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Thank you Emma ! |
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In memory of Emma Hess |
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This website is dedicated to the memory of Emma Hess who, during World War Two, rescued the works of her brother, Louis-Christian, who in the 1930s had gone into voluntary exile in Messina, Sicily, where she was living at the time, to escape persecution from the Nazis. When the winds of war starting blowing across Italy, the artist entrusted his works to his sister and left for Switzerland, to seek a new refuge. Emma had the perseverance to keep the works for thirty years, firmly convinced that one day she would have the opportunity to make them known and appreciated by the public. Thank you Emma! Visitors to the website should be grateful for the opportunity offered to them to enjoy the works and documents that shed light over a dark period in German art between the wars. The works of an artist who was in danger of being forgotten, because he died young, at 48, in the hospital of Schwaz after an air raid over Innsbruck, can now live again.
In those terrible years before the Allied landing in Sicily, Messina suffered massive bombings, day and night, by the Anglo-American air force, due to its strategic position, as a result of which the city was later awarded the Gold Medal for Civilian Bravery for the hardships and destruction it suffered. The waves of bombs were a continuous threat for her brother’s paintings, so, to protect them, Emma rolled and wrapped them up, all together, so that they could be easily carried to the air-raid shelters. On 16 August 1943, the US Eighth Army entered Messina, during the final attack to free the island. The war may have come to an end on the island, but in Central Europe it was still raging. Emma was worried because she had received no more news from her brother. Unfortunately, mail could not enter or leave Italy because the Germans had took position along the so-called “Gothic Line” and effectively cut the country in two. An unbearable silence stretched out day after day for over a year, until the Red Cross circulated the news of his death, on 26 November 1944. Her brother’s death was a great blow to Emma, whose greatest hope became that he might continue to live on through his works, which she never failed to protect, always looking out for a good opportunity to share them with the world. So, in 1956, she exhibited several of his works, without much success, in Messina, at that time a sleepy and insensitive provincial town. Five years later, at long last, the great opportunity appeared on the horizon in the form of a project aimed at rediscovering the work of Christian Hess, a difficult challenge that nobody had ventured before. With Emma’s help it was possible to gather all the available information to undertake studies and research on the artist’s life, on his known and lost production, on the activities and exhibitions held in various German cities in the 1920s and 1930s, on the reviews of the time, on the witnesses still living in Munich, the place where he received his artistic training, Bolzano, his birthplace, and Innsbruck, the city that hosted his first exhibitions. A thorough, slow, long-term project to gather the necessary photographic evidence of the principal elements of his pictorial language. Only one year before the date set for the event, when everything was running to schedule: the restoration of his works, the visits by art critics and journalists, support to the programme of the itinerant exhibition, the catalog, Emma – who was by now certain that her dream would finally come true – passed away peacefully, on 26 September 1973.
In the meantime, the
project had obtained the sponsorship of the
European Parliament and the support of the
Region of Sicily, the Goethe Institut, the
Tiroler Landes Museum in Innsbruck, the
Künstverein in Munich, the City of Bolzano and
other institutions. From Palermo, where it
opened first, the Rediscovery Exhibition moved
to 12 different locations in Italy, Austria and
Germany – between 26 November 1974 to 6 March
1977 – thus restoring Louis Christian Hess, on
the thirtieth anniversary of his death, to his
rightful place in the history of art. Today, in
the era of the Internet, this cultural
Association named after the Artist, intends to
extend the Rediscovery to a global plane through
this website, which pays tribute to the memory
of Emma and continues her wishes. |
