Whenever I read about Hitler’s youthful dream of becoming an artist, I imagine an alternate history in which the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna accepted his application to study there. But the august academy said no to the future Führer not once but twice, and Hitler himself declared that the academy’s rebuff struck like “a bolt from the blue.”
Yet as the journalist Charlie English demonstrates in his penetrating chronicle “The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art” (Random House, 304 pages, $28), even so ego-shattering a blow as that did not deter Hitler from his artistic ambitions. Instead they became ever grander. As he rose to power, he fashioned himself the “artist-Führer,” destined to sculpt a new German culture and “pure” Aryan race. And the maniacal path Hitler charted to realize that vision, Mr. English contends, began with his war on modern art and the degeneracy he condemned in modern culture.
