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Hitler's Art
Kute Fine Art
The Nazi regime made art theft a major priority and this is mainly due to Hitler's personal interest in art. So where did this interest come from?
Hitler described himself as a painter in the Academic tradition. Most everyone else who's seen his work has described Hitler's painting style as either "Bad" or "Extremely bad."
A mediocre painter as a youth, Hitler had, as a student, twice tried and failed the entrance examination to the School of Fine Arts in Vienna. He earned a living by using his artistic skills to produce paintings that were sold to the public or used for postcards. Hitler was a great student of the fine arts and studied music, opera, painting, sculpture, and architecture. While living in Vienna under conditions of poverty, he read voraciously and still managed to spend whatever income he had to attend lectures, concerts, opera, and the theatre. Even when he barely had enough money to survive he refused to compromise and always purchased the best paints, brushes, paper, and canvas.
As a remarkably prolific artist, he is estimated to have created between 2000 and 3000 drawings, watercolours, and oil paintings. His artistic “talent” revealed itself at an early age and continued painting and drawing throughout his life. Even while behind the front lines in World War 1, he continued to paint in his spare time and contributed instructional drawings and cartoons to the military newspaper. His art continued throughout his leadership of Germany and included detailed building plans, furniture design, city planning, and monuments.
The Nazi leader remained convinced he was an artistic genius removed from ordinary moral values and was often irritatingly obsessed by art despite his failure as a painter. You only have to look at his paintings to see why Hitler never made it as an artist.
His self belief is best described in a book Genius Delusions: Hitler and Art, by Birgit Schwarz. She claims the Nazi leader remained convinced of his extraordinary talent until he committed suicide in his Berlin bunker in 1945.
"The extent to which Hitler considered himself an artistic genius has been, underestimated," Ms Schwarz said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine. "Many of his actions were driven by this self-perception and his overheated artist's ego. His love of art led to the heart of evil."
Ms Schwarz illustrates Hitler's obsession with art by citing the Italian art historian Ranuncio Bandinelli, who was given the job of escorting the Nazi leader on a tour of art galleries during his official visit to Italy in 1938.
Mr Bandinelli recalled in his journal that Hitler spent hours upon end admiring the paintings to the point that his Italian host, the Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, was conspicuously irritated.
Hitler's rejection by art school increased rather than diminished his self perception as a genius, Ms Schwarz insists, even if he considered himself an unrecognised one. She said that he collected works by lesser-known artists as a result.
However she argues that, after his rejection he began to think that his genius could best be expressed in architecture rather than painting.
Hitler went to Munich after Vienna, and, according to Ms Schwarz, his new-found
obsession with architecture is evinced by plans he drew at the time for a competition to design a new opera house for Berlin. Hitler never submitted an entry, but, Ms Schwarz maintains: "He thought he could rank equal with the most famous architects of the time."
In time he became an avid, though unskilled, art collector. His personal artistic taste was rigid, and he favoured the Old Masters of Northern Europe—Dürer, Cranach, Vermeer, Rembrandt and Rubens, among others—that strongly enhanced and fitted into his own political views on the superiority of Germanic culture. He also coveted the words of the Italian Renaissance Masters, such as Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci.
On the other hand, Hitler despised Picasso, Matisse, and the whole modern art school. In Mein Kampf, his autobiography, he ferociously attacked the degeneracy of modern art, considering Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism to be the product of decadent twentieth-century society. After taking power in 1933, Hitler sold or destroyed the modern paintings found in Germany's state museums. He did not allow looted modern or degenerate artworks into Germany; instead, these were returned to the European art market in exchange for pieces that met the approval of Nazi ideology.
Hitler intended his thousands of newly, ill-gotten Old Masters and realistic paintings to form the central collection of a European Art Museum to be built in the Austrian city of Linz, where he had spent his childhood years. Other Nazi dignitaries, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering and Foreign Affairs Minister von Ribbentrop, also took advantage of German conquests to increase their private art collections.
So what can we conclude? An artist's unique perspective and instinctual drive to create something out of nothing makes the artist uniquely qualified to lead and inspire a nation.
People with skinhead haircuts and bovver-boots do not buy Hitler’s paintings when they come to the market.
Having failed the entrance examination to the School of Fine Arts in Vienna on twice, Hitler then embarked upon a well-documented crooked path toward attempted world domination after this final artistic disappointment. We'll never know if the history of the 20th Century may have been vastly altered - and millions of lives not been cut tragically short - had Hitler been accepted to art school in 1907 or 1908.
He was a monster, maniac, insane and a poor artist.
Chris Sabian is an artist with http://www.kutefineart.com and co-owner of http://www.paragonprints.co.uk
Article submitted Thursday, May 26, 2011 & read 327 times.
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