Rome - An exhibition about art and madness in northern Italy
will feature a painting by Adolf Hitler, despite the late German
dictator's work being far from a masterpiece, organizers said Friday.
"In art history... there have been many artists whose minds were
racked by torment, who expressed themselves in a visionary and
hallucinated language," said notoriously foul-mouthed art critic and
TV personality Vittorio Sgarbi, who curated the exhibition titled
"Museum of Madness."
Sgarbi told Italian news agency ANSA that Hitler's small oil
painting, which is on loan by a private German collector and has
never been exhibited before, "is a piece of shit artistically
speaking" but that it "says a a lot about his psyche: There is no
grandeur here, only misery."
The painting by Hitler, who turned to politics after being rejected
by a fine arts academy in Vienna, will appear next to artworks by the
likes of 18th-century Spanish master Francisco Goyaby, US graffiti
artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and British painter Francis Bacon, as
well as several Italian artists.
The show opens on Saturday and runs through November 19 at the Museo
di Salo (MUSA).
MUSA is located in the Lombardy town of Salo, where Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini set up a Nazi-backed puppet state for two years
during World War II.