Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics
By Frederic Spotts
The Overlook Press, 2003
Pretend with me. I am the lost boys, and you are the washed out, old Peter Pan in “Hook.” Use your imagination, I say, though not to turn empty bowls into full ones, but to picture a 1916 watercolor drawing, called Haubourdin, the Seminar Church. The watercolor painting of an idyllic European church and the surrounding street employs a variety of soft, secondary tones: a lush, phthalo green; a burning, bright orange; a shy, deep ochre; and a light gray and blue that manage to successfully double as sky or roof, depending upon the context. The composition, if examined dearly, tries its hand at the neo-classical, with sharp triangles, neutralized by rounded wet-on-wet watercolor technique. The picture is a quaint, urban one, with industrial undertones in the smokestacks, and modern in its execution and its disregard–probably unintentionally–for harmony and balance.
As an experiment, I showed the painting to Yeshiva University students standing on Amsterdam Avenue at 185th Street in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood, where I typically engage my peers in Socratic dialogues, aimed at interrogating their very ideals. Like a good scientist, I replicated the experiment enough times to satisfy the skeptic demon on my left shoulder (she has since relocated to my right one). They praised the sunniness of the piece, the happy mood, and the “pretty colors.” I then showed them the byline: Adolf Hitler. Dispositions changed from pleasure to shock, horror, and embarrassment, almost as quickly as Rafael Palmeiro’s batting average dipped following the discovery of his cheating.
This next part is true, so cover your eyes if you cannot handle it: Hitler was a painter, and he painted far better than almost all of you, dear readers. This will strike many as blasphemous; had they known that Picasso the womanizer extinguished lit cigarettes on women’s faces, they would surely banish him from the artistic canon as well. Degas’ pretty illustrations of ballerinas would find their entrance to the museum barred owing to their creator’s anti-Semitism. By the time the censors finish, the entire canon would emerge eerily empty, as devoid of talent and significance as most of the galleries in the Musee du Louvre.
Ironically, though, according to Frederic Spotts and his Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, the very notion of review would anger the anti-critic, Hitler. Another edgy title from the champion of gutsiness, Overlook Press, Spotts’ book offers opening statements for contemplating the character of Hitler the man, who seemed to view himself as an accidental statesman. He once said to his cabinet at a meeting, “I became a politician against my will. For me politics are only a means to an end… If someone else had been found, I would have never gone into politics; I would have become an artist or a philosopher.” But Hitler doth protest too much, methinks. Hitler’s entire artistic ideology was historical and critical far more than it was aesthetic, which makes him a critic himself.
I can hear the criticism surfacing that Spotts (and now, I, by exploring his book) seeks to defend the monster by exploring his art. But the monster has nothing whatsoever to do with the painter, in my estimation. Spotts concedes to only an occasional interplay of the two roles. He writes, “Many of Hitler’s key policies–such as racial genocide and the military domination of Europe–did not grow out of his aesthetic ideals. Hitler the ruler and Hitler the artist sometimes coincided, sometimes not.”
And in Spotts’ view, one of Hitler’s statements proves the foundation of his aesthetic. “If I were to assess my work,” he once said, “I would first emphasize that in the face of an uncomprehending world I succeeded in making the racial idea the basis of life, and second that I made culture the driving force in German greatness.” Spotts comments, saying, “No single statement ever summed up so openly and concisely his two supreme oals of racial genocide and the establishment of a state in which the arts were supreme.”
Spotts tells a tale of a dictator who practiced for years in front of a mirror to perfect his oratorical skills, who described himself as a penniless painter before his rise to power, and who held meetings with his cabinet to discuss culture and philosophy, even as the allies moved in on his bunker. It is a tale of a tyrant who exempted artists from serving in his army, even when the army was starving for reinforcements, and whose early patrons were Jews. Hitler’s propaganda campaigns appealed to his listeners’ hearts–like all artists do–not their minds.
Spotts includes pictures of Hitler’s lectures that could have easily come from a dramatic, off-Broadway production. Hitler designed his rallies as if they were the stage; he arranged lighting; he even designed his own flag.
But, as Spotts observes, Hitler hated critics, whom he felt fettered the artist’s creativity, and banned them from his newly state-controlled art scene. Spotts prefers to see Hitler as an artist who went too far with his art by turning it into politics: “It has been a trait of megalomaniacs throughout history to use the arts to control thought… Who is afraid of Adolf Hitler? Just about everyone.” Everyone is afraid because “The artist creates his own world out of nothing. Hitler took the existing world and tried to turn it into his own.” Spotts further argues that Hitler made the twentieth century: displacing European control and splitting it between America and the Soviet Union, decolonization, ushering in the atomic age.
It seems that Spotts might better have conceived of Hitler as the very thing he hated most: an art critic. Hitler’s efforts to control the world through art, to destroy modernist art in favor of classical Greek and Roman, was really a historical effort. Spotts sees Hitler’s architecture as a desire for immortality. But one look at Hitler’s paintings and designs–so cold, academic, and literary–reveals his desire to control historical space rather than aesthetic space.
Art history and art criticism are always about control and power. Mix in a heavy dose of pathology, luck, manipulation, and weaponry to back it up and the result is unfathomable.
