Hitler famously applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the 1900s but was rejected twice.
Hitler famously applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in the 1900s but was rejected twice.
I can see why. But imagine if they had admitted him. Would he have become the monster he did?
THANKS VIENNA FINE ARTS ACADEMY!!
To be fair, the painting sucks.
So now we know he was deluded from VERY early on.
Franz Liebekind: You know, not many people knew it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.
Max: Really, I never dreamed that...
Franz Liebekind: That is because that you were taken in by that verdammte Allied propaganda! Such filthy lies! They told lies! But nobody ever said a bad word about Winston Churchill, did they? No! ‘Win with Winnie!’ Churchill! With his cigars. With his brandy. And his rotten painting, rotten!
Hitler - there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in one afternoon! Two Coats!
Churchill. He couldn’t even say ‘Nazi’. He would say ‘Noooo-zeeehz, Nooooooooooooo-zeeehz!’ It wasn’t Noses! It was Nazis! Churchill!...Let me tell you this! And you’re hearing this straight from the horse. Hitler was better looking than Churchill. He was a better dresser than Churchill. He had more hair! He told funnier jokes! And he could dance the pants off of Churchill!...Churchill!
I am among the first to criticize when ISIS or the Taliban blows up a monument or destroys a cultural center.
But destroy that Hitler painting. Burn it. Burn all of his paintings. If that makes me a hypocrite, so be it.
They rejected ME too !
I wonder if W could get in ?
There is an interesting movie called “Max” which stars John Cusack as Max (a Jewish art dealer) and Gary Oldham as a post WW1, disillusioned war vet and mediocre artist named Adolph. It’s all foolish speculation, but an interesting film.
Good realism isn’t easy, but “art” at the time was getting more and more abstract and decadent, as were German politics.
I don’t like to line Hollywood’s pockets, but if you can get it for free, it is worth watching.
Lot’s of Artists and Musicians achieve greatness without the help of Academia, but Hitler wasn’t one of them!
It looks like the crap they ooze over these days as being edgy and expressive.
Hitler's cat As someone already pointed out, Hitler didn't paint people very well and left them out of many of his cityscapes, which were good enough for sidewalk sales, apparently, because they supported him, more or less. He might have gotten by as a third-rate architect, or so Speer said many years later when it was safe to do so. The only things he really did well were orate and perform devious political manipulation, good enough to best Hindenburg in his dotage, who was no slouch at it either when he was younger. Strange, inadequate, and very, very evil man.
I recall reading that Hitler was a post card painter in Vienna, 1906 when he first joined the Christian Socialist movement and became anti Jew.
“1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place”
He had been born Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, was known to his friends as Koba and is now remembered as Joseph Stalin.
Trotsky and Stalin were just two of a number of men who lived in central Vienna in 1913 and whose lives were destined to mould, indeed to shatter, much of the 20th century.
It was a disparate group. The two revolutionaries, Stalin and Trotsky, were on the run. Sigmund Freud was already well established.
The psychoanalyst, exalted by followers as the man who opened up the secrets of the mind, lived and practised on the city’s Berggasse.
The young Josip Broz, later to find fame as Yugoslavia’s leader Marshal Tito, worked at the Daimler automobile factory in Wiener Neustadt, a town south of Vienna, and sought employment, money and good times.
Then there was the 24-year-old from the north-west of Austria whose dreams of studying painting at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts had been twice dashed and who now lodged in a doss-house in Meldermannstrasse near the Danube, one Adolf Hitler.
The truth of it is, they would probably be fine with the paintings if they came from a transsexual, a lesbo, or from a minority.
They would then be telling us how the paintings expressed sadness from being crushed by the demands of evil white men. It’s easily better than half of what is hanging in art museums today.
"We like to refer to this one as Der glückliche kleine Unfall des Führers"
This painting popped into my mind.
I’ve seen worse. Jack the Dripper comes to mind.
I like it as an illustration of a dark topic.
I find the piece intriguing; guards, doorways, blood-red floor ... judgement??
It’s an insight into his vision, and of the darkness of his soul.
Thanks for the post. I had only seen his sketches and I think watercolors. I don’t think it’s bad at all, and it’s curiously german-expressionist in light of what I thought were his later denunciations of artists like Kokoschka (sp?) And others. Also - wildly telling. A very significant “rabbit hole” and hall of mirrors behind the pitiless gaze of the paper-holder who seems to control both the fate of the viewer as well as of the attendant applicant or waiting hopeful.
Looks like it might be based on Kafka’s parable “Before the Law”.