At seventeen-year-old, Hitler travelled for the first time to Vienna, the imperial capital and one of the most significant hubs for music, art, and traditional European culture. He travelled with his mother's money in his pocket to view operas and explore the renowned picture exhibition in the Court Museum. Instead, the city's stunning architecture captured his attention.
Architecture had highly piqued Hitler's interest. He could create intricate drawings of a building he had just once visited and enjoyed thinking about how to make existing structures larger and streamline municipal plans. He spent hours around Vienna's Ring Boulevard while admiring the city's buildings, including the opera theatre and the parliament construction.
He had demonstrated a natural knack for drawing as a young child. His high school teachers had also noticed that he had a talent for drawing. But his high school experience had not been good. A disgruntled, slothful student who practically failed his classes was by Hitler placed his hope in the goal of becoming a great artist to escape the reality of that failure and avoid the dreadful reality of workaday existence.
He chose to enrol at the esteemed Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. He took his inheritance money out of the bank in October 1907 when he was eighteen-year-old and moved to Vienna to live and pursue his studies. Hitler's mother had undergone an unsuccessful operation in January and was battling breast cancer. Hitler was reluctant to leave her, but his burning desire to become a great artist overcame that.
He participated in the two-day painting school entrance exam. He was confident and self-assured as he awaited the outcome. However, failure came at him like a flash of lightning. He got refused admission because his test drawings were deemed insufficient. This rejection left Hitler feeling quite vulnerable. When he returned to the academy to ask why, he was told that his paintings demonstrated a lack of creative ability, particularly a disregard for the human form, whereas by informed had some aptitude for architecture.
However, attending the building school and then the architectural school at the academy looked unlikely without the needed high school credential. Hitler committed to retaking the art school admission exam the following year. Hitler eventually left Vienna and went back to his house, where his mother, whom he loved dearly, was now terminally ill with cancer.
When he painted architectural representations, Hitler used a highly deliberate approach. His paintings imitated nineteenth-century masterpieces and other artists rather than expanding his aesthetic influence. Although he claimed to represent the synthesis of numerous aesthetic movements, his primary influences were Neoclassicism, Greco-Roman classicism, and the Italian Renaissance. He admired the artists' technical prowess as well as their use of understandable symbolism. He regarded Rudolf von Alt as his most important teacher. The two exhibit themes and colour schemes, but Alt uses fanciful settings that pay just as much attention to the natural world as they do construction.
Hitler worked as a house painter and postcard tinter from 1908 until 1913. At the age of 21, he created his first self-portrait in 1910. US Army Sergeant Major Willie J. McKenna found this artwork in Essen, Germany, along with twelve other works by Hitler in 1945.
Many of the young Hitler's paintings got purchased by Samuel Morgenstern, an Austrian businessman who worked with him in Vienna. Morgenstern claims that Hitler initially approached him at the start of the 1910s, probably in 1911 or 1912. Hitler presented Morgenstern with three of his paintings when he first visited his glazier business. The buyers of the young Hitler paintings might be found thanks to Morgenstern's meticulous client records. The majority of the purchasers were discovered to be Jewish. Hitler's drawings of old Vienna purchased by a lawyer named Josef Feingold, a significant client of Morgenstern.
Gisela Perez | 8:15 PM
Saturday, Oct 15, 2022
Time in New York, NY
Artpendix Press
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