# Who was the most talented artist: Hitler, Stalin or Mao **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [January 4, 2013, 9:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042 "2013-01-04T09:35:08Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 13\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![KermitTheFrig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/47e85d/32.png) [@KermitTheFrig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KermitTheFrig)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2013, 9:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/21 "2013-01-05T21:52:53Z")
Hitler’s painting is weak, but his line drawing is very accomplished. The furniture sketches show this particularly well. By far the best of the three–especially since the “Stalin” sketches are not by Stalin at all. ---
**Author:** ![Sevencl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@Sevencl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevencl)\ **Post date:** [January 5, 2013, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/22 "2013-01-05T21:55:55Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > There were 2 nekkid women there. > > He had a thing about not doing mens genitalia - they got awful vague on that one dude that just had a sort of genital balloon down there. Yeah, but I’ve seen photos of guys like that (though never that extreme). They’re always circumcised, maybe it’s caused by being cut too tight or something ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2013, 11:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/23 "2013-01-06T11:29:06Z")
Looked at one Stalin sketch, and said, “Yeah, Joe.” That’s really good work. So of course it’s not his. Disappointing, yet somehow reassuring, that he was not Stalin and also a great artist. ---
**Author:** ![Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c68b51/32.png) [@Ashley\_Pomeroy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ashley_Pomeroy)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2013, 4:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/24 "2013-01-06T16:21:10Z")
For contrast [here](http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=667) are some paintings by Winston Churchill, which - spookily - seem to be on a similar artistic wavelength to those of Adolf Hitler, e.g. they’re chocolate boxy. It’s funny that the most reviled and controversial paintings of the early 20th Century - paintings that were mocked by the establishment and pooh-poohed by posh people - were produced by individuals who I would have been happy to put in charge of the world, whereas the leaders we ended up were mostly either incompetent or blood-thirsty lunatics with no artistic talent. But then again, how would Marcel Duchamp have fared with the nitty-gritty of fiscal policy, defence, transport infrastructure and so forth? There is a case for arguing that Idi Amin was an accomplished surrealist who chose for his canvas Uganda rather than, for example, _a canvas._ His leadership of Uganda was a provocative attempt to pull colonialism out of historical stasis and return it to active symbolic duty, _where new adjacencies might reactivate latent meanings_. Eisenhower painted as well. [Here’s a portrait of Bernard Montgomery](http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/field-marshal-bernard-law-montgomery-18871976-1st-viscount28146) that makes him look unhinged, which is fair enough. Perhaps he was trying to convey something of the man rather than just duplicating his appearance. On a technical level it’s the best of all the paintings I saw when composing this message. To be fair, he didn’t fancy himself as a great artist (and neither did Churchill) and he achieved greater things in other fields. I can conclude that we’re very lucky Thomas Kinkade didn’t fancy himself as a great politician; we would have had a nuclear war by now. ---
**Author:** ![Slithy\_Tove](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slithy_tove/32/18248_2.png) [@Slithy\_Tove](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Slithy_Tove)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2013, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/25 "2013-01-06T19:00:45Z")
[paintings by US Grant.](http://www.granthomepage.com/grantartist.htm) Drawing and draftsmanship were taught at West Point. Of course, Eisenhower also went to West Point and Churchill to Sandhurst. Another example: [Frederick the Great’s flute concerto](http://youtu.be/foIIbU8qadQ) I’ll suppress the urge to post the “Where’s the rest of me!?” clip from \*\*Kings Row \*\* ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2013, 7:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/26 "2013-01-06T19:35:34Z")
