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Known mainly for his postcard art, bland but technically skilled landscapes and city scenes quickly produced to procure the vagabond artist lunch money, here is a rare personal work which can be variously interpreted in light of his past disappointments and future rise and fall.
The image shows a hallway receding into infinity, framed by an increasingly smaller series of rectangular doorways or archways. Two men are present in the foreground. Or, two figures are present in the foreground. One, seated at a desk on the left, dressed in a formal suit, possibly a clerk or gatekeeper, is certainly male. The other, assumed by most art historians to be male, stands holding a document or portfolio, facing forward but not directly engaging the viewer or the seated man. Yet when I first saw the painting, I was struck by the *It’s Pat* nature of the standing figure. The long frock, the suggestion of breasts, the gender neutral facial features and hair, this figure struck me as the one-testicled, asexual Hitler’s possibly unconscious representation of himself.
I see Hitler waiting with his portfolio to be admitted for examination by the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. The pain of his two rejections by the Academy, the depression, the frustration of his life’s dream, the emptiness and loneliness of his future, the persecution by the bureaucratic Art Academy, are all foretold after the fact in this uncanny painting.
Dominated by dark, muted tones—deep grays, browns, and shadows—it conveys the coming somber, oppressive atmosphere for Germany. One can’t help but view the vast, receding hallway as the prototype for the Third Reich, in which the people will struggle against incomprehensible systems. Hitler’s masterful use of one-point perspective adds a sense of depth, guiding the viewer’s gaze inexorably toward Germany’s vanishing point, and foretelling his claustrophobic, helpless feeling trapped in his last days in his underground bunker.
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