Oct. 16 (UPI) — Channel 4, the British broadcaster, has bought a painting by Adolf Hitler and will poll a studio audience on whether to destroy it during a televised program titled Jimmy Carr Destroys Art.
During the show, comedian Jimmy Carr will host a panel will debate whether art by problematic artists such as Hitler can be separated from the people who made them, according to CNN and The Guardian.
A Channel 4 spokesperson told CNN that the Hitler painting will be shredded if the audience chooses to destroy it. The show was filmed Wednesday and is scheduled to air on October 24.
Other “problematic” artists that the audience will consider include Pablo Picasso, convicted pedophile Rolf Harris and sexual abuser Eric Gill, according to The Guardian.
It was not immediately clear which painting by Hitler the broadcaster had purchased, when it was purchased and how much it had cost. In 2019, German police seized three watercolor paintings during an investigation into possible fakes being auctioned.
“There is nothing entertaining or laughable about Hitler or the murder of six million Jews, and the persecution of millions more,” Olivia Marks-Woldman, the chief executive of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, told the BBC.
Marks-Woldman called the show’s use of the Hitler painting “deeply inappropriate” and said it was “dangerously trivializing” of the horrors of the Nazis.
“The question of how far art can be linked to its creators is an important one, but this program is simply a stunt for shock value, and cannot excuse the trivialization of the horrors of Nazism,” she said.
A teenage Hitler moved from Linz to Vienna in 1908 in the hopes of becoming an artist but twice failed the admission test to be accepted into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
At least four paintings purportedly by Hitler were seized by U.S. soldiers at the end of World War II and have been held at the U.S. Army’s Center of Military History, and can be seen on appointment.
Others that were not seized started to enter auction sales in the 200s and have fetched hundreds of thousands of dollars when sold.
“They are prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritual imagination. They are architect’s sketches: painful and precise draftsmanship; nothing more,” the late journalist John Gunther wrote in 1936 after seeing Hitler’s paintings.
“No wonder the Vienna professors told him to go to an architectural school and give up pure art as hopeless.”
