Alfred Hess

Hess was a shoe manufacturer in Erfurt, Thuringia.^[1] M & L Hess Schuhfabrik had four factories in Erfurt.^[2] He was keen on art and German expressionism. His portrait was made into a woodcut by Max Pechstein in 1919 when he was one of the artists who stayed at the Hess house. Hess made donations to local museums and his visitors' books were so lavishly decorated that illustrations were published as a book in 1957.^[3] Hess's factory was forcibly Aryanised under the Nazis.

A memorial plaque for Alfred Hess has been erected at the Hess villa in Alfred-Hess-Straße, Erfurt; the street was named after him in 1992.

With his wife Thekla (1884–1968), née Pauson, he had an art collection of around 4,000 works that contained important German Expressionist works.

Hess was a philanthropist, donating numerous artworks to museums in Germany. Gifts included the Johannes Driesch (1901 - 1930) drawing, Familie und Liebespaar, and Lionel Feiniger's Viadukt to the Museum für Kunst und Heimatgeschichte in Erfurt.^[4][5] He also loaned artworks to museums, such as Landungssteg by Lionel Feiniger^[6] and Tänzerinnen by Erich Henkel.^[7] These and other gifts and loans he made to museums were later seized by the Nazis, as were works from his private collection. Others were sold to finance the escape and survival of his family.^[8]

Hess died in 1931, before the Nazis came to power. His widow Thekla, who emigrated from Germany to the UK via Switzerland, said that she was forced to sell paintings by the Gestapo.^[9] She was forced to deposit paintings with the Cologne Art Association in 1937, and was later told, falsely, that they had been destroyed. She joined her son Hans Hess in the UK in 1939.^[10][11]

Hans Hess helped Leicester Museum and Art Gallery create an exhibition of German Expressionist art in 1944. Leicester Museum bought or was given four artworks.^[2]