Albert Janesch. “Water Sports”, 1937, Tempera on Canvas, 153 x 208 cm. Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin

Austrian portrait and genre painter Albert Janesch studied in Wien, Vienna, from 1904-12. During World War One,  he was an official war artist, as he was during World War Two in France, Russia and Greece. After 1945 Janesch produced murals for the “Iron Room” of the Museum of Military History located in Wien, which he finished in 1954.

One of his works, “Water Sports”, was submitted for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It was a representation of the perfect beauty of a race steeled in battle and sport, inspired not by antiquity or classicism but by the pulsing life of current events. Adolf Hitler took this painting for his private collection.