London: Jake & Dinos Chapman channel Adolf Hitler at White Cube

If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be
and Fucking Hell
30 May—12 Jul 2008
White Cube
Mason's Yard, London SW1

Left: Jake and Dinos Chapman with their re-created 'Fucking Hell' installation
Photograph: Joel Ryan/PA
Courtesy the artists and The Guardian, UK

Mark Brown wrote in The Guardian ( May 30, 2008):

Five years ago the artists Jake and Dinos Chapman were labelled vandals for defacing a set of Goya prints. There may be less fuss over their new target: 13 watercolours of dubious quality by a man who never made it to art school despite his best endeavours. Adolf Hitler. Yesterday the brothers revealed new works including the amateurish Hitler paintings, on which they have painted rainbow skies, smiley faces and colourful stars and flowers.

The artists take delight in what the tyrant's reaction might have been. "If hell exists and Hitler is there, I think he is turning in his grave," said Jake. The brothers spent £115,000 on a "job lot" of pretty dire paintings by Hitler. They said that they were exploring themes of redemption and had made Hitler's art "better by it being worse".

The Hitler watercolours are the sort of works that can be seen in junkshops the world over, say the brothers, describing them as impoverished and benign.

"They are absolutely archetypal of the miserable representation of art that was going on then," said Dinos. Too much time could be spent looking at the art to try to read the mind of the man Hitler became, they say. "All they indicate is that this person is not very good at art, they don't indicate this person will become a terrible tyrant," said Jake. The last time the brothers had a go at someone else's art was in 2003. In Insult to Injury, they took a collection of 80 Goya prints and drew puppy and clown heads on the faces. It offended some and delighted others.

The brothers - once called "the cleverest of the Young British Artists" by the critic Matthew Collings - also marked the fourth anniversary of the loss of one of their most celebrated pieces of work, 'Hell', destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire in east London, by revealing its successor. This time it is entitled 'Fucking Hell' - also on show at the White Cube gallery in central London - is nine glass cabinets arranged in a swastika formation with tens of thousands of miniature figures enduring awfulness on a grand scale. The original installation was lost in the east London fire which destroyed much of Charles Saatchi's stored art collection four years ago.

"You couldn't fail to see something funny about Hell being on fire," said Jake. Their first thought was: let's do it again. Jake said: "We wanted to rescue the work from the sentimentality that soon clothed the work after it burned, an affection for the work that wasn't there when it actually existed as an object, so the idea of a world without Hell was unacceptable to us.

"While everyone else was whingeing around kicking their legs in the air like overturned cockroaches, the first thing we said was we'd remake it". The Chapmans did not realise Hell was in the fire at first. "We thought it was in special storage for the stuff that he [Saatchi] really liked," joked Dinos.

Backstory (The Guardian)

Adolf Hitler, like so many amateur artists, thought he was rather good with a paintbrush, if not brilliant. After school he applied to the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts but was turned down because he lacked a school leaving certificate. He tried to persuade it with the quality of his landscapes and, much to his fury, was turned down again. Hitler's view of art was straightforward - he liked sentimental landscapes. What he didn't like, he labelled decadent. He instructed his minister for popular enlightenment and propaganda, Josef Goebbels, to lead a purification purge against this degenerate art (ie virtually all modern art) as "part of the Jewish conspiracy". He complained that modern artists "see meadows blue, skies green, clouds sulphur yellow, and so on ..." In 1937 the Degenerate Art exhibition was held in Munich. Organised by the Nazis, it was to show how corrupting the art was. If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be subverts his work with a sky of rainbow colours.

Heavy fun, go see.