The lives of Vincent van Gogh and Adolf Hitler are rarely considered together. Here, Nethmi Samaranayaka looks at two men who both hoped to make their way as artists, and at how the regime one of them led would later seize the paintings of the other.
Vincent van Gogh - Self-portrait with grey felt hat. Source: Public domain, Van Gogh Museum, available here.
A Death in Auvers
In the early hours of July 29, 1890, Vincent van Gogh died in a small attic room at the Auberge Ravoux, an inn in the village of Auvers-sur-Oise, north of Paris. Two days earlier, he had shot himself in the fields outside the village. The doctors who attended him judged it too dangerous to remove the bullet, and his brother Theo hurried from Paris to be with him. According to a letter Theo later wrote to their sister, Vincent's last words were "La tristesse durera toujours"("The sadness will last forever"). He was 37 years old.
At the time of his death, Van Gogh was almost unknown to the wider public. Within a few decades, he would be one of the most celebrated artists who ever lived. And less than half a century later, his paintings would be removed from German museums by a regime led by another man who had once hoped to become a painter.
A Late Start
Born in 1853 in Zundert, in the southern Netherlands, the son of a Protestant minister, Van Gogh came to art slowly. He spent several years working for the art dealers Goupil & Cie, then taught at schools in England, worked briefly in a bookshop, and served as a lay preacher among the coal miners of the Borinage region of Belgium. It was only in 1880, at the age of 27, that he committed himself to becoming an artist.
He had little formal training. Short spells of study, including a few weeks at the Antwerp Academy in 1886, left him frustrated with academic teaching, which he found rigid. Instead, he learned by drawing constantly and by studying the artists he admired, among them Jean-François Millet, Rembrandt, and Eugène Delacroix. In Paris, where he lived with Theo from 1886 to 1888, he encountered the Impressionists and Japanese woodblock prints, and the dark, earthy palette of his early work gave way to bright color and bold, rhythmic brushwork.
Theo
Throughout his career, Van Gogh depended on Theo, who worked as an art dealer in Paris. Theo sent him a monthly allowance and paid for paints and canvases, and the two brothers exchanged hundreds of letters. Most of these letters survive, and they remain the richest source we have on Van Gogh's life and his thinking about art.
Van Gogh's personal life was often difficult. He could be intense and quarrelsome, and many of his relationships broke down. From late 1888, he experienced a series of serious mental health crises, the first of which followed a quarrel with Paul Gauguin in Arles that December. In May 1889, he voluntarily entered an asylum at Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he stayed for a year. The exact nature of his illness is still debated today.
A Decade of Work
Despite illness and poverty, Van Gogh was remarkably productive. In roughly ten years, he created about 2,100 works, including around 860 oil paintings and more than 1,000 drawings and watercolors. Many of his best-known pictures, including his sunflower series and The Starry Night (1889), date from the last two years of his life. In Auvers, where he arrived in May 1890 to be closer to Theo and under the care of Dr. Paul Gachet, he produced 74 paintings in about 70 days.
It is often said that he sold only one painting in his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, which was bought by the Belgian artist Anna Boch in 1890. In fact, he sold or exchanged a small number of other works. By 1890, recognition was also beginning to arrive: the critic Albert Aurier published an admiring article about him in the Mercure de France that January, and his work was well received at exhibitions in Brussels and Paris.
Posthumous Fame
Theo died just six months after Vincent, in January 1891. It was Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, who did more than anyone to establish Vincent's reputation. She lent paintings to exhibitions, sold works to carefully chosen collectors and museums, and in 1914 published the brothers' letters. Major exhibitions in the early 20th century, including a large retrospective at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum in 1905, secured Van Gogh's place as a pioneer of modern art. His expressive use of color and brushwork influenced the Fauves and the German Expressionists, and by the late 20th century his paintings were selling for record-breaking sums.
Van Gogh is buried beside Theo in the cemetery at Auvers-sur-Oise. The room where he died at the Auberge Ravoux has been preserved and is open to visitors.
A Young Man in Vienna
When Van Gogh died in 1890, Adolf Hitler was a toddler. He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn, Austria, the son of Alois Hitler, a customs official, and his third wife, Klara. After his father's death in 1903, the teenage Hitler left school without qualifications and set his heart on becoming an artist.
In 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and was rejected. The academy's verdict on his test drawings was "unsatisfactory," with the note "few heads." By Hitler's own later account, the academy's rector suggested that his talents lay in architecture, a course of study for which he lacked the necessary qualifications. Two months later, in December 1907, his mother died of breast cancer. He applied to the academy again in 1908 and was turned away without being allowed to sit the entrance examination.
Years of Obscurity
Hitler remained in Vienna for the next five years. After his money ran out, he went through a brief period of homelessness in 1909 before moving, in early 1910, into a men's hostel on Meldemannstraße, where he lived until 1913. He earned a modest income from small watercolors of Vienna's landmarks, which were sold for him by a fellow hostel resident and by local dealers. His pictures were competent but conventional: carefully drawn buildings and street scenes, usually with few people in them.
