history CHIVE t’s ANDREAS DOMMA (INSTAGRAM: @ANDREAS.DOMMA)


former ASLEF head of comms Nick Wright – Halpin began to sift through her father’s papers. Tey found texts of unpublished lectures Hans had given at York and the University of Sussex, where he was a founding father of the art history department in his final years. “When you have a series of 10 one-hour


lectures, that is a book,” Halpin recalls. It turned out to be three. Discussions followed with radical publishing cooperative Manifesto Press, which is chaired by Wright; Wright himself had worked with Hans in the 1970s through left-wing art history circles and the theoretical journal Marxism Today. It was soon arranged for Hans’s selected works to be published in three volumes. Tese very aesthetically pleasing coffee table books are


packed with the pithy insights on art and politics that had made her father renowned in his lifetime. Prefiguring the arguments that John Berger would make in his seminal TV series Ways of Seeing, Hess wrote in 1963: “Today’s mythmakers live in advertising agencies – they create the hopes, fears and aspirations in which men and women see their lives.” Te project has now grown much bigger than Halpin, with a


series of events and seminars taking place across Europe. Halpin played a crucial role in the Cultures in Resistance


festival at Wortley Hall, the ‘workers’ stately home’ in south Yorkshire, in April. Tat event brought together trade unionists, artists and art historians. London Recruits, the film about the British activists recruited to fight apartheid in South Africa, was screened and there were discussions on art and labour in the age of AI, and a workshop on producing artistic manifestos. Tere was also a significant programme for children. “Some of them have already been writing down in the notebooks that we provided for them what they want to do next year, which is brilliant,” Halpin says. She hopes this will become an annual event, and that


it can play a role in bringing working class organisation together with the arts, which, she says, “really is a bourgeois enterprise”.


Max Pechstein, Portrait of Alfred Hess, 1919, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery, loaned by private collector © Pechstein Hamburg/ Toekendorf/DACS, 2013


Te next stage goes back another


generation. Avant-garde artists would regularly visit the large family home in Erfurt during Hans’s childhood. Halpin’s grandparents Alfred and Tekla kept a guest book – to which leading expressionists including Max Pechstein, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee contributed drawings and watercolours. Tis was the subject of a conference in


March this year, held at the headquarters of German newspaper Neues Deutschland. Lucy Burke, a principal lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, has worked with the family and Manifesto Press to bring together a community of cross-disciplinary researchers. Te conference had a moral significance too, in bringing


Halpin’s family back to Germany – where many family members were persecuted in the Nazi era and much of the Hess art collection was looted. In 2006, Halpin won a restitution case against the city of


“


Berlin for a famous painting that had been in the family collection, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s Berlin Street Scene. Even then, it provoked a fierce backlash from right-wing politicians and a section of Germany’s art establishment unwilling to accept the need for redress. Halpin is encouraged by the project’s success in bringing


Halpin won a restitution case against Berlin for a looted painting that had been in the family


together different aspects of media production, skills and craft – from the Morning Star and German media partners Neues Deutschland and Junge Welt to the Bristol-based printing firm that produces the books. When she first joined the NUJ in the 1970s, there were still


fierce demarcations between areas of work in newspapers and magazines. “It was seen as a guild rather than a trade union,” she explains. “And that certainly changed under recent general


secretaries John Foster, then Jeremy [Dear] and Michelle [Stanistreet]. Certainly [with] the current general secretary having come out of a very harsh negotiating arena successfully, I’m sure we’ll keep up that tradition of punching above our weight.”


theJournalist | 19


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