No takers for ‘Hitler’ paintings at auction
nuremberg (Germany) — Five paintings attributed to Adolf Hitler failed to find buyers at an auction on Saturday held amid anger at the sale of Nazi memorabilia.
High starting prices of between €19,000 and €45,000 euros ($21,000 and $50,000) and lingering suspicions about the authenticity of the artworks were thought to have scared off potential buyers.
The Weidler auction house did not comment on the reasons for the failure but said the paintings could yet be sold at a later date.
Nuremberg’s mayor Ulrich Maly had earlier condemned the sale as being “in bad taste”.
Among the items that failed to sell were a mountain lake view and a painting of a wicker armchair with a swastika symbol presumed to have belonged to the late Nazi dictator. The Weidler auction house held the “special sale” in Nuremberg, the city in which Nazi war criminals were tried in 1945. Days before the sale a number of the artworks were withdrawn on suspicion they were fakes with prosecutors stepping in.
Sales of alleged artworks by Hitler — who for a time tried to make a living as an artist in his native Austria — regularly spark outrage that collectors are willing to pay high prices for art linked to the country’s Nazi past.
“There’s a long tradition of this trade in devotional objects linked to Nazism,” Stephan Klingen of the Central Institute for Art History in Munich said. “Every time there’s a media buzz about it... and the prices they’re bringing in have been rising constantly. Personally, that’s something that quite annoys me.” —