>
Would you buy a painting of a mass murderer? Could you enjoy music if you knew it was composed by a monster? Can you tell good art from the bad people who sometimes make it?
These are questions Channel 4 hopes to raise when it airs a debate next week called Jimmy Carr Destroys Art.
The show has purchased a painting painted by Adolf Hitler and will let a studio audience decide whether to burn it with a flamethrower by the controversial comedian.
Understandably, the plan has been criticized as a tacky gimmick. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said the show “makes Hitler a subject of light-hearted entertainment.”
Olivia Marks-Woldman, the trust’s chief executive, said the program was “just a stunt for shock and cannot excuse the trivialization of the horrors of Nazism.” She has a point. But while Hitler’s painting is making headlines, he is just one of the “problematic” artists being debated.
Others include convicted pedophile Rolf Harris and womanizer and womanizer Pablo Picasso.
The show has purchased a photo painted by Adolf Hitler and will let a studio audience decide whether to burn it with a flamethrower by the controversial comedian.
Each painting by these artists will have its defender on the agenda, and then there is the chance for someone to argue why – whatever the merits – the artwork should not be shown. At the end, the studio audience decides the fate of the picture.
If the public insists that the Hitler painting be destroyed, it will be in the air. If saved by the public, the fate of Hitler’s creation seems less certain.
Channel 4’s chief content officer, Ian Katz, says only it won’t hang in the TV company’s boardroom.
So would you hang a Hitler on your wall? Would you vote to destroy it? Or would you choose a middle ground – keep it, but tuck it away?
Hitler was certainly a much better painter than I ever was when I entered art school at the age of 18. But his efforts were still uninspired, dull and characterless.
His small paintings, mainly architectural, would be worthless if you didn’t know the artist’s name. It is because of Hitler’s shame that people collect them, and why there are a thousand fakes for every true Hitler watercolor.
During World War II, there was a very good artist in London named Oskar Kokoschka, a refugee from the continent.
He was haunted by a strange sense of guilt. In the early twentieth century he had won a place at a Viennese art academy, which rejected another candidate. . . Adolf Hitler!
Kokoschka confided his terrible sense of doom to his friends in the pubs of Hampstead. If Hitler had been given that place instead of him, he would have realized his life ambition, which was to become a stage painter at the opera. The world would never have heard of him. Perhaps the entire 20th-century nightmare—the war, the persecution of the Jews, the massacres—had never happened.
Would I buy a Hitler watercolor? No. I’d say it was definitely bad taste to do that. But if someone gave me one, I’d probably keep it as a curiosity. Would I hang it? Almost certainly not.
While Hitler’s painting is making headlines, he is just one of the “problematic” artists being debated. Others include convicted pedophile Rolf Harris and womanizer and womanizer Pablo Picasso
But now comes an even trickier problem – the question of really bad people who were really good artists and whether we can like their art. Picasso was a brazen misogynist who told one of his mistresses Françoise Gilot that “women are machines for suffering.” He said that “to 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, swallowed them and crushed them on his canvas.” After spending many nights extracting their essence, as soon as they bled out, he would throw them away.”
Two of his lovers committed suicide, two more went mad. He was, of course, not as monstrous as Hitler. But in the post-#MeToo era, he would have been hunted.
And yet his art is extraordinary. Not everyone likes it. Coincidentally, I do – I consider him one of the great giants of the 20th century, always experimenting, always finding something new and, from his earliest years, quite an amazing draftsman and painter from a purely technical point of view.
Supporting the left in the 1930s, when Hitler came to power, he was always a bit of a hero to liberals, both for his views and for his work. And in all likelihood, the reason much of his art is so direct and ingrained is because of his disdain for people.
Caravaggio was one of the greatest painters of the High Renaissance. He died in 1610 at the age of 38, probably of a fever, but some say he was murdered. He must have committed murder himself.
