Hitler, the failed artist

[danfrodo]

And to put things in context, while the Versailles Treaty was unfair let's remember what the Germans did when they were the victor.   The Germans had, the year before, forced Russia's new Bolshevik gov't into a much worse treaty than Versailles.  It was called the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and when Germans complained about the terms the French and British were pushing, the allies replied that it was less harsh than what the Germans had recently done to the Russians.  So when the Germans cried of the terrible unfairness and punitive nature of Versailles, they were pleasantly ignoring that they more greedy & punitive than the allies in treaty negotiations with fallen foes.

[RockinHarry]

4 hours ago, danfrodo said:

And to put things in context, while the Versailles Treaty was unfair let's remember what the Germans did when they were the victor.   The Germans had, the year before, forced Russia's new Bolshevik gov't into a much worse treaty than Versailles.  It was called the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and when Germans complained about the terms the French and British were pushing, the allies replied that it was less harsh than what the Germans had recently done to the Russians.  So when the Germans cried of the terrible unfairness and punitive nature of Versailles, they were pleasantly ignoring that they more greedy & punitive than the allies in treaty negotiations with fallen foes.

what context please!? You´re just about to open another can of worms. I´ve just deleted what I´d liked to reply here and I better leave it this way. But keep your short sighted discussion going. I step out here.

[danfrodo]

The context was that many Germans felt justified in starting wars because they were treated unfairly (true, they were).  But they really had no morale high ground, no right to play the victim, because that they showed worse behavior to a fallen Russia the previous year. 

[RockinHarry]

1 hour ago, danfrodo said:

The context was that many Germans felt justified in starting wars because they were treated unfairly (true, they were).  But they really had no morale high ground, no right to play the victim, because that they showed worse behavior to a fallen Russia the previous year. 

yeah... the germans, the russians, the good and the evil, the black and the white. Maybe there´s bits more behind that, but what I´d said....stepping out.

[danfrodo]

Oh, please understand me.  I was not saying it was black and white.  I was saying it was all grey and complicated.  My statement wasn't about good guys and bad guys.  It's about perception.  Folks feel persecuted, rightfully.  And these same people then persecute others.  And on and on.  It's not a 'german' thing, it's a human thing. 

[Sgt.Squarehead]

2 hours ago, danfrodo said:

Folks feel persecuted, rightfully.  And these same people then persecute others.

At some point, somebody needs to grow a pair and break that cycle.....'I had a bad time' is not an excuse for giving one to others. 

[Michael Emrys]

17 hours ago, Sgt.Squarehead said:

At some point, somebody needs to grow a pair and break that cycle.....'I had a bad time' is not an excuse for giving one to others. 

You are entirely correct IMO. But apparently it will require the hard decision to go to genetic alteration to get us there, and there is bound to be somebody who believes it to be in his/her interest to sabotage the process.

Michael

[John Kettler]

Childress,

What an informative post! I agree with DerKommissar that Hitler's art was certainly good enough to rate admission to the art school. Indeed, what I've seen of his art is much better, in my view, than lots of stuff I've seen in museums that allegedly is art. Am certainly in the multitude wishing he'd gotten to go to art school and that Stalin had become a Pushkin or similar. Did Mao have stymied artistic aspirations, too?

Returning to Stalin, the more I watch Russian movies about the GPW and read about him and his generals, the more impressed I am about Stalin's real mastery (as opposed to Hitler's pseudo-mastery) of running a gigantic war effort in an almost intimate way. What I've seen of his message traffic is fascinating.  He was a super man in terms of hard work, routinely keeping extraordinary hours so grueling I can recall reading he killed three generals from overwork. Believe his handling of the war, admittedly imperfect at times, was still astonishing for someone who, to my knowledge, had never  been a soldier or a street fighter. From what I recall, Stalin was first a criminal (a thief, I believe), an agent for the Tsar's secret police (maybe a double serving it and the opposition to the Tsar), then got entrenched in the upper echelons of the Bolshevik party. This is probably incomplete, but my main point is someone with no paramilitary or military experience was running a war, war production, logistics, etc. on a scale far greater than was Hitler, and overall doing it well, not to mention accomplishing a whole series of geo-strategic successes too.

Regards,
 

John Kettler 

 

Edited September 7, 2019 by John Kettler

[Frenchy56]

Yes, Hitler had a passion and technical skills for drawing buildings. But you can't really get into art school if that's basically all you want to draw, there's more to it than that. Art is something that is used to transmit emotions or otherwise some kind of meaning, and Hitler's disinterest in that pretty much sealed his fate.

Edited September 8, 2019 by Frenchy56

[Wicky]

3 hours ago, Frenchy56 said:

Art is something that is used to transmit emotions or otherwise some kind of meaning

Not I imagine then for art school - entrance to them was from demonstrating some form of eye hand drawing ability - and this was honed by life drawing , first from plaster casts and then life drawing in the classical tradition. There was in acedemia / pre-camera a heirarchy for artists where the best emarked on careers as Figural / portraitists, then lower down Landscapes, then the lowly Still Life artists.

Things now are a bit more flexible - Hitlers work reminds me of when I first attended life drawing at an One year Arts Foundation Course  (pre Uni) following A' Levels and I was seated next to an aspiring industrial designer - and he produced a wonderfuly drawn picture of the room inc plumbing/ radiators etc all in perfect perspective but where the nude model was meant to be was just a blank untouched silhouetted outline.   

Here's what the precociously talented Picasso (b. 1881) and Dal (b. 1904) i were doing in their early teens.

https://mymodernmet.com/picasso-early-work/

https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/all-works#!#filterName:Period_early-years-1917-1927,resultType:masonry

 

 

 

[Combatintman]

That's nothing … I've painted my Mother-in-Law's front room, the wife and my bedroom, the big spare bedroom, small spare bedroom, the front room, the downstairs hall, the utility room, the downstairs khazi, the kitchen, the fitted shelves for two wardrobes, a garden shed and a heap of bookshelves this year alone.

[Erwin]

Hah... I have painted my entire house...  twice!

[Childress]

On 5/5/2019 at 7:31 AM, Sublime said:

I wonder what Stalin's poems were like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalin's_poetry

As a young man, Stalin avidly studied the works of Shakespeare and Goethe in translation. One of his poems:

"The pinkish bud has opened,
Rushing to the pale-blue violet
And, stirred by a light breeze,
The lily of the valley has bent over the grass."

He wrote in his native Georgian language and later Russian. Robert Service, one of his biographers, wasn't enthusiastic: "fairly standard for early 19th-century Romantic poetry", and as "very conventional, ... very standardized and rather self-indulgent".

Stalin published all of his work anonymously and never publicly acknowledged it. When Lavrentiy Beria secretly had Boris Pasternak and other noted translators prepare a Russian edition of Stalin's poems for the ruler's 70th birthday in 1949, Stalin had the project stopped. -Wiki