Master race masterpieces
Some incensed critics have compared buying a painting by Hitler, as happened with much fanfare this week, to bidding on eBay for the hairball that Britney Spears coughed up after she kissed Madonna (well, maybe that’s a bad example – who wouldn’t want that??)
But the guy was such a Compleat Failure at everything he applied himself to, the dictionary’s definition of bad, that his artistic side will always rank right up there with the great curiosities of evolution.
It’s been said before that, for people like Caesar and Napoleon and Uncle Adolf, the world was a vast canvas, and life the ultimate experiment in aesthetics, with people as pigments and wars and mass murders as the brushstrokes. They considered themselves gods, after all.
Even as a god, though, Hitler was humble enough to admit he wasn’t a very good painter. Neither were the other two amateur daubers who waged World War II, Churchill and Roosevelt. It would have been nice if they could have settled things with a painting competition instead of trying to blow up my dad. I think Churchill might have won too.
I’ve read that the US Army Center of Military History in Washington has a boatload of Nazi propaganda and some Hitler art under lock and key. Others aren’t so shy, though, and that’s why 21 of the Fuhrer’s canvases were on the auction block the other day in, of all places, England.
His stuff does show up on the market every once in a while because (a) he was quite prolific in his Hitler youth, and (b) there’s probably a lot of fakes around and always plenty of gullible buyers.
For every gullible buyer there’s a buyable “expert” evaluator to verify an artwork’s authenticity. I’m not implying this was the case in the little town of Lostwithiel in Cornwall on Tuesday, which had to get a whole slew of phonelines installed when word got out about the Hitler auction and prospective buyers laid siege. But the fact is that the vendor, Jefferys auction house, could only “attribute” the works to the not-so-great dictator; it couldn’t say they were definitely his.
The little old lady in Huy, Belgium, who found the paintings in the proverbial “battered suitcase” while rummaging around in her attic picked the Cornish auctioneer to present them to the world apparently because Jefferys managed to snag £5,200 for a Hitler landscape last November.
In the attic?? Well, you see, there were these two “refugees from France (?), apparently returning home (?)”. They “left a sealed box” at the woman’s house in 1919 containing watercolours which depicted scenes around Le Quesnoy, “the area in France where the women (?) had originally come from”.
The first woman, the one who struck gold in her attic, did so in 1985 and had the pictures checked by “experts” the following year, determining that “the signatures appeared genuine although the standard of the paintings was not as high as previous Hitler work”. And the paper was the right age.
Plus, all of the pictures, like “Village Scene” here, depict places within a small radius of where Hitler stayed while on leave during World War I. He was stationed in Flanders. You know, where poppies grow. Plus plus, they’ve all got his autograph in one corner or his monogram.
All-righty, then!
No report I’ve seen says anything about the 21 years that elapsed between the paintings’ discovery and the auction, although most take note of the fact that the “experts” have since died. Apparently there are no longer any experts around to have another look.
Nor have I been able to determine exactly what “terrorist comedian” Aaron Barschak was attempting to do when he interrupted the auction, which was conveniently being broadcast by the BBC, by bidding a gajillion pounds for the pieces. “Barschak’s wife said the sale was offensive,” the Beeb offered by way of explanation, noting with a sigh that, yes, this is the same idiot who crashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party dressed as Osama bin Laden.
They’d expected “a crush of bidders from Canada to New Zealand”, but in fact the big money all came from Russia and Estonia, places the Nazis did their best to grind into Prussian blue and burnt umber.
Bidders from those now-cheerier spots paid £118,000 for the bunch, more than double what Jefferys expected.
The highest bid – £10,500 – was for “The Church of Preux-au-Bois”, seen at the top of this post. An Estonian at the auction, doing the legwork for some east European businessman, said, “I had a budget to bid for anything that has Hitler’s signature. I have something to take back.” Huh.
But a British businessman snagged a pencil sketch of a chateau for £3,800, saying he did so “on a whim – I hadn’t intended to bid. I didn’t buy them because I admire him – I bought them because they are a piece of history.” Huh.
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Future uber-monster Adolf Hitler was just a lad when he tried to sign up at Vienna’s Academy of Arts in 1909 and was turned down. He tried again and was turned down again. Big mistake. He ended up crashing in shelters for the homeless, eating in soup kitchens … and learning to hate Jews. All he had to read was anti-Semitic propaganda.
For pocket change he took the odd menial job and sold his art – he supposedly did two or three watercolours a day, by his count a thousand in all while he was in Vienna.
In Munich a few years later, still long before Solutions 1 through Final occurred to him, he sometimes paid for restaurant meals with paintings. The waitress at one place ended up with 21 of them, four of which were ultimately hocked by a British collector.
In those years before he got swept up in a pair of corporal’s stripes in the Great War and got all his notions about even bigger, better wars, Adolf sold paintings to tourists and gallery owners. Some gallery owners liked the ornate frames and couldn’t give a toss about what was inside them; others needed the pictures to fill their own empty frames. The tourists liked his little postcard paintings, especially the ones with churches in them.
His buddy Reinhold Hanisch was his art pimp, dictating a gruelling picture-a-day pace for the future dictator so they could buy more struedel.
The next thing anybody knew, Hitler was the freaking chancellor of Germany, and suddenly everyone thought his paintings were “Mein Gott, brilliant!”
Hanisch wasn’t about to let a good whore go, so he started selling fake Hitler paintings. It didn’t end well.
Some of Hitler’s erstwhile co-bums in Vienna claimed after the war that Hitler had done his share of forgeries too, baking his paintings in an oven to make them look old and valuable.
Anyway, when Hitler became King of the World, his legions of admirers couldn’t get enough of his artwork. Several million copies of a coffee-table book on Hitler’s art were published during the Third Reich. This despite Der Fuhrer himself getting all bashful about his abilities. He was the greatest architect in the history of the universe, he’d say, but come on, only a so-so painter.
Really, though, was he any good at all? As an artist, I mean.
In “Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics”, Frederic Spotts said the little freak “had a modicum of talent — at least in sketching buildings – but …”
But he was boring, imitative, opportunistic and, what dya know, a populist. He considered modern art, from the impressionists on, nothing but a decadent bowl of messerschmidt. Opera was okay if Wagner wrote it, Beethoven and Mozart were barely tolerable and Brahms ought to have been shot. Jazz and swing, well, don’t mention jazz and swing to Herr Hitler – he’ll have one of his attacks.
In his own art he was given to muted colours, roiling clouds, impatiently dappled trees, wonky people and animals usually out of scale in their surroundings – but extremely precise architectural perspectives and details.
In 1935 Hitler fancied building Europe a new art capital. Vienna had the title at the time, but Vienna had been naughty, so his adopted hometown of Linz, Austria, got the nod for “Special Assignment Linz”. The National Socialist German Workers Party was told to get out there and find all the Fuhrer’s old paintings, schnapp schnapp. Schulte Stratthaus of the German embassy in Vienna spent years roaming around (or at least his peons did), paying the owners handsomely for the pieces and storing them all in tunnels beneath the Platterhof Hotel.
The GIs must have whistled when they saw the stash at war’s end, as GIs do in all the movies when they see something amazing.
But I still wouldn’t pay a pfennig for a Hitler landscape. Nor a Churchill, for that matter.
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Charles Snyder has a blitzkrieg of details about Hitler the Artist on his website, Snyder’s Treasures, including value, technique and how to spot the fakes.
