Commie Party chair nets £20m

It couldn't have been a greater contrast: the comrades of the Communist Party of Britain were meeting on a wet Wednesday night in one of the grottier enclaves of east London, while in an auction room in Manhattan the world's leading art dealers were on a spending spree which broke world records. Few would have guessed the unlikely link between them. But Anita Halpin, the 62-year-old stalwart and chair of the far left group, was about to become a multimillionaire. In the last few months, unbeknown to friends and colleagues, Ms Halpin has inherited one of the most important expressionist German paintings. Yesterday, it was sold for £20.5m. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene, a vivid vision of the claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing ebb and flow of urban life in 1913, was bought from Ms Halpin by art consultant Daniella Luxembourg on behalf of the Neue Galerie, New York. The work, which was recently transferred to Ms Halpin - as the sole surviving heir to a Jewish German shoe factory owner - under contentious Nazi restitution laws. There was no indication from Ms Halpin's Communist Party of Britain colleagues at their headquarters in Croydon yesterday as to how the proceeds from the sale of the Kirchner might be distributed. For the full story - click the title Irish Art