Would you hang a HITLER in your hall? … or would you destroy it? That’s the question asked by a controversial TV show. Here, eminent critic A.N. WILSON argues we can separate the art from even the most evil of artists
Would you buy a picture painted by a mass murderer? Could you enjoy music if you knew it had been composed by a monster? Can you disentangle good art from the bad people who sometimes create it?
These are questions Channel 4 hopes to provoke when it airs a debate next week called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art.
The show has bought a picture painted by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether it should be burnt with a flamethrower by the controversial comedian.
Understandably, the plan has been criticised as a tasteless gimmick. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said the show is ‘making Hitler a topic of light entertainment’.
Olivia Marks-Woldman, the trust’s chief executive, declared that the programme was ‘simply a stunt for shock value and cannot excuse the trivialisation of the horrors of Nazism’. She has a point. But while Hitler’s painting grabs the headlines, he is just one of the ‘problematic’ artists to be debated.
Others include convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and the womaniser and wife-beater Pablo Picasso.
The show has bought a picture painted by Adolf Hitler and will allow a studio audience to decide whether it should be burnt with a flamethrower by the controversial comedian
Each painting by these artists will have its defender on the programme, and there will then be the chance for someone to argue why — whatever its merits — the work of art should not be displayed. At the end, the studio audience decides the picture’s fate.
If the audience insists the Hitler painting should be destroyed, this will happen on air. If it is saved by the audience, the fate of Hitler’s creation seems less certain.
Ian Katz, Channel 4’s Chief Content Officer, says only that it will not be hanging in the TV company’s boardroom.
So would you hang a Hitler on your wall? Would you vote for it to be destroyed? Or would you opt for a middle ground — keep it but hide it away?
Hitler was certainly a much better painter than I ever was when I got into art school aged 18. But his efforts were still uninspired, dull and characterless.
His little paintings, mainly architectural, would be worthless if you did not know the name of the artist. It is because of Hitler’s infamy that people collect them, and why for every genuine Hitler watercolour there are a thousand fakes.
During World War II in London, there was a very good artist called Oskar Kokoschka, a refugee from the continent.
He was haunted by a strange guilt. In the early 1900s, he had won a place at a Viennese fine arts academy which turned down another applicant . . . Adolf Hitler!
Kokoschka would confide in his friends in Hampstead pubs his dreadful sense of doom. If Hitler had got that place instead of him, he would have realised his life’s ambition, which was to be a scene-painter at the opera. The world would never have heard of him. Perhaps the whole 20th-century nightmare — the war, the persecution of the Jews, the mass slaughter — would never have happened.
Would I buy a Hitler watercolour? No. I would say it was certainly bad taste to do so. But if someone gave me one, I would probably keep it as a curiosity. Would I hang it up? Almost certainly not.
While Hitler’s painting grabs the headlines, he is just one of the ‘problematic’ artists to be debated. Others include convicted paedophile Rolf Harris and the womaniser and wife-beater Pablo Picasso
But now comes another more tricky poser — the question of really bad people who were really good artists and whether we can like their art. Picasso was a brutal misogynist who told one of his mistresses Françoise Gilot that ‘women are machines for suffering’. He said that ‘for me there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats’.
He was physically and emotionally abusive towards women, and his granddaughter Marina wrote that he submitted them ‘to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them and crushed them on to his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them’.
Two of his lovers committed suicide, another two went mad. He was not as monstrous as Hitler, of course. But in the post-#MeToo era he would have been hounded out.
And yet his art is extraordinary. Not everyone loves it. As it happens, I do — I regard him as one of the great giants of the 20th century, always experimenting, always finding something new and, from his earliest years, a quite stupendous draughtsman and painter from a purely technical point of view.
Because he supported the Left during the 1930s when Hitler was rising to power, he was always a bit of a hero to liberals for his views as well as for his work. And in all likelihood, the reason much of his art is so immediate and visceral is because of his contempt for people.
Caravaggio was one of the greatest painters of the High Renaissance. He died aged 38 in 1610, probably of a fever, but some say he was murdered. He had certainly himself committed a murder.
He was moody, violent, sexually voracious, a thoroughly bad hat. But his pictures, artificially and dramatically lit, sometimes to my mind anticipating the great moments of cinema, are quite extraordinary.
