The Brothers Who Defaced Hitler Art

British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman once bought original Adolf Hitler watercolors and painted over them. They treated the dictator's mediocre landscape art as a canvas for their own surreal additions.

The duo is famous for using shocking imagery to confront historical trauma and art history itself. By defacing these specific paintings, they aimed to diminish the dictator's ego by turning his work into a mere backdrop for their own vision. This provocative act is a signature example of their career spent questioning the boundaries of morality and taste. It remains one of the most controversial ways an artist has ever used a historical artifact.