Cosmopolitan Vienna incubated his peculiar genius as well as his hideous ideas. Hitler was eighteen years old when, in , he moved from Linz and took up residence in Vienna. He walked the same streets as Freud, Gustav Mahler, and Egon Schiele , but he did so as one of the city's faceless, teeming poor. He often slept in a squalid homeless shelter, if not under a bridge.
Intent on becoming an artist, he twice failed the art academy's admission test; his drawing skills were declared "unsatisfactory. With help from a friend, he earned a meager living drawing postcard views of Vienna and selling them to tourists.
Jews were among his companions and patrons. Although he was fanatically pan-German—caught up in visions of an expanded Germany, which would incorporate Austria—he had laudatory things to say about Jews at the time.
He proved, however, an apt pupil of the city's rampant strains of anti-Semitism, which exploited popular resentment of the wealthy Jewish bourgeoisie that had arisen under Franz Josef I, the conservative but clement—and, effectively, the last—Hapsburg emperor.
Hitler studied the spellbinding oratorical style of the city's widely beloved populist, anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger. The young Hitler was wild for Wagnerian opera, stately architecture, and inventive graphic art and design. His taste in painting was—and remained—philistine. Hitler's own stilted early efforts were the work of a provincial tyro who was ripe for instruction that he never received.
As with any drifting young life, Hitler's might have gone in a number of ways. The most exasperating missed opportunity was the possibility of working under the graphic artist and stage designer Alfred Roller , a member of the anti-academic Secession movement whose sets for the Vienna Court Opera's productions of Wagner, which were conducted by Mahler, foreshadowed Nazi theatricality.
With a letter of introduction to Roller, Hitler approached the great man's door three times without mustering the nerve to knock. As it turned out, he seems never to have consorted with anyone whose ego overmatched his own. Grandiose and rigidly puritanical, he was a figure of fun to many of his mates in Vienna's lower depths. In his book Mein Kampf, he claimed to have produced as many as three paintings a day. While in power, Hitler allegedly ordered the collection and destruction of his artworks, but several hundred are known to still exist.
In Germany, it is legal to sell pictures by Hitler so long as they do not contain Nazi symbols. The collection has never been exhibited. Others are held in the private collections of individuals and institutions. The picture came with a bill of sale and a signed letter by Nazi military commander Albert Bormann. Others have been auctioned for lower amounts. All were signed: A. Remarkable tale of Hitler's young Jewish friend. How the BBC told the world Hitler was dead. Hitler had an affinity for Romanticism and 19th century painting and preferred peaceful country scenes.
His private collection included works by Cranach, Tintoretto and Bordone. Like his role models Ludwig I. The National Socialists were not the first to persecute avant-garde artists, but they took it a step further by banning their works from museums. In , the authorities had over 20, art works removed from state-owned German museums. Anything that the Nazis didn't consider edifying to the German people was carted off. Abstract art had no place in Hitler's "national style," as grew clear when the "Great German Art Exhibition" put traditional landscape, historical and nude paintings by artists including Fritz Erler, Hermann Gradl and Franz Xaver Stahl on display in Munich on July 18, Even those in Hitler's inner circle were highly unsure which artists he approved of.
In the "Degerate Art" exhibition, confiscated artworks from 32 German museums were on display, the exhibits equated with sketches by mentally handicapped persons and shown together with photos of crippled persons. The intention: to provoke revulsion and aversion among visitors. Over two million visitors saw the exhibition on its tour of various cities.
The "Degenerate Artworks Confiscation Law" of May 31, retroactively legalized their unremunerated acquisition by the state. The law remained valid in the postwar years, the allies determining that it had simply been a redistribution of state property. Unlike stolen artworks, pieces that the Nazis labled "degenerate" and had removed from museums can be freely traded today. Many works were sold by Hitler's four art merchants: Bernhard A. On March 20, the Berlin fire department burned approximately 5, unsold artifacts, calling it an "exercise.
Taking place on June 30, , it met with eager interest worldwide. Over 21, works of "degenerate art" were confiscated. Estimates on the number subsequently sold differ; sources estimate 6, to 10, Others were destroyed or disappeared. Hundreds of artworks believed lost turned up in Cornelius Gurlitt's collection — and reignited the discussion. The sale of alleged artworks painted by Hitler is a regular source of controversy, with the high prices that collectors are often willing to pay a particular point of outrage.
Personally, that's something that quite annoys me.
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