WI: Hitler dies, becomes paradigm shifting artist

It's often said with good reason that the best thing an artist can do for his career is die. Well, what happens if Adolf Hitler kicks the bucket in say the early 20s, and his works are discovered by a growing romanticist art movement, catapulting him into posthumous stardom?
 
Perhaps he gets seen like a modern Keats, with artists wondering what he would have done had he lived longer.


...


Now I want to read a timeline where John Keats becomes a genocidal dictator.
 
Perhaps he gets seen like a modern Keats, with artists wondering what he would have done had he lived longer.


...


Now I want to read a timeline where John Keats becomes a genocidal dictator.

Now there's a sentence I never thought I would see in a million years.

More seriously, was Hitler ever an accomplished enough artist (either in quality or quantity) that a romanticist art movement would consider him a great star?

I know he had some ability and did do some painting, but I'm not sure it would have been that impressive.

Hard to say of course, and art is particularly subjective, just musing on how he compares to any roughly similar examples of "seen as a nobody until after their death".
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
More seriously, was Hitler ever an accomplished enough artist (either in quality or quantity) that a romanticist art movement would consider him a great star?

I know he had some ability and did do some painting, but I'm not sure it would have been that impressive.

Hard to say of course, and art is particularly subjective, just musing on how he compares to any roughly similar examples of "seen as a nobody until after their death".

He was told by members of the art establishment in Vienna that his stuff was not particularly good, and that he should focus on architecture, where he apparently had some talent.
 
To be honest, Hitler being considered a great artist of the 20th century is pretty much ASB. While he wasn't bad at drawing, he was not innovative or a producer of great art (art being things of artistic value, not just pieces of art). His style was very conservative, much more like the romanticist landscapes of the early 19th century than any contemporary movements, and he had a chocolate box idealism. I'm sure he could have eked out a living producing conservative artworks for conservative patrons, but he would never have been an artist on the level of Cézanne or Klimt.
 
Apparently most of his work consisted of street scenes: views of buildings, parks, and the like. I'll support that general sentiment that his talents were said to be architectural rather than representational. There's one for you: suppose he had somehow gotten apprenticed to/hired on as an architectural designer by a firm in Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, or another major German-speaking city? Had that happened, chances are the name "Adolf Hitler" would be lost in obscurity save for appearances on century-old architectural renderings and drawings.
 
In the alt-wiki page someone made an awesome post that had Hitler go color blind because of a gas attack, and he became world famous for trippy day glo gritty scenes of Trench warfare.
 
He was told by members of the art establishment in Vienna that his stuff was not particularly good, and that he should focus on architecture, where he apparently had some talent.

Apparently most of his work consisted of street scenes: views of buildings, parks, and the like. I'll support that general sentiment that his talents were said to be architectural rather than representational. There's one for you: suppose he had somehow gotten apprenticed to/hired on as an architectural designer by a firm in Vienna, Salzburg, Munich, or another major German-speaking city? Had that happened, chances are the name "Adolf Hitler" would be lost in obscurity save for appearances on century-old architectural renderings and drawings.

This...

Hitler as an Architect holds some possibility. I did an "Alternate Hitler" thing somewhere on this board where he became known as the father of a school of architecture that blended neoclassical with Italian Futurism to built tall, imposing semi-classical buildings that used forced perspective tricks to appear larger.

His art showed a lot of architecture, typically with distorted perspective that made them look bigger, so this made sense to me:

adolfhitlerpainting.jpg
 
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