He was moody, violent, sexually voracious, a thoroughly bad hat. But his photos, artificially and dramatically lit, sometimes anticipating the great moments of cinema, are, in my opinion, very special.
Think of his painting of the disciples in The Supper At Emmaus, in which he recognizes the risen Christ; or his photo The Calling Of St Matthew, of Jesus calling Matthew the tax collector. People’s lives have been changed for the better by looking at these photos of a murderer.
Whenever I walk up Regent Street in London and look at the statue of Ariel that adorns the BBC building, I renewed my immense admiration for the sculptor Eric Gill, who is also a part of the Channel 4 debate. A great craftsman and devout Catholic convert, this fascinating man produced some of the finest statues of the mid-20th century.
His small paintings, mainly architectural, would be worthless if you didn’t know the artist’s name. It’s because of Hitler’s shame that people collect them, and why for every true Hitler watercolor there are a thousand fakes
Long after his death, biographer Fiona MacCarthy revealed that Gill had sexually abused relatives and sometimes even the poor old family dog.
It led many Catholics to feel that Gill’s Stations of the Cross should be removed from their cathedral in Westminster. You get what they mean – especially given the appalling record of their church and its priests regarding child abuse.
But – and this is the fascinating difficulty – Eric Gill’s sculptures, carvings and drawings remain beautiful objects in their own right.
There is, of course, another complication when it comes to great artists: money. If you bought a watercolor of Hitler, it would only give you the equivalent of a luxury family vacation.
A Picasso or Caravaggio canvas would be far beyond the reach of anyone but multimillionaires. For this reason alone, I doubt there are any collectors or public galleries that will send Picasso’s work to the trash.
Channel 4, however, will have to investigate whether they should. Whether our venality comes into play and overrides any sense of morality.
Then there’s that question that hurts some opera-goers. While we love the great music dramas of Richard Wagner – surely one of the greatest geniuses of the 19th century – shouldn’t we be repelled by his despicable anti-Semitism?
My answer to all these questions is basically the same whether we look at the amateur endeavors of Hitler and Rolf Harris, the genius of Picasso, the towering music of Wagner, the sensationally illuminated oils of Caravaggio or the awe-inspiring and beautiful images of Eric Gill. It is that we must continue to enjoy great art by wicked people with a clear conscience – because it manages to transcend the filth, or sheer wickedness, of those who made it.
Hitler’s art isn’t great. It just stays on the market for its unsavory souvenir value, as if it were part of a freak show.
It was not Rolf Harris’s artistic skill, but television fame, that led the Royal Collection to commission him to paint a portrait of the Queen. I imagine this embarrassing blob was quietly put up for sale – he would never be taken seriously as a painter, especially after his criminal sexual preferences became apparent. I would quite easily limit all his work to the wood room.
Picasso, Caravaggio, Eric Gill, Wagner, on the other hand – their brilliance surpasses and conquers their hateful sins.
I can totally understand why some people disagree with me. In Israel they banned Wagner’s music for years. 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, just as the shower was suddenly turned off and the gas turned on?
But Wagner, while anti-Semitic and loved by Hitler, was not really a murderer. And his work not only lasts, it uplifts the soul.
The victims of Eric Gill’s lusts had to live with the terrible consequences of his depraved behavior. This doesn’t stop thousands, if not millions, of people from seeing in his statue of Prospero and Ariel outside the BBC an image of humanity elevated by art to a realm where we all want to be better people.
There is also a deeper point here, which is sometimes overlooked. The great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that ‘from wood as crooked as that of which man is made, nothing can be cut quite straight’. In other words, all humans are imperfect.
Some are guilty of really bad behavior. But the fact is that art comes from 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 one of them was in a relationship with someone dear to me, I’d scream.
But the most important thing they leave behind – and the reason why their names remain with us – is great art.
Beauty and truth bubble from the evil cauldron of the human soul. There is something wonderfully uplifting about this fact.
Jimmy Carr Destroys Art airs next Tuesday at 9:15pm on Channel 4.