Hans Hess (museologist)


Hans Hess was a German museum curator who worked in Leicester and York.

Biography

He was born in Erfurt, the son of a successful Jewish shoe manufacturer and patron of the arts Alfred Hess. The artists Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Pechstein were family friends.
Hess worked for the publisher Ullstein until 1933, when he was forced out for being Jewish. He moved to London in 1935 and co-founded the Inside Nazi Germany magazine and, in 1938, helped to launch the 'Free German League of Culture'. He was interned on the Isle of Man as an 'enemy alien' before being deported to Canada. Hess returned to Britain in 1942.
In 1944 he was appointed as an Art Assistant, under Trevor Thomas, to the Leicester Museum just before the opening of an exhibition titled 'Mid-European Art', which was supported by the Free German League of Culture. Hess was appointed curator at York Art Gallery in 1948, when the gallery reopened after being bombed during the Second World War. He lived with his wife Lillie Williams and their daughter Anita on Skeldergate in York.
He was awarded an OBE in the 1958 New Year Honours.
During his time in York he was artistic director of the York Festival in 1954, 1957, 1960, 1963, and 1966. He left York in 1967 to take up a post with the University of Sussex after a public altercation with Jack Wood, a York councillor, regarding the programme for the 1966 Festival.
Throughout his life Hess was an active Marxist and contributed articles to Marxism Today, the magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
At the University of Sussex he was Reader in the history and theory of art.
In 2010 he was the subject of a Sheldon Memorial Trust Lecture by John Ingamells.

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