Think of his painting of the disciples in The Supper At Emmaus, recognising the risen Christ; or his picture The Calling Of St Matthew, of Jesus calling Matthew the tax-gatherer. Human lives have been changed for the better by looking at these pictures by a murderer.
Whenever I walk up Regent Street in London and gaze towards the statue of Ariel which adorns the BBC building I renew my huge admiration for the sculptor Eric Gill, who also features in the Channel 4 debate. This fascinating man, who was a wonderful craftsman and devout Catholic convert, produced some of the most beautiful images of the mid-20th century.
His little paintings, mainly architectural, would be worthless if you did not know the name of the artist. It is because of Hitler’s infamy that people collect them, and why for every genuine Hitler watercolour there are a thousand fakes
Long after his death, biographer Fiona MacCarthy revealed that Gill had sexually abused family members and even, on occasion, the poor old family dog.
It led many Catholics to feel that Gill’s Stations Of The Cross in their cathedral at Westminster, should be removed. You see what they mean — especially given the terrible record of their church and its priests with regard to child abuse.
But — and this is the fascinating difficulty — the statues and carvings and drawings by Eric Gill remain beautiful objects in their own right.
There is, of course, a further complication where great artists are concerned: money. If you bought a watercolour by Hitler, it would only set you back the equivalent of a luxury family holiday.
A canvas by Picasso or Caravaggio would be way beyond the means of any but multi-millionaires. On this ground alone, I doubt whether any collectors, or public galleries, are going to consign Picasso’s work to the dustbin.
Channel 4 will have to examine the question of whether they should, though. Of whether our venality comes into play, over-riding any sense of morality.
Then there’s that question which causes agony to some opera-goers. While loving the great music dramas of Richard Wagner — certainly one of the greatest geniuses of the 19th century — should we not be repelled by his vile anti-Semitism?
My answer to all these questions is actually the same, whether we are considering Hitler and Rolf Harris’s amateur attempts, Picasso’s genius, Wagner’s towering music, Caravaggio’s sensationally lit oils, or Eric Gill’s awe-inspiring and beautiful statues. It is that we should continue to enjoy great art by bad people with an untroubled conscience — because it manages to transcend the nastiness, or the sheer wickedness, of those who created it.
Hitler’s art is not great. It remains on the market simply because of its unsavoury souvenir value, as if part of a freak show.
It was not Rolf Harris’s artistic ability but television fame that led to the Royal Collection commissioning him to do a portrait of the Queen. I imagine that this embarrassing daub has been quietly put into store — he was never going to be taken seriously as a painter, less so after his criminal sexual predilections became apparent. I would confine all his work to the lumber room pretty easily.
In contrast, Picasso, Caravaggio, Eric Gill, Wagner — their brilliance outshines and overcomes their hateful sins.
I can utterly understand why some people would disagree with me. In Israel, for many years they banned the music of Wagner. Who could forget that the overture to his great work The Mastersingers Of Nuremberg was played as muzak in the ‘showers’ of the concentration camps, at the very moment when the shower was suddenly turned off and the gas switched on?
But Wagner, though anti-semitic, and though beloved of Hitler, was not actually himself a murderer. And his work does not merely endure, it elevates the soul.
The victims of Eric Gill’s lusts had to live with the awful consequences of his depraved behaviour. This does not stop thousands, perhaps millions, of people seeing in his statue of Prospero and Ariel outside the BBC an image of humanity lifted up by art into a realm where we all want to be better people.
There is a deeper point here, too, which is sometimes missed. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that ‘out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made, nothing entirely straight can be carved’. In other words, all human beings are imperfect.
Some are guilty of really bad behaviour. But the fact is that art comes out of humanity. It is made by complicated and sometimes bad people.
Two of the greatest British artists of the 20th century, Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon, were monsters. If I thought of either of them was having a relationship with anyone dear to me I would scream.
But the important thing they leave behind — and the reason their names remain with us — is great art.
Out of the evil cauldron of the human soul bubbles beauty and truth. There is something wonderfully uplifting about this fact.
Jimmy Carr Destroys Art will air on Channel 4 this Tuesday, at 9.15pm.
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