The article began with a remark made by Hitler to British Ambassador Sir Nevile Henderson about his desire to one day give up politics and return to his youthful pursuit of art. If he were to do so, Life’s editors suggested, “the world would lose a very shrewd politician and gain a very poor painter.” Despite Hitler’s rejection from art school, his “ambition to be an artist was never dimmed by his lack of talent.” The young Austrian “tinted postcards and painted houses for a living,” haunting Munich’s cafés in the hope of being noticed by established artists. Demonstrating why they ignored him, the article turned to examples of Hitler’s early paintings, reproduced on two full color pages, that it claimed had been smuggled out of Germany and were being published for the first time. The strengths and faults—mostly faults—of Hitler’s work were assessed for readers, such as the crudeness of the technique and the obsession with “empty, desolate spaces.” A painting titled Battleship Wien, an Austrian ship torpedoed in 1917, prompted the criticism that Hitler had hidden the “stern of [the] ship in [a] smudge of smoke” because he was “too tired or lazy to finish details.”
Having largely dismissed the German leader’s own artistic skills, the article then addressed his impact on the nation’s artistic production. “As the defender of German art,” it stated, “he has purged it of modernism, handed it over to the academics.” The article featured two photographs of Hitler in the company of Gerdy Troost, his interior decorator, and high-ranking Nazi officials visiting the Great German Art Exhibition earlier that month. The article also noted that the Nazis enjoyed nudes that were “literal and very explicit,” a claim accompanied by a photograph of Adolf Ziegler’s The Four Elements, which had become infamous when first displayed at the Great German Art Exhibition of 1937 for its attention to Aryan pubic hair. The article thus undercut the Nazis’ claim to protect the purity of German art with a reference to the salaciousness of its defenders.
When the article turned to Hitler’s involvement with architecture, both as patron and creator, the biting tone of the article began to subside. Hitler’s artistic impulses, it stated, were now mostly channeled into architecture, and he stayed up nights in his mountain home “furiously” poring over architects’ designs. He personally approved all important public buildings, which “are being frozen into the decent but uninspired modernized-classic architecture that Hitler insists on.”
Less ambivalent words of praise were reserved for the Berghof, “a huge mountain mansion” designed, readers were told, with Hitler’s help. Two full pages of color photographs, the first color images of the interior most Americans had ever seen, revealed the rooms with prismatic intensity. Burgundy and jade green hues predominated, with the eye being drawn to the richness of the red marble banister in the entrance hall or the warmth of the polished wood in Hitler’s study. To contemporary readers, who had heard much about Hitler’s simple and “soldierly” tastes, the vividness and complexity of the color scheme must have come as a surprise.
Beginning with the architecture itself, the article described the “combination of modern and Bavarian chalet” styles as “awkward but interesting.” The interiors, “designed and decorated with Hitler’s active collaboration, are the comfortable kind of rooms a man likes, furnished in simple, semi-modern, sometimes dramatic style. The furnishings are in very good taste, fashioned of rich materials and fine woods by the best craftsmen in the Reich.” The ingenuity of repeating the colors of the Gobelin tapestry hanging in the great hall in the room’s furnishings was also carefully noted. The main stairway leading up from the ground floor was particularly commended for being “a striking bit of modern architecture.” This admiring assessment of design ability was balanced by a jibe at the type of paintings hung on the walls: “Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler likes pictures of nudes and ruins.” Nonetheless, the article concluded that the success of the design indicated that “in a more settled Germany, Adolf Hitler might have done quite well as an interior decorator.” With their backhanded compliment, the editors thus insinuated that the man reordering the map of Europe had missed his true calling of rearranging furniture.
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