Hans Hess: Selected Writings Volume 1 - Art in the 19th Century

Narrated and produced by Rochelle Anne Swanson.

With additional image descriptions read by Natasha Raskin Sharp, highly-prized presenter of Bargain Hunt, Antiques Road Trip and Flog It!, and a much-loved and respected presenter of late-night music shows for BBC Radio Scotland.

Editor’s notes and citations read by Adele Allen.

Find us @manifestopresscoop

Hess wrote in the 1960s and used ‘man’ throughout this volume to mean ‘people’, you and me. But today’s use of the word ‘man’ is almost never gender-neutral, and it now reads terribly exclusive.

Forget everything you were told about art. This is not a gentle stroll through a gallery; it is a Molotov cocktail thrown at its foundations.

Hans Hess, introduced by art historian and activist Nick Wright provides an incisive framework, which reveals art as a brutal ideological battlefield where culture is a site of struggle, not a refuge of beauty.

He shatters the myth of the ‘lone genius’, exposing how artists became cogs in a capitalist machine, their work a weapon for the ruling class and the subjection of peasants and workers alike.

Journey from the artist’s origins as a functional craftsman to their alienated status in industrial society where in Hess’s words, ’The goods have become the gods.’

Hess traces how art transformed into a fetishised commodity and investigates how even colour is ideologically charged. He dissects the political clash between cold classicism and yearning romanticism, arguing that true revolutionary art is socially engaged, not introspective.

This is a provocative, Marxist-guided tour of how art is truly produced, consumed, and valued. It challenges you to see the economic and ideological forces and class conflicts hidden beneath the surface of every canvas and sculpture.

© 2025 Manifesto Press Cooperative (Audiobook): 9781907464836

Release date

Audiobook: 18 November 2025