Hacker News Reader

Comment by dEnigma | Hacker News Reader

I actually think some of his paintings and sketches look quite good for a young artist, who hadn't even received proper training yet. There are some more available on Wikimedia Commons:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Paintings_by_Ado...

View on HN

They really aren’t that bad. Very uneven, but that’s to be expected from a young person. The few looser paintings like “Klosterruine in Messines” show promise IMHO, at least compared to the heavy-handed drafting of most of the watercolors.

This one makes me think that it would be an amazing trolling opportunity to remove the signature, create high-quality reproductions of this “Mary with Jesus” and give them out to American Evangelicals, as the art style generally matches the Christian fundamentalist taste: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HitlerMaryWithJesu...

As I commented above. many of his works were far from hopeless for a young artist, and if he'd been accepted to the right academy, the latent talent could have nurtured something much better, but the safe thing even for modern art critics is to simply agree with a prevailing and hindsight biased idea that of course the art showed a total lack of imagination and humanity and was right for rejection. One wonders at the world we'd know today if the young Hitler had gotten an admissions official with just a bit more imagination for his application.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com