Face of Evil

THE FACE OF EVIL

100 Portraits of the Devil

by Thomas Dellert

2015

The first 50 of 100 portraits
This is a new series of photomontages and mixed media art works in an attempt to depict the face of evil. I have chosen to use the image of Adolf Hitler to represent all evil in the world, a choice I made for many reasons. Purely with a look of his piercing eyes alone, his face still emits fear 70 years after his suicide in his Berlin bunker. The complexity of the person that is Adolf Hitler offers a million angles and the graphical qualities of his Chaplin moustache and side hair part are today almost laughable. Hitler was one of the few in history of mankind who seduced, mesmerised and conquered the world with deadly results.

Together with his contemporaries Josef Stalin, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and later Mao Zedong, he was the ultimate totalitarian leader. Today, we with the matrix in our hands can see how he changed the world in devastating ways. There is no doubt that Hitler was a great manipulator and seducer of the masses, the most loved, worshipped and followed man of the 20th century and the most hated man in the present Western world. Thus, if any human being should represent evil it must be Adolf Hitler.

But it does not end here. As I have learned by studying his life for over 35 years, Hitler was a man who wanted to create but loved to destroy. With this in mind, we can use his own paintings and drawings as a tool to get closer to who he was and why he did what he did.

During his time as a soldier, he mainly made drawings of the First World War wreckage and aftermath. Even later in life, he told his architect Albert Speer during the destruction of Berlin that he loved ruins and that the war would in fact make it easier for them to build up the new Germania.

I have used some of these drawings and photos of Adolf from this period in time with the knowledge that the Second World War was the continuation of the first. The German people were seduced by Hitler to believe in the “stab in the back theory” and the great revenge. In a way Hitler “painted” the future world to the Germans as a wonderful great nation of Aryans. Millions believed in this body of work and that Germany was its beating heart.

Yet Hitler also painted flowers, fragile and semi transparent. He drew children and dogs and painted landscapes of the Alps. How could an artist like Hitler cry hearing classical music, draw children in his art and hugging them and playing with them as Uncle Wolf, and at the same time be the architect of the Holocaust, mass murder of over one million children alone and another 6 million in his extermination camps and death factories. Is this not a personification of the Devil with a capital D? Smiling, seductive, manipulative, charming and deadly.

This is the reason I have used his haunting face in these 100 portraits, as a warning of the evil that lives on in countless ways, equally seductive and deadly. Adolf Hitler, as creator and destroyer, lives on. In our daily lives, in the form of the Volkswagen, that he made the original drawing of and had Ferdinand Porsche create for him. In all the many business suits by Hugo Boss all over the world. Hugo Boss dressed up the Nazis designing the most lethal and seductive uniforms in history that were those of the SS, the SA and the Hitler Youth. Hitler lives on in the form of a macho image and the most famous anti-Semitic man the Arab world knows, where his legacy “Mein Kampf” is the best selling book after the Koran.

And Hitler lives on in the many fanatical organizations all over our planet like ISIS and al-Qaeda. They practice the same ethnic cleansing and mass executions that Hitler’s “Einsatzgruppen” did during the Second World War.

Evil will never go away, only change its face.
In these new art works I have also used the childish art of Hitler himself, as well as the art he feared. The strong, free and modern art of that time. The art that he had stamped as “degenerated” and cruelly looted from museums and family collections, then ritually burnt as a propaganda spectacle. I have on purpose used these in these my art works, the kind of art labeled Dada, Cubism, Surrealism as a counter attack on the Nazis who themselves attacked this kind of art. In this way, Hitler, the artist turned dictator becomes a part of the world he hated and tried to destroy yet failed.

Some of the images are rightly frightening, some more comical in structure. Some are seductively beautiful, some are plainly ugly. All what I feel evil represents.

If Adolf Hitler would have been excepted into the Vienna Art Academy, the world would have been spared the death of 60 million people.

I want these portraits of the devil to function as a platform for thought and
discussion.
They should be displayed together as one giant mosaic work.
Thomas Dellert