Hitler oil painting attacked by screwdriver-wielding man who screamed ‘b*****d’ as he slashed at canvas
AN oil painting by Adolf Hitler has been attacked in a museum by a screwdriver-wielding man.
The enraged art viewer yelled "b*****d" as he tried to destroy the artwork by the fuhrer.
The Hitler artwork was hanging in the Museo di Salo, a museum in the lakeside resort of Salo on Lake Garda in Italy, as part of a travelling exhibition.
According to a museum spokesman, the perpetrator was around 40-years-old and came intending to slash the painting.
Security guards managed to prevent the man from destroying the painting, although the perpetrator managed to escape the museum premises.
The picture suffered only small bits of chipping of the colours. The owner, a private collector in Germany, decided after examining the damage not to file criminal charges.
The painting, measuring 12 by 16 inches, has no official name and features a seemingly endless dark space with gloomy colours.
In the foreground, a man sits behind a table next to a standing figure.
The signature "Adolf Hitler" sits in the bottom-right corner.
It is the first time that the work of Hitler has been publicly shown in an exhibition.
The genocidal maniac tried unsuccessfully to become a painter at the Vienna Art academy before rising becoming of Fuhrer of Nazi-Germany.
It is not known when the painting was made exactly.
MEET THE HITLERS American fanatic names his son Adolf and daughter Eva Braun before changing his last name to Hitler
The exhibition is about art and madness.
According to a museum spokesman, the reason why the painting was not better protected is because of its "poor artistic value" compared to works by Francisco de Goya and Francis Bacon, which are also part of the exhibition of about 200 items.
Exhibition curator Vittorio Sgarbi said that works like Hitler's have to be seen with "contempt and distance" but "without reproducing the censorship and hatred expressed by the dictatorships."
Sgarbi called Hitler's work "the image of despair" and said it reminded him of Franz Kafka.
He added that nothing can be seen in it but "misery".
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