Littered with fakes: why the Hitler art trade is such a sick joke

A batch of the Führer’s watercolours has just been sold at a controversial auction. But as well as having zero artistic value, most ‘Hitlers’ are probably fake – so why do we continue to collude in this grotesque deception?

Featured on theguardian.com

A sale of Adolf Hitler’s paintings in Germany is rightly controversial. Who are these collectors that fork out considerable sums for the art of a man who caused murder and cruelty beyond imagining? The trade in Hitler’s paintings is repulsive and sick. But that’s not all: it is also transparently dishonest.

Perhaps because art historians have better things to do than authenticate the artworks of this monster, the market in “Hitler” paintings is littered with fakes. It is, however, slightly consoling that the dubious characters who long to own a masterpiece by the Führer are, much of the time, being duped.

The sheer number of paintings attributed to him that have been sold in recent years ought to ring alarm bells. Why would so many of his paintings have survived?

Young Hitler tried to study art in early 20th-century Vienna, the city of Klimt and Schiele. Rejected by the Austrian capital’s prestigious Academy of Fine Arts, he became a dropout who painted topographic views to raise a bit of cash, first in Vienna and then in Munich. That is the extent of his career as an artist. His authentic work has zero personality.

No one cared about Hitler’s dull pictures when he made them, and there’s no reason to think they survive in huge numbers. I have not visited the auction house in Nuremberg that has sold the latest batch, so I can’t comment on the authenticity of these particular works. But sales of Hitler’s art often takes place outside the margins of the serious art world. You won’t find this stuff at Christie’s or the like, where proper scrutiny would be hard to avoid.

I once had a chance to study “Hitler’s” art up close at an auction house in Lostwithiel, Cornwall, of all places, where 21 of his supposed works were going under the hammer. Looking at the paintings revealed influences that Hitler would never have embraced, or even known about. These landscapes were inflected by impressionism in a way totally at odds with his style, such as it is. In my opinion, they were fakes.

The artists Jake and Dinos Chapman have gleefully played the market in Hitler paintings. They have bought paintings offered as Hitler originals and used them to their own ends, adding grotesque jokes to these toxic artworks. The Chapmans know full well the art they have bought as “by Hitler” is probably a forgery. That’s part of the joke. In arecent exhibition at Hastings, they displayed an obvious, hilarious Hitler fake.

The bizarre thing is that however unlikely the attributions, however obvious the fakery, the whole world colludes with this trade in Hitler’s art. It is too sensational for reporters to resist. Questioning the authenticity of the art would spoil everyone’s fun – including that frisson of unease we get from looking at art that is supposedly by Hitler.

Thus, many people accept the art unquestioningly, as if it were inconceivable to fake a Hitler. My God, what disrespect that would show the Führer! The media seem to believe there is some equivalent of the Rembrandt Research Projectout there authenticating his oeuvre. Of course, there is nothing of the sort. No one is controlling this dubious trade in sick ephemera.

Is it harmless? No. Every time a supposed painting by Adolf Hitler appears, unquestioned, in a newspaper or on TV, someone will be thinking: “That’s not bad, the man was an artist.” It falsely humanises him.

Horrible as the idea is, perhaps it is time for a proper exhibition of Hitler’s art at a serious museum. This would be an opportunity to define his style more clearly and demolish myths and exaggerations about his ability and output. For Hitler was no artist, and the trade in his purported works is a sick joke on his millions of victims.