Art: Critic Adolf

The most powerful art critic in the world is Adolf Hitler. Like many of his tribe, Critic Hitler was himself once an unsuccessful painter. Like all critics, he takes his art very seriously, considers himself pretty knowledgeable. Not only does he know what he likes; he is able to banish from sight in the Third Reich everything he doesn’t like. There is a lot of art he doesn’t like: 1) the highly individualistic sort (spattery impressionism, cubist geometry, African-influenced neo-primitives, Freudian surrealist nightmares) that made Paris the artistic capital of the pre-war world; 2) art that does not glamorize war and womanhood. Says he: “Cubism, dadaism, futurism, impressionism and the rest have nothing in common with our German people. For all these notions are neither old nor are they modern; they are simply the artificial stammering of people whom God has denied the boon of genuine artistic talent and given instead the gift of prating and deception.”

Since the 16th-Century days of Albrecht Dürer, art has not been Germany’s strong point. But Critic Adolf, who like Philosopher Oswald Spengler strongly believes that art is a measure of national vitality, has insisted that Germany’s artists, like Germany’s women, create prolifically for the Fatherland. Three weeks ago, a month after Critic Hitler had taken a tourist’s view of Paris’ half-empty Louvre Museum (TIME, July 8), Deputy Führer Rudolf Hess opened in Munich a huge exhibit (1,397 paintings and sculptures by 741 Germans) showing what Germany’s laboring artists had brought forth. Though strong on quantity, the Munich exhibition failed to keep up even the humdrum quality of competent imitative craftsmanship that has characterized the general run of German painting and sculpture for 400 years.

Hitler’s artists (nearly all unknown outside Germany) had sheep-footed it neatly along their Führer’s academic path. Patriotism, heroism, war and svelte, 100% Nordic nudes dominated the show, with many busts and figures of Mussolini and Critic Hitler thrown in for good political measure. The most competent of this art (like the innocuously pleasant white Aryan nude of No. 1 Reich Sculptor Josef Thorak) would not have disgraced a high-class Victorian barroom of the 18905. The worst of it, resplendent with heiling storm troopers and Prussian eagles, would have looked well in a 1940 beer hall.