An important Kirchner painting sold at the record-setting auction in New York the other day for nearly $40 million. But possibly more interesting than the work itself is the identity of the seller – “Anita Halpin, the 62-year-old stalwart and chair of the far left” Communist Party of Britain. “For a communist, it may seem a galling sum for 200cm by 150cm of canvas. Worse still, perhaps, for a woman with Stalinist credentials.”