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In 1907, an 18-year-old boy named Adolf Hitler attempted to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. The young man had prepared intensively for over a year to pass the admission exam, where he would compete with more than 100 other applicants. He passed the written portion and moved on to the next stage: the drawing test, for which he had to present a series of previously completed works. The result was deemed insufficient. That young man failed the test. As we now know, it was Adolf Hitler…
Without losing hope, the young Hitler tried to enroll in the architecture school, but the results were even worse; he did not meet the minimum requirements for entry. A year later, in 1908, Hitler again tried to enter the Academy of Fine Arts, but this time he did not even pass the written exam. Despite the rejections, and determined to succeed as an artist, he established himself as a painter in 1910, creating small-scale works that were copies of postcards and prints, such as those you can see at the end of this article.
Hitler: From Painter to Genocidal Maniac
Most of his works were made with pencil, pastels, ink, and watercolors. The aspiring painter partnered with Reinhold Hanisch, who was responsible for selling his works. His main buyers were small Jewish merchants. In 1913, Hitler moved to Munich, selling his paintings to finance the move. The average price for one of his pieces was 100 marks, while the future Führer’s cost of living at the time was 80 marks per month. This allowed him to attend the opera and the theater, artistic activities that he loved.
Despite his attempts to become a renowned painter, in Vienna he was a “nobody,” and in Munich, an outcast. The rejection from the Academy of Fine Arts eventually convinced him that he would never be a great artist. In 1914, Hitler enlisted as a soldier and was decorated several times. In the trenches, he wrote poems, demonstrating his artistic personality. One can draw a certain parallel with the thought of the Futurist Movement, which in its first manifesto glorified war as “the world’s only cure.” Perhaps it was this shared ideology that led Marinetti’s movement to become the official culture of Fascism. His participation in the war awoke in Adolf Hitler a growing interest in politics, and he would transform from a frustrated and unknown painter into a public speaker, an agitator, and the architect of the horrible history that would affect all of humanity.
The Artistic Production of the Future Führer
His artistic training was very limited; he had only received a few sculpture classes in Vienna from an unknown sculptor. The most recurring theme of his works was landscapes, which he copied from postcards or other paintings. His pieces were not original creations, and each one took about three days to complete. This inevitably raises the question: can a copyist with no originality be considered an artist? Some believe so, because he at least possessed the technical skill to reproduce the originals. Others argue that a mere copy cannot be considered a work of art.
There were those who considered him a talented draftsman and painter with potential, such as the Scottish stage designer and collector Edward Gordon Craig, who saw a true artist in Hitler and owned more than 100 of his drawings and watercolors.
Hitler and the Avant-Garde
Dominated by a 19th-century aesthetic, Hitler hated the avant-garde movements of his time, as evidenced by his persecution and condemnation of what he called “degenerate art.” Under the pretext of building an art museum in his hometown of Linz, he organized a plundering of artworks from important private collections, mainly Jewish-owned, which led to the loss of an invaluable part of art history. If we ask ourselves, what would have happened if Hitler had been accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts? The answer is not simple, but what is clear is that history would have been different. Perhaps Adolf Hitler could have channeled his hatred, racist phobias, frustrations, and emotional imbalances into painting, and humanity would have been spared the millions of deaths caused by the genocide to which the frustrated Vienna painter led us.
This Is How Hitler Painted
The forged diaries promised to reveal Hitler’s secret thoughts on pivotal moments of the war, such as his strategic meeting with Spanish dictator Francisco Franco in Hendaye, offering a tantalizing, albeit fake, glimpse into his mind.
His participation in the war awoke in Adolf Hitler a growing interest in politics, transforming him from a frustrated painter into a public agitator. This new path would eventually lead him to strategic meetings with world leaders, such as the infamous encounter between Hitler and Franco in Hendaye.
The public’s morbid curiosity with Hitler’s personal life extends beyond his early paintings. This same fascination fueled one of the biggest media scandals of the 20th century when Hitler’s supposed diaries were discovered—and later exposed as a brilliant forgery.
