Adolf Hitler wanted to to be an artist and believed he had the necessary talent.

In his book Hitler, the historian Norman Stone contradicts some assumptions about the young Adolf that were and still are widely held:

Hitler  inherited enough capital [from his father] to keep him roughly at the level of a junior schoolteacher, and he did not have to starve – on the contrary, as he grew up, he became a fussy dresser, and indulged his taste for opera. He could pay for his own  studies, and he made for the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, hoping to study architecture. The academy thought quite highly of him but competition for places was severe and he was twice rejected in 1907 and 1908.

Actually, Stone gets one thing wrong there. Hitler’s “test drawing” in 1907 was “unsatisfactory”, according to Academy records. And in 1908 his submissions did not even qualify him to take the entrance examination.

But he did make some extra money by selling his paintings to tourists.

Norman Stone writes:

Contrary to legends that he later propagated, he was never crushed by poverty, forced to live in a home for tramps, or become a house painter.

During the Second World War it was commonly believed in the allied countries that Hitler had been a house painter. (Hannah Arendt says so in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, perhaps because she really believed it, or perhaps because she wanted to believe it. It was an occupation that intellectuals naturally scorned. It would have been unthinkable to her that Hitler was a painter in the sense of being an artist – even a poor one.) Among intellectuals, art was then, as it is now, held in high esteem, and the calling of the artist was to them as near to being sacred as anything on earth could be. It was a view that Hitler shared.

To what extent his failure to become a renowned artist contributed to his becoming a monster, recognized universally as the personification and archetype of evil, nobody of course can know, though many theorize about it. The fact remains that the revolutionary national-socialist genocidal mass-murderer and destroyer of Europe, Adolf Hitler, was an art-loving bohemian, animal-loving vegetarian, and passionate admirer of Wagner’s death-loving operas. (“Death-loving”? See our post The cultivation of evil the sickness of Europe, July 20, 2010.)

Aesthetics should never be confused with ethics. Nor is strong feeling in itself a moral good. Beauty is not truth, nor truth beauty. And often what is true is extremely ugly.

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Post Script: The paintings in our post below are by (in descending order):-

1. Hitler
2. Hitler
3. Hitler
4. Churchill
5. Hitler
6. Churchill
7. Churchill
8. Churchill
9. Hitler

Some of these paintings are by Winston Churchill and some are by Adolf Hitler.

Some are signed, but of the rest can you tell which are by whom?

It should be easy.

Art critics have praised Churchill’s and slated Hitler’s.

But was that because they knew who the painter was in each case?

Which of these works are good and which are bad, and why?

Are the characters of the two men revealed in their painting?

If so, how?

It turns out that two of the terrorist leaders, now in Yemen, who plotted Abdulmutallab’s intended Christmas Day atrocity over Detroit, were released from Guantanamo in November 2007.

Their names: Said Ali al-Shihri and Muhammad Attik al-Harbi (since changed to Muhammad al-Awfi).

They were flown off to Saudi Arabia, there to be healed of the tragic affliction of their souls which, compassion junkies believe, compelled them to be torturers and killers.

The magic cure was ART THERAPY.

Yes. Designing tiles or whatever non-representational art Islam permits.

Michelle Malkin tells us more about them:

In January 2009, the two “rehabilitated” recidivists released a video vowing to wage jihad to “aid the religion,” “establish the rightly guided caliphate” and ” fight against our enemies.” One of the duo, Said Ali al-Shihri, is suspected of involvement in a deadly bombing of the United States embassy in Yemen’s capital, Sana, in September 2008.

So art therapy doesn’t work for terrorists?

Can we think of anything else that might be worth a try?

Hell by Hieronymus Bosch

The playtime revolutionaries and vandals of the Viennese commune (see below, Heaven and Hell (1)) lived very comfortably in the midst of what they chose to call Hell. They knew it was nothing of the sort. They also could not help knowing that millions in neighboring Communist countries longed for the freedom and prosperity that they had and pretended to despise. Their Hell was a lie, but their Heaven was truly unimaginable.

Genuinely feared Hells are much the same in successive generations and diverse cultures. Hell is pain, sorrow, fear, loneliness, loss, defeat, oppression, humiliation, frustration, despair. It is all that we hate and fear. Its geography and architecture are hideous and threatening. Its images are iron and fire wielded by ruthless tormentors with absolute power, assaulting vulnerable flesh. Everyone can recognize Hell instantly in Hieronymus Bosch’s picture of it. As pain is universal, so are the furniture and vocabulary of Hell.

But what of Heaven? Who has described or pictured it convincingly?

The conventional Christian Heaven or Paradise – commonly depicted as a pearly-gated garden (‘Paradise’ is an Old Persian word for a garden) where disembodied but human-shaped beings with wings stand on clouds and pluck harp-strings, in the vicinity of a throne on which a huge bearded man is seated – cannot have a lot of appeal to a human nature that craves excitement, competition, challenge, variety, drama, achievement, and carnal satisfactions. At best it might be a rehab retreat rather than a pleasure resort. But there are profounder Christian visions. In Dante’s Paradiso the degrees of bliss – that is, nearness to God – depend on the capabilities of the individual souls.

In ancient Greece, the shades of heroes went to Elysium to wander about in a state of blessedness but not happiness, according to Homer. It lay on the rim of gloomy Hades, where the unheroic multitude languished forever. The wicked suffered unremittingly in the dreadful pit of Tartarus.

A perpetual feasting with the Gods in the great hall of Valhalla was how the Vikings imagined eternal bliss. But even if immortal digestive systems are part of the deal, such an afterlife, when measured against the pleasures pursued on earth, must surely lack a certain je ne sais quoi.

Jillian Becker,  December 16, 2009

From Slick.com