Freudian Slip - Hitler Edition

Did Freud Own a Hitler Painting?
Theunis Bates/AOL News

LONDON (Feb. 15) -- Since 1945, psychologists have pored over the paintings Adolf Hitler created as a struggling artist in the years before World War I, looking for insight into the murderous Nazi leader's young mind. Now a British auction firm is selling an early Hitler watercolor, which it says may have hung in Sigmund Freud's Vienna office.

But some Freud experts dispute the suggestion that the Jewish father of modern psychology had a firsthand opportunity to study the soul of the warmongering despot.

The painting, due to be sold by Mullock's Specialist Auctioneers in central England next month, depicts a church and mountains, and is signed in one corner "A. Hitler - 1910." The back of the 8-by-4-inch watercolor is inscribed with a line of Italian reading, "Studio Medico Sigmund Freud Vienne," the name of the psychologist's medical practice in Vienna. (Several of Freud's patients and employees are known to have spoken Italian.)

So is it possible that as Hitler was mooching around the Austrian city between 1907 and 1913, selling his third-rate daubs to tourists and locals, Freud or someone he knew might have bought one from the Führer-to-be?

"This painting is exactly the sort of cheap piece of art you'd see hanging on the walls of dental surgeries and hospital waiting rooms across Europe at the time," says Mullock's auctioneer Richard Westwood-Brookes. "It's not too far beyond the realms of possibility that this little struggling artist, who was selling his paintings on the street, would have sold this work to one of Freud's assistants or perhaps to Freud himself."

The auction house acquired the work from a respected Italian collector, who in turn claims he bought it from an American soldier who grabbed the painting from Freud's abandoned practice at Berggasse 19 after the Allies captured Vienna in 1945.

However, Freud experts have doubts about the watercolor's alleged provenance. Peter Nömaier, spokesman for the Freud Museum in Vienna, which now occupies Berggasse 19, notes that the psychologist took almost all of his possessions with him when he fled the city for London in 1938. He says any works of art left behind -- especially those signed by Adolf Hitler -- would almost certainly have been seized by the Austrian authorities when Freud left the building. Because the psychologist catalogued his extensive collection of ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian antiquities, Freud would have recorded this painting in his diaries or letters, Nömaier believes.

Ivan Ward, education director at London's Freud Museum, says that while it's possible Freud sold the painting before going into exile, he believes it's more probable that the work -- if it was snatched from Berggasse 19 -- was owned by another of the property's residents. Following the psychologist's departure, the apartment block was used to house Jews on their way to death camps, and then in 1942 it was handed over to several Austrian families, including those of high-ranking Nazis.

"So it's possible that the painting could have come from Freud's apartment," says Ward, "but it might have been owned by one of the later tenants."

Just imagine if Hitler did really hit up Freud to buy one of his awful paintings. I'm sure Freud had the habit of psychoanalyzing anyone he came across. I bet he could have had a ball with a pre-Fuhrer Hitler. It would have been really funny if Freud traded his psychiatry services for one of the paintings. I'm sure he would have concluded that Hitler had an Edipus complex and had some serious daddy issues. Hitler's sexual predalictions probably could have kept Freud busy for months.