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What do you think? Would you pay that if you had the money? What do you think of Hitler's talent and/or skill as an
artist?
I didn't know this:
FTA: Hitler moved to Vienna as a young man to try to make it as an artist. Ironically, a Jewish art dealer believed in his talent and sold several Hitler paintings to wealthy Viennese Jewish clients beginning in 1911.
He showed promise in architecture, flunked out of high school and I think he did have some talent. If he was allowed into the Academy, his artistic skills probably would have improved. Interesting that Marc
Chagall also was rejected from the Fine Arts Academy in St. Petersburg in Russia. Who know's
what may have happened if Hitler did decide to try the exam a second time (but he was lazy).
I don't want to defend this maniac/monster and to answer the original question, no I would not buy his
work but I'm sure someone will.
^
On his work being bought....wouldn't surprise me since Nazi artifacts particularly some more than others when related to historical factors are continually finding buyers.
^
On his work being bought....wouldn't surprise me since Nazi artifacts particularly some more than others when related to historical factors are continually finding buyers.
That''s true. Out of curiosity, I looked that up and found that some museums are interested in
acquiring them for historical reasons, many of which were from those who served (vets) during
WWII.
Well its just what you read and not the real truth. Hitler did more than that and I think his watercolor is great enough to get into vienna academy.
And obviously, you're wrong. First, his works were demonstrably not good enough to get him into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, for in 1907, he applied and his in-person series of test drawings was rejected. In 1908, a second attempt apparently resulted in the Academy not even being interested enough in Hitler to allow him to test again.
As far as watercolors, no, that's pretty much all Hitler did. He painted them, usually copied from postcards depicting local scenery, to sell. And he sold enough of them to keep him solvent, if fairly poor. The problem was that he wasn't interested in working more than the bare minimum required to keep him housed and fed. Simply put, the aimless young Hitler in Vienna was a lazy.
But for his later political rise, every last thing Adolf Hitler ever painted would be long forgotten and discarded - even he knew that his paintings weren't much.
Hitler was disparaging about his own paintings - though proud of his architectural drawings - when speaking to his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, in 1944, commenting that it was 'madness' to pay such prices as they were fetching.
--Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris, p.625, fn 262
Well its just what you read and not the real truth. Hitler did more than that and I think his watercolor is great enough to get into vienna academy.
There was not a chance in the world that Hitler would have been allowed to enter the Viennese Academy of the Arts. Vienna at that time was the white-hot apex of the European art world, at a time when Europe still ruled the world of fine art. He was given a shot twice at entrance, and was denied both times.
Vienna's artists were leading both in avant grade modernism and traditional painting simultaneously from the years between ca. 1890 to 1914 when World War I broke out. At that time, few formal art schools existed, and the Academy was, as they all were, private schools. All the academies were largely funded by royal and noble patrons, and gaining admittance guaranteed any young artist a good income, mostly painting portraits and other art for noble patrons afterwards. Many of the graduates went on to serve as apprentices afterward to some of the leading Austrian, Russian, German, Spanish and French artists of the day, which added to their budding reputations.
Art at that time was as much a luxury as diamonds and fine jewelry for the wealthy of Europe. Street artists were everywhere in Vienna, as the city was also the hottest social spot in Europe, where the rich from all over the world rubbed elbows with the royalty. The staff of the Academy were all practicing artists themselves, all renowned to various degrees, and all very selective as to who they would allow into their tightly knit circle.
Hitler was not impoverished when he arrived in Vienna. His father had set up an inheritance for him, and Hitler took all the money in that account with him. Once there, he painted seriously for a short time, trying to put an admission portfolio together, but when he was first denied admittance, he then squandered the rest idly, putting down his brushes and hanging out in the beer halls. His second denial came after he was reduced to living in a run-down drafty shed in the residential district's outskirts, when he finally began painting seriously again. There were rumors that persisted until his rise after the war that he sometimes turned to prostitution to get some quick money. But even then, he still preferred to hang out in the bars over trying to sell his paintings on the street.
He did manage to sell a few through a well-known Jewish art dealer who took pity on him. In gratitude, once he became dictator, the SS captured the dealer, and sent him to a concentration camp where he died.
Hitler mostly painted pictures of buildings. Tourist stuff. Once he joined the army, he never painted again, but when he came to power, he made sure that all the artists who once turned him down got their works stashed away in warehouses, away from public view. All his attention after the war turned to architecture, his favorite painting subject. He hung very little of his stolen artwork in his private residences.
He promoted an architect who built him fantasy models of a New Berlin, Albert Speer, into the high ministry as Minister of Armaments and War Production.
If he had just buckled down and gone back to work after his first failed admission attempt, what would have happened after the WWI armistice? While Austria lay in ruins, other areas of Europe were not as impoverished. It's possible that, with credentials, Hitler could have gone to Switzerland and made a fine living there if he had finally been admitted to the Academy. I'm sure he must have shown enough promise to have been given a second chance, which must have been a rarity.
You know from the foregoing it does show Hitler had an 'artistic' side that he sought to express. The fact is he did find success artistically in writing down his thoughts into arguably one of the most notorious books in history. And that was Mein Kampf.
What Hitler couldn't express through his art apparently surely seeped in and throughout his emotional prose writing. And that writing apparently lighted a fire among readers.
In Hitler's case it was the book rather than the picture that stands as a pivotal object on his legacy to the world. It is evident that damming up the art that never got to fruition within him unleashed calamity on the world. His words became literally more powerful than the brush.
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