Hitler's Paintings.(Adolf Hitler)(Brief Article)

"But why give him the wall space?" One of the art critics at the exhibition preview asked Deborah Rothschild, curator at the Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts. "Him" is none other than Adolf Hitler, and two of Hitler's watercolors are part of the exhibition "Prelude to a Nightmare: Art, Politics and Hitler's Early Years in Vienna 1906-1913" (through Oct. 27). Rothschild's personal answer was, "I grew up with questions about Hitler--what formed him, what shaped his esthetics, what was the art behind the Third Reich?" An adjacent wall text put it somewhat more bluntly: "... to call [Hitler] evil and end the discussion there explains nothing." Both responses beg the question, however, of why it was necessary to include a couple of art works--especially intimate little watercolors--wrought by the very hand of the 20th century's most infamous villain in what is a historical exhibition.

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 ...