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Hans Hess: The Goods have become the Gods
To mark the recent publication by the Manifesto Press of Volume 3 of Hans Hess: Selected Writings, Dr. Lucy Burke, Academic Director of the new Hans Hess Foundation, will introduce us to an important but hitherto under-examined art historian, curator and left-wing cultural activist.
Born in Erfurt in 1908 into an affluent and cultured German-Jewish family (his father Alfred was the owner of a successful shoe-manufacturing company and an important collector of avant-garde art), Hans Hess spent a year at the Sorbonne before going to the USA, familiarising himself with advertising techniques and the relatively new discipline of market research.
Purged by the Nazis from his job at Berlin’s Ullstein publishers, he left Germany in May 1933. He went first to Paris where he worked as an advertising copywriter, then to London where he worked with John Heartfield in the Free German League of Culture and edited the magazines inside Nazi Germany and Germany Today.
War saw him interned in Canada before finding work as Deputy Keeper of Art at the Leicester Museums and Galleries, moving in 1946 to be curator at York Art Gallery and also artistic director of the triennial York Festival. In 1967 Hess was appointed Reader in the History and Theory of Art at the new University of Sussex and wrote extensively on art history, Marxism and visual culture. Most of these thought-provoking texts remained unpublished in his lifetime and were only rediscovered a few years ago.
Dr Lucy Burke works in the School of English at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her current research explores contemporary cultural and historical representations of disability and care – focusing specifically on dementia and learning disabilities – and the role of the arts in social justice. Forthcoming monographs: Why Should We Care (Manifesto Press), and Dementia Culture (Liverpool University Press). Her interest in Hans Hess returns her to her PhD which explored class and cultural politics in the interwar period.
Image: Hans Hess: Selected Writings
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