The stigmata

The project

Research

Monograph 1970

Restoration

The Preview Showings

Objective

Hess-Guttuso

The travelling exhibition of rediscovered art 

The rediscovery of works by Christian Hess dates back to 26 November 1974, the 30th anniversary of the artist's death. With the support of Sicily's Regional Council, the Goethe Institute and other institutions and the sponsorship of the European Parliament, the travelling exhibition of rediscovered art began its journey from Sicily, where Hess was exiled in the 1930's. After its first appearance at the Palazzo del Turismo in Palermo the exhibition moved on to Rome, Padua, Genoa, Trieste, Bolzano (where Hess was born), Milan, Florence, Turin, Innsbruck (where the artist is buried), Passau and concluded in 1977 in Munich, the city where Hess was to forge his artistic career.

30 years on from that event the man behind the rediscovery of Hess' work, the journalist Domenico M. Ardizzone, will look again in these pages at the ideas and the work leading up to the exhibition. Unfortunately he will also be forced to reflect on how even today in the new - reunited and democratic - Germany the art of Louis Christian Hess still suffers the effects of the censorship imposed in the 1930's by the Nazi regime which banned and broke up the Juryfreie Movement of which Hess was the leading light. Albeit unconsciously, the current disinterest of German culture for the human and artistic drama of Christian Hess would seem to offer continued justification for the ostracism and persecution suffered by the artist: a worthy and leading member of the Munich School who was forced to work in hiding and who, now that he is dead, Germany prefers to forget in order to cover up its sense of guilt.