A watercolour painting by Adolf Hitler from 1912, could fetch more than $30,000, or £20,093, when it hits the auction block, the Telegraph reports. Proving there certainly is no accounting for taste. The painting is being sold by Nate D. Sanders, a Los Angeles-based auction house specialising in memorabilia.
The work is a still life depicting a bouquet of orange, red, and pink flowers in a pitcher has a starting price of $30,000, and features a stamp from Hitler’s dealer Samuel Morgenstein on its back. According to the auction house’s website, “Morgenstern owned an art gallery in Vienna and sold many works by Hitler beginning in 1911; ironically, this Jewish gallery owner was one of the few individuals to see talent in Hitler’s work and paid him well for his paintings. His gallery was later seized when Hitler came to power.”
Last year an equally banal painting by Adolf Hitler was auctioned off at the Weidler auction house in Nuremberg. The work went under the hammer for €130,000, or £102,000. The watercolour painting dated from 1914 or 1915, the titled of which is ‘The Old Town Hall’ and is a depiction of the Munich registrar’s office, was put up for sale by two elderly sisters, whose grandfather bought the artwork in 1916, when Hitler was in his 20s.
The sale of Hitler’s artworks, of which there are about 800 examples known to exist, is permitted unless a piece includes any kind of Nazi imagery. It is widely considered that Hitler’s works are only collected for their notoriety and historical value, and not for their quality, as the irony is that for a fascist leader who attempted to take over the world with his thousand year Reich – Hitler’s art is a drab emotionless and talentless affair, with no artistic value whatsoever.
Hitler began painting in 1908 after moving to Vienna, where he was twice rejected by the Vienna Academy of Art, but had a supporter in Samuel Morgenstern, a Jewish art dealer, who sold a number of Hitler’s paintings to wealthy Viennese Jewish clients. Morgenstern was eventually deported to the Lodz Ghetto, where he died in 1943.