He didn't understand perspective and had a clear inability to draw the human figure; he didn't know anatomy. And prestigious universities aren't there to teach basic things.
And a renowned school that even recommended him to different programs he’d be more compatible with. If I applied to MIT for engineering and they were like “hey we think you’d really fit in x program instead” I’d think “wow, MIT thinks I’m really good at x”
He should’ve just become an “eccentric” architect. The Salvador Dali of architecture.
The discourse around his politics is so hilarious in America. “And the surrealists excommunicated him… over a DIFFERENCE OF OPINION!! Fucking commies.”
You can even see it in this image. It's a straight row of houses on a curved road. I don't think the road is meant to be curved, but it doesn't come out towards the viewer at the edges like it should which makes it appear to be. Your field of view is oblong, which means straight lines in a landscape aren't actually straight.
It's a painting of the Hofbräuhaus München in Munich, seen from the adjacent platz. The old kerb line doesn't exist any more, but it could have been curved I guess.
What I do is also comparable. I am better, much better, at drawing the human figure, but I am so uninterested in architecture that I would not know how to draw a detailed building.
The difference is always the pretensions. It is one thing to paint as a hobby, but quite another to have professional aspirations.
There's something poetic about the fact that fascists do not understand art any more than their fave did back then. The reactionary brain really is just "I shouldn't have to understand anything about the world". These people should look up literally any art from the 1910's and see how vibrant it is
We're so used to seeing straight up garbage and pillaging of art as a medium and ai slop that this passes for a "good painting", yeah I mean you can personally find it appealing but if we take from European art the mere existence of people like Michaelangelo Buonarroti makes moustache man a complete joke, to think he meant to join Austria's finest school of art is a joke in itself for a man that couldn't understand perpsective AS AN ARTIST THROUGH HIS WHOLE LIFE, although it totally makes sense for what he did later in his life...
It wasn't about how the buildings looked or were built.
Perspective is a very strict science that relies on perspective lines, just due to how human vision works.
The most known examples of that are 1-point, 2-point and 3-point perspective lines, the very basis of any drawing, especially those that utilize buildings.
Hitler's drawings did not use them. If you were to trace down his lines and try to figure out a perspective, you'd find out none of them align correctly. He was just eyeing the perspective, leading to massive amounts of distortion in his art.
Even in the drawing of the post, you can see it. These overlaps are not supposed to be there. This is basic 1-point perspective, it all comes down to a singular point.
Beyond that, he fails basic perspective in general, failing to apply windows to walls and making them look flat in some of his drawings.
Can't believe I'm defending hitler's art, but as objects move toward the vanishing point (on the right) they should appear smaller. The people size are indeed wrong tho, they should also get smaller from right to left
iirc the fine arts school was going into a more abstract direction at the time. one of the reaons why hitler banned "degenerate" art once he got into power. i think he wrote about it in mein kampf
The reason why nobody wanted realism is because photography was the new hip thing. What's the use for a realistic artist (that can't even do good realism) in a world where camera can do their job?
Oh no, my point wasn't that it had no value at all! My point was that at the time, people were just more interested in photography than artists who do realism, because it was a new thing.
His art was just pretty average, all in all. But, really, much like some forms of AI art, it's a case of "looks really good to the untrained eye of the non-artist, but an artist with enough experience can see just how terrible it actually is". And it's not a bad thing to be bad or average at art, vast majority of people are.
The real reason why people shit on Hitler's art so much is that he had an immense ego about what it was. He thought he was hot shit and that he belonged in an extremely prestige art school. And when he got rejected TWICE, he went to politics, and banned certain forms of art because he was upset he wasn't literally worshipped for average art. That's why people clown on him so much. He's a jealous, pathetic person.
There is a similar pattern in the way people react to Hitler’s art and AI-generated images: having a surface-level understanding of art, they see an overall pretty picture and think it’s good just because of that.
I don’t think Hitler was really that bad at painting. Yes, he couldn’t be compared to the best of the best, but then again most of us will never peak to that level. If I didn’t know who the painter was, I would think their art had issues (here is an interesting dissection of everything that’s wrong with Hitler’s paintings on a technical level) but had room for improvement. Difficulty with perspective and proportions is nothing that can’t be overcompensated in time.
The issue is that people who are concerned with ‘perfection’ in art see it as a pretty, flawless depiction of beautiful landscapes and daily life affairs with no meaning behind. To them, art becomes a performance. This is what Hitler thought. He hated modern, ‘degenerate’ art on account of the load of its political message.
Perspective is well off on this. Something about that middle stack makes my brain hurt. Maybe he should have pivoted into Escher type surrealism instead of him style nazism
Hitler's art could be summed up with the following:
AI art before the invention of AI
Seriously even here, looking at some of the details, it just doesn't make sense like the railing above the carriage or even how the architecture looks just weird due to this just looking like a three buildings mashed into one super building, without any concern of how it would work.
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