As a weekly palate cleanser, I share arts. This week's episode is from an ethnic cleanser, and it sucks. This is bad art from a bad man. This is probably the worst painting by Adolf Hitler, and he wasn't a good artist in the first place.

This is mother Mary with Jesus (1913) painted by a 24-year-old Adolf. This is the whitest Jesus possible, and also peak white mediocrity. What is going on with Mary here? I understand that people wore duvets back then, but this has no shape or drape at all. And how many fingers does Baby Jesus have? It seems like too many. This is not Hitler's best work, by far.

Like a turd that wouldn't flush, however, this painting was returned to him on his 50th birthday with a note from an ingratiating ambassador,

My leader! On this day, your 50th birthday, I sincerely wish you many more happy years of health and strength, that the tasks you have begun for the benefit of the entire German people and Greater German Reich will find their true completion through you. So, my guide, my little gift should give you some joy. When I was ambassador to Vienna, I bought this picture last year from an art dealer near Vienna, who only handed it over to me after tough negotiations.

With best wishes for you,
your Papen Ambassador of the Greater German Reich in Ankara.

The worst part of this painting is the hands, Mary's hands are like baseball gloves and Baby Jesus seems to have an extra finger. Like AI, Hitler really struggles with hands. Hitler's perspective is also off, that orb of flowers is in its own dimension. Nothing about this painting works. It's notable only for its mediocrity, and for dunking on Hitler, which is frankly overdone at this point. Hitler just applied European colonial methods to Europe. Objectively, Hitler was an average European evil and an average amateur painter.

Hitler's city scenes are not bad. You might pay a tenner for them on the street. Hitler was a passable street artist, but not an artist. As Hitler's own architect and warchitect Albert Speer said, described a 1909 Hitler painting like this one,

A Gothic church done in 1909, it is executed in an extremely precise, patient, and pedantic style. No personal impulses can be felt in it; not a stroke has any verve. But it is not only the brush strokes that lack all character; by its choice of subject, the flat colors, the conventional perspective, the picture seems a candid witness to this early period of Hitler. All his watercolors from the same time have this quality, and even the watercolors done while he was an orderly in the First World War lack distinctiveness. The transformation in Hitler's personality, the growth of selfassurance, came later. It is evident in the two pen sketches for the great hall in Berlin and for the triumphal arch, which he drew about 1925.

The better work Speer referred to is the Triumphbogen by Hitler, which sounds like a particularly difficult and rewarding booger. This later (1925) sketch is better but still fails at basic perspective. The right side just droops down for no physical or artistic reason. And the thing looks like a dog house.

Hitler's a shit artist, this is well established. But Hitler did have a great eye for art, and the theatrical. Hitler said, “A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art,” and he was, in his way. Nazi iconography, cinematography, and graphic design were state of the art, and he was the patron of all of it. Hitler could recognize talent, and let them have at it. Hitler's general brief was, “My surroundings must look magnificent. Then my simplicity makes a striking effect.” Thus he gave Speer a free hand to design the New Reich Chancellery. Describing it, Speer said,

And describing the indigestion that made him do it in a year, Speer continued,

This then transitions into how Hitler starts shooting some concoction of cocaine and morphine and amphetamines every day as ‘vitamins’ from “Dr. Theodor Morell. Skin and Venereal Diseases.” Speer's memoirs are fascinating, just absolutely bonkers Nazi shit was going on.

Speer absolves himself of all evil, complaining about the architectural destruction of Kristallnacht, saying, “charred beams, collapsed façades, burned-out walls— anticipations of a scene that during the war would dominate much of Europe. Most of all I was troubled by the political revival of the "gutter." The smashed panes of shop windows offended my sense of middle-class order.”

Nonetheless, Speer's fly-on-the-wall narration is fascinating. He describes remodeling for Herman Goering saying, “Goering, scarcely inquiring what I thought of the proposal, put me into his big open limousine after the meal was over and dragged me off to his residence like a piece of booty... There was a kind of chapel presided over by the swastika, and the new symbol had also been reiterated on ceilings, walls, and floors throughout the house. There was the feeling that something terribly solemn and tragic would always be going on in this place.” and that, “He [the notoriously fat and cherubic Goering] was rapturous every time he made an inspection; he beamed like a child on its birthday, rubbed his hands, and laughed.”

This brings us to the point, which is that a Nazi is the last person to paint Mary and Jesus with any feeling. This rendition of Mary and Jesus is a bad painting by a bad man, which seems fitting. Humans were really the most difficult thing for Hitler to represent, and divinity was quite beyond him.