> [@ZebraShaSha](#): > > I thought most people agreed his architecture was tortuous. Hitler provided the general sketches and concepts, and (mainly) Albert Speer carried them out. [The results](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_architecture) were grim and imposing, but not nearly busy enough to be “tortuous.” It was mostly smooth, blank-walled facades, and it was all **big.** What they [planned for postwar Berlin](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welthauptstadt_Germania) was even bigger. From [_The City in Mind,_](http://www.amazon.com/City-Mind-Notes-Urban-Condition/dp/0743227239/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1357499144&sr=1-1&keywords=the+city+in+mind) by James Howard Kunstler, chapter on Berlin: > [@](#): > > . . . Hitler’s postwar career as a frustrated young artist has become a cliche of history. To describe him as a “failure,” however, misses the point. His political career was performance art, with many explicitly theatrical touches, and it was such a smashing success that he was rewarded with a kind of absolute temporal power not seen since the Roman emperors. Among other things, it enabled him to practice architecture on the grandest conceivable scale, through his surrogate, Albert Speer. > > Back in 1924, while serving a year in Landsberg Prison for his Munich insurrection against the leftist Bavarian government, Hitler had made sketches of a soldier’s monument – a triumphal arch akin to one depicted in a painting by Schinkel, but never built – and a domed government hall of gargantuan proportions. Both these fantasies emerged ten years later virtually intact when Hitler engaged Speer to collaborate with him on an ambitious scheme to transform Berlin into a world capital. By then, Hitler had erased the boundaries between the party, the state, the economy, and his own personality, and anything seemed possible. > > \ > > Speer soon replaced [the old Reich Chancellery] with an enormous, somberly classical edifice, more than half of which was occupied by a sequence of vast ceremonial courts and corridors designed to cow visiting diplomats as they marched hundreds of feet on slippery marble floors from the front entrance to Hitler’s office. . . . As a matter of style, Speer’s version of classicism was not so far from the spirit of Art Deco, which could be described as classicism mechanized and streamlined for speed; Nazi architecture was classicism further simplified to express power minus distracting eroticism. It differed from Art Deco chiefly in eschewing any hint of feminine curves. . . . > > \ > > In those heady days before America entered the war, when France had been conquered, and Paris occupied, and England was reeling from the Blitz, and the Russians were mollified with a nonaggression pact, and America dallied in denial and isolationism, and the prospect of a quick Nazi victory did not seem so far-fetched, Hitler loved nothing better than to adjourn a dinner party at the chancellery and lead his guests to Speer’s headquarters next door where they could ogle a huge, elaborately detailed scale model of the Berlin project, with Hitler weilding a flashlight to illuminate dramatically the various buildings and urban features while he discoursed on his plans to build a city that would exceed ancient Rome in its magnificence and timelessness. In Hitler’s scheme of things, the war just an unavoidably messy phase of a large construction project. > > The wish to overcome time itself was never far from Hitler’s thoughts in this enterprise. He and Speer even formulated an explicit “theory of ruin value” (_theorie von ruinenwert_) in anticipation of the inevitable distant point when, by definition, history would leave behind the Thousand-Year Reich. Under this theory, steel framing and reinforced concrete were not acceptable building materials because they would not result in aesthetically pleasing ruins. Therefore, all National Socialist buildings would be composed of granite and marble. As it turned out, these standards were too rigorous even for the Nazis, who often resorted to conventional techniques of the steel framework with brick and concrete walls clad in limestone veneer – including the chancellery, which was erected in less than a year by thousands of workers laboring in round-the-clock shifts. In any case, the theory of ruin value was tested during Speer’s own lifetime. It turned out that bombs and artillery do not fashion ruins quite the same way time and weather do. By 1945, the chancellery was reduced to a jagged shell and its remains were eventually bulldozed by the Russians in 1949. The chocolate-brown marble from the interior was taken to decorate the subway station nearby under the Mohrenstrasse. To this day, the site of Hitler’s former headquarters remains vacant save for its eerie little forest of shrubs and trees. Ambitious reconstruction goes on all around it, but the site remains untouched. There are no historical markers, nor even graffiti identifying the empty lot on the corner of the Wilhelmstrasse and the Voss Strasse. An aura of historical toxicity lingers there, contaminating with poisonous shame not so much the soil but the persistent collective memory. ---
**Author:** ![Sevencl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@Sevencl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevencl)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2013, 7:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/27 "2013-01-06T19:50:04Z")
… I like nazi architecture… (and brutalist architecture in general). That might be because I am, at heart, a supervillain. Big imposing doom fortresses are awesome. ---