Vienna at this time was a city of intense political and ethnic tension, in which German nationalist and antisemitic politics had a wide following. How far Hitler's own views took shape there is debated. In Mein Kampf, written in the 1920s, he described Vienna as the place where his worldview was formed, but historians have found little contemporary evidence that he held the radical antisemitic views he later espoused before the end of the First World War.
War and Politics
In May 1913, Hitler moved to Munich. When war broke out in August 1914, he volunteered for the Bavarian army and served for four years as a regimental dispatch runner on the Western Front. He was awarded the Iron Cross, Second Class, in 1914 and the Iron Cross, First Class, in 1918. He was in a military hospital, recovering from a gas attack, when Germany's defeat was announced in November 1918.
Like many Germans, Hitler embraced the myth that the army had been "stabbed in the back" by enemies at home. Still in the army in 1919, he was sent to monitor a small political group in Munich, the German Workers' Party. He joined it, found that he had a talent for public speaking, and in 1921 became leader of what had by then been renamed the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or Nazi Party.
In November 1923, Hitler led a failed attempt to seize power in Munich, known as the Beer Hall Putsch. He was sentenced to five years in prison but served barely nine months, during which he wrote much of Mein Kampf. For several years afterward, the Nazis remained a fringe party, winning just 2.6 percent of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag election. The Great Depression transformed their fortunes. As unemployment soared, support for the party grew rapidly, and in July 1932 it became the largest party in the Reichstag, with 37.3 percent of the vote. On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor.
Dictatorship
Within months, Hitler had dismantled German democracy, banning rival parties and trade unions and establishing a one-party state. Jews were systematically excluded from German life through boycotts, dismissals from public service, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, which stripped them of their citizenship rights.
The War on "Degenerate" Art
Hitler's own career as an artist was long over, but his tastes helped shape the cultural policy of the Nazi state. He favored traditional, realistic art and regarded modern movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and abstraction as signs of cultural decline. In 1937, Nazi officials confiscated thousands of modern works from German museums. That July, an exhibition titled Degenerate Art opened in Munich, displaying modern paintings alongside mocking slogans, while the officially approved Great German Art Exhibition opened nearby.
Van Gogh's work was caught up in the purge. The regime sold many confiscated works abroad to raise foreign currency. At a public auction in Lucerne, Switzerland, in June 1939, paintings by Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and others were sold, among them a Van Gogh self-portrait taken from the state collection in Munich. Earlier that year, in March 1939, thousands of works judged unsellable had been burned in the courtyard of a Berlin fire station.
War, Genocide, and Defeat
In September 1939, Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War in Europe. During the war, the Nazi regime and its collaborators murdered around six million Jews in the Holocaust, as well as millions of other victims, including Roma, disabled people, Polish civilians, and Soviet prisoners of war.
By early 1945, Allied armies were advancing into Germany from east and west. On April 30, 1945, with Soviet troops fighting in the streets of Berlin, Hitler died by suicide in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery, together with Eva Braun, whom he had married the previous day. He was 56 years old.
Two Painters
Vincent van Gogh and Adolf Hitler were born 36 years apart and were alive at the same time for little more than a year. Both began adult life without a settled career, both hoped to make their way as artists, and both knew periods of poverty and obscurity. There, the similarities largely end.
Van Gogh devoted the last decade of his life to painting and died with little sense of the recognition to come; the world has since come to see his work as a turning point in the history of art. Hitler abandoned art for politics, and the regime he led brought war and genocide to Europe. In one of history's ironies, that regime's campaign against modern art reached into the collections of the very painter whose work had helped to inspire it. Van Gogh's reputation survived untouched. Today, his paintings hang in museums around the world, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, built around the collection that Theo and Johanna preserved, is one of the most visited museums in the Netherlands.
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References
Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam): Official historical archives on Vincent van Gogh's life, letters to Theo, and his artistic career statistics.
The House of Van Gogh (Auberge Ravoux): Historical documentation of the Ravoux Inn and Room No. 5 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.
The History Place (Rise of Hitler): Detailed biographical chronicles regarding Adolf Hitler’s early life, family background, and his years in Vienna.
History.com (Hitler's Frustrated Art Career): Institutional insights into Adolf Hitler’s failed art applications and his subsequent campaign against modern art.
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (Holocaust Encyclopedia): Reference articles on the Holocaust and the Nazi campaign against "degenerate" art.
Ian Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris (London: Allen Lane, 1998).
Brigitte Hamann, Hitler's Vienna: A Dictator's Apprenticeship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Stephanie Barron (ed.), 'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991).
Nienke Bakker et al. (eds.), Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months (Van Gogh Museum, 2023).
