The Williams show is the college’s contribution to something Ludlumesquely titled “The Vienna Project,” a collaboration among 11 cultural institutions scattered throughout the Berkshires–a hilly patch of the Northeastern United States that looks so picturesquely like parts of Austria that you fear for the Trapp family among all those SUVs roaring down scenic roads. The prestigious Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (also in Williamstown) is showing some Gustave Klimt landscapes, MassMoCA (the gigantic contemporary-art showplace housed in an old mill complex in nearby North Adams) is hosting avant-garde Viennese art and other Berkshire venues are offering Austrian dance, music and theater. Although a few people have wondered aloud about some kind of conspiracy–Austrian government money pushing a nationalist agenda?–“The Vienna Project” is really about getting a few extra cultural tourists up to the Berkshires this summer and fall.
Rothschild decided to mount an exhibition based on Brigitte Hamann’s 1999 book “Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship.” She’s stuffed a couple of small galleries with 275 objects–paintings, drawings, prints, posters, digital facsimiles and video monitors with antique film footage flickering upon them–to try to convey an idea of what Emperor Franz Joseph’s Vienna was like, and what effect it might have had on the young Hitler. (The installation is a bit much: alcoves punctuated by tall red banners that smack of Nuremberg rallies, and Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyrie” playing at elevator volume.)
Hitler came to Vienna at 17, wanting to be a great builder but disqualified from architectural training because he hadn’t finished high school. He turned to art, but flunked the Vienna academy’s admission test–twice–because he couldn’t draw the human figure very well. Soon Hitler was living in a men’s shelter, scraping together a few schillings with drawings copied from postcards, and stewing about the fate of ethnic Germans in the polygot Austro-Hungarian Empire. As Hamann writes, “Puny, pale, and serious, what was most conspicuous about [Hitler] were his mental rigidity, his inflexibility and inhibition, his fear of women, and his inability to be merry and have a good time with others…”
Esthetically, Hitler’s watercolors don’t merit space in a sidewalk art sale, let alone in a museum. His 1910 picture of the Vienna Opera House is a deadeningly rote transcription from a postcard. “Mountain Chapel” (1909) was at least done on-site–ironically, commissioned by a Jewish art dealer for a Jewish lawyer–but it’s a halfhearted cliche that violates practically every rule of Composition 101: Don’t put the spire dead center! Don’t let the mountains and the clouds slant in the same direction! Don’t have another building enter weirdly from the edge! Esthetics, however, is not the issue in “Prelude to a Nightmare.” If one may respectably write a book about Hitler in Vienna, then one may respectably stage an exhibition on the same subject. And if one does that, it makes no sense to leave Hitler’s handiwork–he was an aspiring artist, after all–out of the mix. That said, is there anything in the art of a 20-year-old Hitler that tells us why he became a monster? Not that I can see–although a genius combination of art critic, forensic detective and psychiatrist might find a tiny clue or two in Hitler’s hack paintings. Hitler was a frustrated no-talent in art who, tragically, turned out to have an evil gift in politics. It’s certainly worth a small amount of wall space to have that fact confirmed before our eyes.