**Author:** ![aruvqan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/aruvqan/32/2891_2.png) [@aruvqan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/aruvqan)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2013, 10:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/28 "2013-01-06T22:18:54Z")
> [@Sevencl](#): > > … I like nazi architecture… (and brutalist architecture in general). > > That might be because I am, at heart, a supervillain. Big imposing doom fortresses are awesome. And there was some very interesting Soviet fantasy architecture projects, and some really interesting projects. I can remember seeing some slideshows of abandoned Soviet era heroic architecture. ---
**Author:** ![gracer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/8e7dd6/32.png) [@gracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gracer)\ **Post date:** [January 7, 2013, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/29 "2013-01-07T00:35:02Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > He had a thing about not doing mens genitalia - they got awful vague on that one dude that just had a sort of genital balloon down there. Can someone please tell us what the red scribble says next to that? Please, oh please let it be “see the teacher after class, your willy-drawing is insufficient” or something!! Stalin’s hot guys are appealing, but some of the faces seem quite off, almost like they don’t belong with the body. The face on the last one is ok. He’s still the winner, as far as I’m concerned. Hitler’s landscapes look like those cheap shit things you find at those sad junk stalls that also have piles of icky looking tupperware that’s 20 years old. Or maybe it looks like those paintings you make with the help of the tv-guy. Mao’s writing does nothing for me, but it may be lost in translation. ---
**Author:** ![Hippy\_Hollow](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hippy_hollow/32/4841_2.png) [@Hippy\_Hollow](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hippy_Hollow)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 5:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/30 "2013-01-08T05:53:03Z")
> [@aruvqan](#): > > And there was some very interesting Soviet fantasy architecture projects, and some really interesting projects. I can remember seeing some slideshows of abandoned Soviet era heroic architecture. I actually enjoy looking at buildings like this, essentially because they are usually completely disrespectful of the environment. It’s like, “I don’t give a fuck if I’m supposed to be a library, I am going to scare the hell out of anyone who even looks at me.” Any links to good fascist scary-assed architecture? I was very impressed with Eisenhower’s painting and Hitler’s pen drawings. Especially the one of the dog and the blond woman. Who knew he was a dab hand? I have often heard Hitler criticized as an artist - one wonders if it’s because he’s, you know, Hitler. Like if Hans Kranz had that portfolio, would people say good things about it? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 5:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/31 "2013-01-08T05:58:16Z")
> [@Sevencl](#): > > … I like nazi architecture… (and brutalist architecture in general). No, no, no. Brutalist architecture is when you take the molding away without smoothing out the concrete, leaving a rough and random surface showing the wood-surface as it was against the concrete. (The main Orange County Library in downtown Orlando, Florida, is a prime example.) That’s not for them thar Nazis, the anal-retentive barstards, they smoothed **everything!** And didn’t even like to admit they were using anything so plebeian as concrete! ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 6:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/32 "2013-01-08T06:06:45Z")
> [@Hippy\_Hollow](#): > > Any links to good fascist scary-assed architecture? Try the [Metropolitan Opera House](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Opera_House_(Lincoln_Center)) and the [Kennedy Center.](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_Center) ---
**Author:** ![Sevencl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d9b06d/32.png) [@Sevencl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevencl)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2013, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042/33 "2013-01-08T06:21:14Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > No, no, no. Brutalist architecture is when you take the molding away without smoothing out the concrete, leaving a rough and random surface showing the wood-surface as it was against the concrete. (The main Orange County Library in downtown Orlando, Florida, is a prime example.) That’s not for them thar Nazis, the anal-retentive barstards, they smoothed **everything!** Oh, I see. That’s interesting, I’m not educated in architecture at all, only that one phrase, which I remember because I actually like the style. Some nazi stuff seems similar to my untrained eye, imposing, bare, etc. I do like both, but that library has too much glass for my taste. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-most-talented-artist-hitler-stalin-or-mao/646042.md?page=1)