Was Hitler a Good Painter?

Examining the popular perception of Hitler's skill in artistry, and whether this idea is an honest evaluation of the dictator's portfolio.

A few months ago, online discourse began again over Hitler’s artwork. There’s an old internet bait-and-switch of one of his better paintings that tricks people into saying they liked a fascist dictator’s artwork. This was the height of pre-2008 edgy comedy, but is relatively tame by today’s standards. Nevertheless, some Neo-Nazi organizations have run with this menial tidbit from history,and have turned it into some sort of esoteric secret along the lines of “did you know Hitler was a good artist? Imagine what else the deep state isn’t telling you.” Hitler’s rejection from art school is a turning point in history that is often theorized over, but is it fair to call him “good”? When this discourse first came to my attention, I thought it would be illuminating to critique some of Hitler’s artwork and compare the actual reasons the academics gave after I finished my own assessments. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is something rarely brought into the discussion. 

The reason behind his rejection is much more straightforward; he submitted drawings of buildings which were more geared towards a career in architecture, and few examples of portraiture that the school had asked for were truly awful.¹ And yet, this myth of his great artistic skills still persists. Thus ruined the major appeal of my article, which was 3/4ths done, or so I believed. Luckily, another fascist popped up and decided to praise Hitler’s artwork from a different perspective, this time comparing it to other “contemporary” artwork. Contemporary is in quotation marks here for the simple and obvious reason that these comparisons are from wildly different areas, eras, and stages. Hitler was rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 1907 and 1908. The first of her example paintings is by Albert Birkle, who graduated from the University of Art in Berlin, and would have been 7 years old when Hitler got the boot. It is an unfortunate tendency of the modern fascist to mask the truths behind any matter concerning their heroes, but at the very least this gives us another lens through which to critique Hitler’s artwork. 

Albert Birkle, as previously mentioned, painted Die Kreuzigung, which depicts the last moments of Jesus’ suffering on the cross. The emaciated bodies of Saint Dismas and Gestas almost seem to melt to the ground like candle wax, while Jesus’ body, while still bony, hangs nobly from its crucifix. The lower body to the right, presumably the impenitent thief Gestas, seems to have his mouth agape in agony from taunting Jesus and telling him to get them off the crosses.² The penitent thief Dismas, however, droops solemnly with more blue tones across his skin, in a state of peaceful death. It is difficult to find readily available examples of Birkle’s work online, both because he was less famous than the other painters from that post and because he was younger and therefore less is in the public domain, but this landscape is comparable enough to judge against Hitler’s. I find this watercolor of his to be one of Hitler’s better works,³ but the differences in media mean that a value judgment is harder to make, especially in terms of vibrancy, which is the main characteristic of beauty in both of them. Hitler has some other mountain scenes, but they seem to stand in as a representation of majesty in his works, and frankly, those pictures aren’t typically as good because they have major perspective issues. With all these caveats in mind, I’m still going to give it to Birkle because his layering of colors is more interesting than Hitler’s, whose picture only seems to become more washed out to indicate distance.