Art Gallery.

Hess was an immensely sophisticated thinker who was extremely well-grounded, in the German manner, in Marxist theory.

He was as much interested in the systems of artistic production, its social and historical context, as the work itself.

Following Marx, and in asserting that the defining feature of materialist thought lay in the conception that material existence is the basis of thought and “their formalisation, that is art, poetry, writing, religion, as well as legal, political concepts and constructs,” he continually asserted the specificity of artistic creation, its root in the time and place of its creation.

At the same time he insisted that the work itself must be realised within its own terms as the product of individual and collective endeavour, imbued with its own form and content.

Holding firm to a conception of the dialectical relationship between the economic basis of a given society and the ideological superstructure, he nevertheless insisted on a clear- sighted recognition that our reception of, and appropriation of, classical and all art from previous eras ought to be distinguished from the meaning of that work in its original context.

Historical materialism is thus an essential tool for the art historian, both in understanding the charm of art from earlier contexts but also its function as an element in the false consciousness of subsequent eras in which it is received.

He wrote two important monographs on artists from the Weimar period with whom he had personal connections.

His 1962 postgraduate thesis — supervised by the art historian and writer Quentin Bell — was transformed into an authoritative volume on the painter Georg Grosz, while a long engagement with the work of Lionel Feininger was published simultaneously in Britain and the German Democratic Republic.

His Pictures As Arguments, published by Sussex University Press in 1975, was republished as How Pictures Mean by Pantheon in New York and, under the editorship of James Klugmann, he often wrote in the Communist Party’s theoretical and discussion journal Marxism Today.

“To deprive the bourgeoisie, not necessarily of its art but of its concept of art, is the precondition of a revolutionary argument,” he once wrote.

There can be no clearer statement of what Hess’s life and work was all about and why his writings remain an inspiration.

Manifesto Press is to publish a collection of Hans Hess’s writings later this year.

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