It was Frederick Spotts’s book Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics rather than the seven videos that I saw on You Tube about the art of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, that gave me the idea to compare the paintings of the Fuhrer with that of the other great icon of the early 20th century — Winston Churchill. Neither was regarded as being a great artist. Both were treated as marginal

figures whose importance had perhaps been wilfully exaggerated because of their exalted position in politics.

Temperamentally, the two had very little in common — leadership skills being one and a preference for landscapes being the other. Adolf Hitler, who was the younger of the two by 15 years, dreamed at being a great artist and thought he could make a living by painting and selling pictures. For years he plodded in Vienna, churning out many hundreds of canvases, even postcards. Though he managed to sell some to a benefactor, he wasn’t particularly successful.

For Winston Churchill painting was a pastime, a hobby, albeit a pleasant one. He was 40 years of age when he picked up a brush and paint box for the first time. He didn’t really care if his work was sold or just gawked at. But he was tickled pink when somebody liked his work and sent him a cheque.

The two displayed a marked preference for representational work. Churchill preferred oils to water colours. The Austrian was equally at home in both mediums. Hitler had had some rudimentary training in composition. Churchill was essentially self-taught. He just looked upon art as a pleasant pastime — something that he could achieve through disinterested contemplation. Nature was at times a popular subject and he had a particular fondness for the area around Marseilles.

Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler shared one common interest; they were both amateur painters, writes Anwer Mooraj

An article which appeared in The New Yorker on July 19, 2002 described Hitler as a ‘modern’ artist and stated that cosmopolitan Vienna had incubated his particular genius and his hideous ideas in which Nazism was a movement shaped by his aesthetic sensibility. While this may be true, he certainly wasn’t ‘modern’ in the sense that Vasily Kandinsky was.

The fact that Hitler had twice failed the entrance exam to the Vienna School of Fine Arts did bother him immensely. But he carried on regardless. In the early years he concentrated on copying the masters and developed a fondness for Greco-Roman classism and subsequently the Italian Renaissance, and tried to absorb some of their symbolism. He also painted flowers, buildings, lakes, occasional portraits and sketched dogs. Architecture was his favourite subject and his style became very deliberate particularly when he painted historic buildings. Some were enlivening pieces of work, though grittily methodical that embraced and extended the mutual inheritance of the visual artist and the photographer.

His watercolours leant toward the narrative, telling stories of buildings and the environment all fused into a cohesive rendition of visual reality documenting the impact of development on the human environment. He churned out hundreds and hundreds of canvases. After his death, however, other than the ones confiscated by the US army, and those that landed in museums, his paintings sold for thousands of dollars.

For Churchill the compositional challenge of depicting a landscape, a lake surrounded by buildings and trees, or a storm in the making gave the heroic rebel in him temporary repose. He possessed the heightened perception of a genuine artist to whom every scene is important. Nearly 500 canvases came off his easel over a period of 48 years. With the passage of time his art became a sort of passion and obsession. With a Cuban cigar stuck between his teeth and a glass of brandy by his side he would give finishing touches to an old oak or a threatening sky. He enjoyed discussing his art with admirers. To him it was the greatest of hobbies.

However, he had another pastime — writing. And in this too he excelled. Alive to the lithe life of language he left behind a great legacy for his countrymen. If a comparison was made to determine which of the two was a greater artist I feel Hitler would get the prize. One wonders what might have happened if he had passed the entrance exam to the art school. He might still not have become a great artist … but a world war might have been averted.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine October 11th , 2015

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