Hitler: A Gift For Evil--But Not For Art

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By Peter Plagens

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But why give him the wall space?" an art critic asked Deborah Rothschild, curator at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. "Him" is Adolf Hitler, and two of Hitler's watercolors are in the exhibition "Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics and Hitler's Early Years in Vienna, 1906-1913" (through Oct. 27). Rothchilds's answer was, "I grew up with questions about... what formed [Hitler], what shaped his esthetics, what was the art behind the Third Reich." Hitler went to Vienna at 17, wanted to be an artist, but flunked the Vienna Academy's admission test--twice. Soon he was living in a men's shelter, scraping for money, making art copied from postcards and nursing political grudges.

One of the watercolors, "Mountain Chapel" (painted in 1909, when Hitler was 20), was--ironically--commissioned by a Jewish art dealer for a Jewish lawyer. The work violates practically every rule of Composition 101: don't put the spire dead center! Don't let the mountains and the clouds slant in the same direction! Don't have another building zoom in weirdly from the edge! Is there anything in it that tells you why he became a monster? Unless you're a combination art critic, forensic detective and psychiatrist, no. But the picture does help prove that Hitler was a frustrated no-talent in art who, tragically, turned out to have an evil gift in politics. That lesson is worth a little wall space.

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