‘Hitler’ paintings fail to sell at Nuremberg 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 Days before the sale a number of the artworks were withdrawn on suspicion they were fakes with prosecutors stepping in.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 told AFP. “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.” In Germany, public displays of Nazi symbols are illegal but exceptions can be made, in educational or historic contexts for instance. To comply with the law, the auction house pixellated the swastikas on the wicker chair and a blue-and-white Meissen porcelain vase in catalogue photos, and covered them up on-site. But none of the paintings included any of the totalitarian party’s insignias. According to Klingen, Hitler had the style of “a moderately ambitious amateur” but his creations did not stand out from “hundreds of thousands” of comparable works from the period — making their authenticity especially hard to verify. The watercolours, drawings and paintings bearing “Hitler” signatures featured views of Vienna or Nuremberg, female nudes and still life works, the auction house said. They were offered by 23 different owners. Prosecutors on Wednesday collected 63 artworks from the Weidler premises bearing the signature “A.H.” or “A. Hitler”, including some not slated to go under the hammer. Nuremberg-Fuerth prosecutor’s office said it had opened an investigation against persons unknown “on suspicion of falsifying documents and attempted fraud”, chief prosecutor Antje Gabriels-Gorsolke told AFP. “If they turn out to be fakes, we will then try to determine who knew what in the chain of ownership,” she said. Weidler said in a statement that the paintings’ withdrawal from sale did “not automatically mean they are fakes”. (AFP)
Mum discovers mother-in-law changed baby’s name
NEW YORK: When it comes to having a baby, one of the most difficult decisions to make is what you’re going to call the little one. One woman thought she and her husband had come up with the perfect name for their son and had worked out a very unique spelling. However two months after giving birth to their child, the mum was horrified to discover that the name they had chosen, wasn’t actually his legal name – according to the birth certificate. A woman known only as Mama Bear revealed how she discovered her husband had changed her son’s name, without telling her. The American mum claims the incident occurred while she was unconscious and recovering from a C-section. And while she’s furious with her husband for not telling her, she knows the real person to blame is her mother-in-law who “guilt-tripped” him into making the change. She goes on to reveal that she started to suspect something was up when her husband’s mother sent a Christmas card to her son, featuring the incorrect spelling. However she only discovered what they had done when she was filing all her son’s paperwork away for safe keeping. (Agencies)