page_title: Anita Halpin
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Anita Halpin / Career
context_page_description: Anita E. Halpin is an English communist and trade union activist of German-Jewish descent who has been successful in having paintings returned to her that were looted by the Nazis from her grandfather, Alfred Hess, in the 1930s. Several works, such as Berlin Street Scene by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Nude by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, have been returned to her and subsequently sold; the former sold at auction for £20.5 million to the Neue Galerie New York, which also paid over £1 million to Halpin for Nude.
context_section_description: After her schooling, Halpin took a junior position in a German publishing company that was arranged through her father's contacts but she did not enjoy being in the country. She returned to London where she edited a medical journal, joined the National Union of Journalists, and began to get involved with trade unionism, causing her political beliefs to harden.
  In the 1990s she became London district secretary of the Communist Party of Britain and soon after joined the executive committee before being elected as the national chairwoman in 2000. Her nickname there was "Stalin's granny" due to her hardline views. She has also been honorary treasurer for the National Union of Journalists and member of the Trades Union Congress General Council. In 1978 she stood in the Tower Hamlets London Borough Council Election in the Limehouse ward but was not successful, receiving 93 votes. In 2000 she stood for the London Assembly but also failed to be elected. In 2006 she was the chair of the Communist Party of Britain.
caption: Berlin Street Scene, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, oil on canvas, 1913
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "300", "Image YResolution": "300", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS3 Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2009:04:22 17:01:58", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "300", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6591", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1948", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2638"}