MY FIRST encounter with the ideas of Hans Hess was in the early 1980s at one of the regular Morning Star book sales held in the McLellan Galleries in Glasgow city centre, which was a magnet for me as a rather skint teenager in the Young Communist League.

Aptly enough, the galleries had once been home to the Glasgow School of Art in the Victorian era, but my visit was more political than artistic, I was there to scour the heaving tables and dusty boxes of Marxist literature for socialist classics and historic documents.

One of the bargains was a pile of old Marxism Today magazines, dating from an earlier era when its title was not a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act. Among the batch was the issue of October 1973 which included the article Is There a Theory of Art in Marx? by Hans Hess.

The article, based on a presentation to a session at the University of Sussex, where he taught, was something of a revelation for someone still trying to work out what the terms “base” and “superstructure” were all about. Far from a dry, mechanical connection between art and capitalism, Hess based his arguments on the far more nuanced and sophisticated ideas of Marx himself.

He began the article with a quotation from Capital: “A commodity is a thing whose qualities enable it — in one way or another — to satisfy human needs. The nature of these needs... for instance if they arise in the stomach or in the imagination, does not alter the matter.”

This was certainly not the crude economic determinism that anti-Marxists then and now often alleged.

Hess went on to draw attention to remarks by Frederick Engels in his funeral oration for Marx that “the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.”

This understanding of the historical materialist method applied to the world of art and artists guided Hess throughout his adult life.

It runs through the remarkable body of work being compiled by the team at Manifesto Press, who have taken up the task of publishing multiple volumes of Hess’s articles and lecture transcripts, lovingly typed up by his wife Lillie Hess, then kept and cared for, and now brought into the public arena as Hans Hess Selected Writings by his daughter Anita Halpin.

The Manifesto co-operative team of editors and designers has produced one of the most visually stunning books by any left publisher that I can think of, bringing to life the images that Hess discusses in detail.

A note must also be to credit Marine Picard for her remarkable editorial work, along with co-editor Nick Wright, and assistance from Adele Allen.

The publication of the third volume, Art and Ideology, opens with a brief overview of the Bauhaus Years by Halpin, linking the Hess family’s artistic connections to one of the most innovative and enduring schools of modern art.

Bauhaus bloomed briefly in the tumultuous Weimar Republican era of interwar Germany, before the Nazi assault on “degenerate art.”

Halpin provides further biographical and political background to her father’s development as his unwanted odyssey took him from escaping the clutches of the Berlin Gestapo to life as an anti-fascist activist in London’s German diaspora, with spells as a wartime internee in the Isle of Man and Canada, before settling permanently in England, via Leicester, York and finally Sussex.

Another introductory piece by Hess himself outlines the remarkable riches of the family guestbook, itself essentially a work of art, detailing the visits and including mementoes from world-famous artists who were hosted at the Hess family house in Erfurt which was “as famous in the town as a rainbow-coloured dog,” as Hess puts it.

Another appreciation of Hess’s work is by a familiar name to Morning Star readers, Nick Wright.

His direct engagement with Hess was as a communist activist and student of art a short time before Hans’s death in 1974, but the impact of these encounters was clearly profound and long lasting.

“Hess employed a richly informed method in his writing that was rooted in a wide command of his material but crucially took art, and artists, as historically determined social categories and the theory of art as falling into the sphere of the relative autonomy of the superstructure,” Wright argues.

The main body of Art and Ideology is based on the notes from a series of lectures Hess gave at the University of York in 1963.

In these six fascinating lectures, he traces the social function of art from the magical ritual elements of early human societies, through art as  political propaganda, to the crude commodity fetishism of the capitalist era where in a memorable turn of phrase “the goods have become the gods.”

This is a worthy tribute to a thinker whose work might otherwise have been lost to posterity but it is also an essential weapon against the contemporary trends to silence artists who speak out against the savagery of modern capitalism and put their creative imagination at the service of the struggles for a world free from war, fascism and exploitation.

Kenny Coyle is a leader in the Manifesto Press/Praxis press Network. Art In The Age Of Degenerative Capitalism is a free event held in collaboration with the Morning Star and Marx Memorial Library & Workers School, on Saturday August 2 at 2pm. The event will have artists in residence, a free Hans Hess toolbag for all attendees, who will collaborate to produce a guestbook of the event and guest speakers from Manchester Metropolitan University, the Bauhaus Archiv and Max Planck Institute in Rome. Only a few tickets remain at https://tinyurl.com/HansHessEvent.