Aspiring artist rejected by art school twice

Sotheby's-AP (left); Bettman-Corbis

A short piece by Jerry Adler in Newsweek:

In their idle moments, historians occasionally speculate on how the world would be different if Adolf Hitler had passed the entrance exam to the Art Academy of Vienna, where he applied (twice) in the early years of the 20th century. Presumably, if he'd been allowed to pursue his dream, he would have inflicted on the world only a large number of mediocre watercolors, rather than World War II and the Holocaust. Contrariwise, the world is better off that a certain British statesman with a gift for inspiring rhetoric never allowed his love of painting to interfere with his career in politics. Otherwise Britain might have gained a trove of derivative post-impressionist landscapes to clutter the antiques shops of Portobello Road, and lost the war to Nazi Germany. One can't help wishing that Hitler had been a better artist—and being grateful that Winston Churchill wasn't.