A freeper's attempt at humor?

[greiner3]

Hitler paintings sold on Austrian eBay

snip

Austrian-born Hitler famously had ambitions to become an artist and was turned down by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, before leading the Nazi Party to power in Germany in 1933

And the freeper's post;

...no doubt...but if they had the democrats and hollywood back then that we do now...Hitler would have been praised for his artistic talent and brilliance as a "freedom" fighter and pleas would have gone out from hollywood for Hitler to be eligible for a pulitzer prize...

8 posted on 12/23/2005 5:02:10 AM PST by auto power

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1545917/posts

My brain hurts just trying to count the number of ways that this is SO WRONG!

[ET Awful]

1. Actually, Hitler's painting is more comparable to "Let the Eagles Soar"

being sold.

[ktowntennesseedem]

4. Oh, thanks alot! Now I've got that damn song stuck in my head!

What a way to ruin my Friday!!! :puke:

(Actually, its good for a little chuckle! :evilgrin:)

[Todd B]

2. Ugh.

Why is it that they are always the first to cry fowl if someone else compares Hitler to Bush but they have no problems comparing Hitler to Democrats? Who has _ever_ praised Hitler as an "artistic talent"? Absolutely sickening.

I'm sick of it - all the Hitler comparisons (on both sides). Hitler was evil. Period. Can we move on now?

[HysteryDiagnosis]

3. Hitler was closer to us in the beginning that most would care

to know.... from a business standpoint.

[Demockery101]

5. how about our own symbols

we have fascs on the walls of congress and the sceptor with an bird on it, both symbols the nazi party used, why are these in our halls of freedom and democracy? a fasc is a roman symbol of a roll of wood with a hatchet in it, and it is where the word FASCISM is derived from. Mabey the whole paralell goes deeper than just a left vs right demogaugary

[HysteryDiagnosis]

7. Ya know.... if you wanted this to be a Stephen King flick..... it could

be without any problem whatsoever. Scary indeed.... but Americans don't scare easy... no wait, they do scare easy. Oh bother.

[Rich Hunt]

14. well, see, the Nazis

The Nazis came out of a puritan ethos, which feared the 'degeneracy' of art. As such, all of their imagery was 'co-opted' (or outright stolen and assigned a new meaning) from various Western sources. The most obvious example being the swastika.

From looking at Nazi art, it looks as if they realized they needed propaganda, but couldn't decide which style to exploit.

Nazism was a reaction to modernism in all its representations - in art, in social life, in business.

[Rich Hunt]

6. are those really Hitler's paintings?

I must say the execution is not terrible. But the freeper is wrong - already modernism was getting attention in the U.S. at the time, and was getting far less mobilized opposition than it had gotten in the late 19th c., so Hitler's paintings would have been seen as old-fashioned and sentimental. Your stereotypical 'Hollywood liberal' would have thought so. But, as an art historian, I think our freeper friend raises an interesting 'what if' question : the Nazis were really hostile to modernism.

I don't think Hitler's paintings should be bought and sold to private collectors, nor do I think they should be destroyed - I think they ought to be preserved in a Holocaust archive or something.

on edit: Here is a website of Hitler's artwork. I have to say, this painting on ebay doesn't fit stylistically.

http://www.oskarschindler.com/Albums6/album.htm

[solinvictus]

8. The paintings aren't bad..

I mean, hell, Thomas Kinkade has turned paintings inferior to Hitler's into an industry and made millions.

[1monster]

9. I disagree. Hitler might have been an okay illustrator, but his painting

lack any kind of focus. The colors are blah, and the composition is incredibly bad.

An art school education might have improved his style, but he never would have made a great painter, judging from the fifteen or so paintings/illustrations I looked at.

As for Thomas Kincaid, the first painting I saw of his made me stop and look. I was enchanted with the Victoriana. But after seeing them over and over again, with every painting looking just like the last one, I tend to feel nauseated. I can only take so much of his Victorian Age style art with its surypy sweetness before feeling ill.

Thomas Kincaid, though, has something Hitler obviously didn't have. He has a gimick ("Painter of Light") and a good marketing strategy.

[achtung_circus]

11. His buildings are no more than OK.

His people are awful. I've seen other pieces with NO sense of scale between the buildings and the figures of the people, almost as if the figures had been added as an afterthought.

He might have made an adequate architect's assistant. Pretensions to art? beyond his pale.

On edit: new personal record, 3 typos.

[Rich Hunt]

13. well...

As I said, I don't think this is one of Hitler's paintings, because the ones I've seen don't have those little doll people in them, and frankly (as terrible as it sounds), the paintings on the 'Hitler's Paintings' site are much less amateurish and the coloring isn't so childish.

Where did you see paintings of 'his people', pray tell? If the work on this site is any indication, he was capable of better:

http://www.oskarschindler.com/Albums6/jpg_hitlerart2.htm

'Architect's assistant'?? 'Beyond the pale'?? What on earth are you talking about? Art and architecture schools aren't in the business of 'condemning' people to some space 'beyond the pale' based on their portfolios. We don't subscribe to that determinist 'nature over nurture' stuff, so I'm wondering why some people are so invested in spin management of Hitler's artwork.

Looking at the drawings, he probably would have been a more than decent architectural draftsman and sketch artist (it looks as if these sketches were done for an architecture class), so I don't understand your non sequitur.

I do wonder about the authorship of some of this stuff, though.

[achtung_circus]

15. "his people"= his rendition of the human form

On Edit: Hit post instead of preview.

His straight line stuff; the buildings, are fine, the "people" (NOT Volk) appear to be an afterthought.

I stand by my architectural comment and by beyond the pale I mean that, as an artist his work leaves me unmoved.

The ability to provoke a human response is, in my mind, the first parameter of art.

Of course, I may be wrong.

I was wrong once.

I thought I was mistaken, but I wasn't LOL.

[deutsey]

10. Actually Wall Street and American Industrialists/Bankers loved Hitler

in the '30s. Like, say, Prescott Bush...

And the Popular Front (which included Hollywood folks) certainly wasn't extolling Hitler's brilliance. Far from it.

[kiki]

12. Self-delete