Interesting thread. Hitler was a mediocre artist…plus, most of his stuff was destroyed-by his own orders (once he became the Fuhrer).
Another question: there seems to a be a persistent rumor that Hitler worked (for a time) as a wall paper hanger-is this true?
It would have popped up in any detailed bio for at least two reasons:
(1) There’s an armchair psychologist school of thought that says his failure in the art world is what set him off on a bad path (of course, there’s also the increasingly attenuated armchair psychology views that he was mad because he caught syphillis from a Jewish prostitute, or his grandmother was secretly Jewish so he was filled with self-hate, or . . . .).
(2) There seems no doubt he was competent as in being able to paint reasonably pretty, lifelike pictures that wouldn’t shock you if you saw them hanging on your dentist’s wall. The debate among art scholars generally comes down that he was trite, conventional, sentimental, lacked inspiration. On the one hand, this is consistent with his being rather, uh, conservative overall, and certainly the paintings I’ve seen tend toward the pastoral, glorifying-German-village-life, old-school manner. On the other hand – and this is the part that would also pop up in the bio – Hitler notoriously made art a doctrinaire part of his politics, most notoriously by staging shows of “Degenerate Art,” or burning all sorts of Modernist or Jewish-painted art. Art scholars, some of whom seem to make something of a point of pride of embracing Modernist or Abstract forms, still haven’t forgiven him for that vandalism (sometimes you wonder if they’re madder at him for that than for everything else he did), so I sometimes question whether their condemnation of his mediocre painting talents is a bit overdone. But as you can see from the pictures, you’d have to agree that he wasn’t doing anything masterful or groundbreaking on the canvas, and if things had gone differently and he’d stuck with that career, it’s doubtful anyone would be bidding up into the millions at Christie’s on an original composition of his.
No…thank YOU FasterThanMeerkats; I have been waiting for 27 posts!
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Hitler intended to put all stolen and looted art in a huge Nazi art museum after the war, in Linz.
I had no idea Churchill was such a good painter.
Well, he was no Hitler… 
While a failure at military tactics, the French were proud that Goering did not manage to pick anything from The Louvre, the French showed that they were at least masters at hiding art (in salt cellars, private homes) and when the conflict was over the pieces returned to the museum, a french documentary reported that every single piece did return!
BTW that documentary (The Golden Prison) on the history of the Louvre is recommended, although it is missing the latest features like the pyramid as it was made in 1978.
I wonder if Hitler’s limited but competent illustration skills could’ve gotten him in on the ground floor of superhero comic books. He was about four or five years older than the original artist who drew Wonder Woman, right around when Superman and Batman first started headlining titles in the '30s – and four or five years younger than Charles Reizenstien, who was cranking out crudely-drawn stories featuring Doctor Mid-Nite and Mister Terrific.
The quality of his drawing would seem to be more than adequate. I think temperament would have been the bigger issue. On the one hand, he was very big into mythology and quasi-mysticism, so you can see him populating a universe of godlike Norse overlords, maybe. On the other hand, there doesn’t seem to have been much about him that was fanciful or humorous, and he took himself so freaking seriously that I’m sure that either a new art form (that took a long time even to be recognized as an art form) or something that was perceived as for children might have had a hard time passing muster with his inflated sense of Dignity and Destiny, or his pride in himself as a classical old-school artist.
Picasso ‘‘Did you hear? The Nazis have labeled our work as ‘degenerate’.’’
**Dali ** ‘‘That kinda makes you proud, doesn’t it?’’
That was excellent. 
He was obviously no great artist. He had technical skill–and it’s apparent he worked very hard-- but while I am no art critic, it’s also apparent that he lacked that je ne sais quoi to be a professional artist. His work has a Hallmark Card quality to it. He might have earned a living as a commercial artist, if such a thing existed in his day.
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Interesting thread. Hitler was a mediocre artist…plus, most of his stuff was destroyed-by his own orders (once he became the Fuhrer).
According to several sites I’ve perused, he didn’t ordered his paintings destroyed but had his henchmen buy them up and then had them stored. The idea was to prevent reproductions of his work. At least we were spared even more bad reproductions of bad art. Here’s one cite, but there are quite a few.
I saw a documentary on PBS one time (sorry this is vague–that’s the problem) that mentioned that Hitler was still painting well into the war. I recall something about him painting the view from the Eagle’s Nest. Yet I can’t find anything about this. When did he actually stop painting?
I second that people interested in the artist side of Hitler should see this movie, as well as the documentary The Architecture of Doom.
In Max, Hitler is a down and outer WWI vet in shambled post war Germany. He’s at loose ends and sort of drifting within his ill formed notions of aesthetics and politics. Without going into details, the story gives you a vague impression that Hitler may have started the whole Third Reich thing as a sort of performance art project. In one of the best scenes he even declares something like “Politics is the new art.”
In TAOD you see just how influential Hitler’s aesthetic notions were in shaping his approach to, it seems, just about everything about the Third Reich. One of the many great tid bits from this movie is that one of Hitler’s prime concerns in the design of Reich buildings was that they would leave grandiose ruins.
Although Nuremberg was the first war crimes trial, it seems a safe bet it will also be the last time an architect (Speer) is put on trial for being a central figure in crimes against humanity (admittedly, it was not just his architecture but his work on logistics and armaments distribution that got him there).
Same in the Netherlands. I used to be a tour guide for Maastrichts underground cave/quarry’s. There was a secured chamber that briefly housed the Nightwatch, Hollands most famous painting, during the height of the war.
He was a Concept Artist with a really bad concept.
Speer’s being tried at Nuremberg had nothing to do with his architecture at all. He was tried as Minister of Armaments and his use of slave labor.
And don’t get me started on his execution… Very messy - practically ruined a whole continent. Why couldn’t he have tried wrapping countries in pretty fabrics like Christo did later?