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(单词翻译:双击或拖选)
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
If you saw some of these paintings of flowers, fields and foggy townscapes for sale at a summer art fair, you might point at one to say, maybe for the guest bathroom. Five pictures allegedly painted by Adolf Hitler are scheduled for auction1 at an art house in Nuremberg today. Two dozen more were pulled after German police raided the place on Thursday on suspicion that a number of the paintings signed A. Hitler are forgeries2. Imagine acquiring the technical proficiency3 to counterfeit4 a work of art only to use those skills not to fabricate a fictitious5 Picasso, El Greco, Gaugin or Georgia O'Keeffe but a watercolor by a highly mediocre6 painter who went on to exterminate7 6 million Jews and try to enslave the world.
In his 20s, the future Fuhrer was twice rejected by Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts for what they called his unfitness for painting. Hitler stayed on in the city to study with private teachers and tried to sell his paintings and postcard sketches8 for spare change. We asked Jerry Saltz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic, for his appraisal9 of A. Hitler's artwork. Physically10 and spatially11 dead, Jerry told us. Generic12 academic realism, the equivalent of mediocre exercises in aping good penmanship. He was an adequate draftsman, utterly13 unimaginative and made the equivalent of greeting cards.
Then why would someone want to create a forgery14 of a Hitler painting? The opening bid for one of those Hitler paintings is more than $50,000, not because it's that good, but because it's painted by history's great monster. That same auction house sold 14 Hitler paintings in 2015 for almost half a million dollars. Auctioneers say their bidders15 were from all over Europe, China and the United Arab Emirates.
Why would anyone who could afford to bid so high spend so much good money on a bad painting by an evil man? It is tempting16 to believe that each and every Hitler artwork should be tossed onto the trash heap of history and burned. But critics and scholars remind us it's important to be able to see Hitler's middling and unremarkable paintings to try to find clues into his monstrous17 mind and malicious18 life. You see the soft landscapes that A. Hitler painted of thatched-roof houses, old-stone churches, slim flowers and snowy countrysides and realize one of the most frightening facts of all - history's great monster was human.
(SOUNDBITE OF BROKE FOR FREE'S "THINGS TO COME")
1 auction | |
n.拍卖;拍卖会;vt.拍卖 | |
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2 forgeries | |
伪造( forgery的名词复数 ); 伪造的文件、签名等 | |
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3 proficiency | |
n.精通,熟练,精练 | |
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4 counterfeit | |
vt.伪造,仿造;adj.伪造的,假冒的 | |
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5 fictitious | |
adj.虚构的,假设的;空头的 | |
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6 mediocre | |
adj.平常的,普通的 | |
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7 exterminate | |
v.扑灭,消灭,根绝 | |
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8 sketches | |
n.草图( sketch的名词复数 );素描;速写;梗概 | |
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9 appraisal | |
n.对…作出的评价;评价,鉴定,评估 | |
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10 physically | |
adj.物质上,体格上,身体上,按自然规律 | |
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11 spatially | |
空间地,存在于空间地 | |
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12 generic | |
adj.一般的,普通的,共有的 | |
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13 utterly | |
adv.完全地,绝对地 | |
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14 forgery | |
n.伪造的文件等,赝品,伪造(行为) | |
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15 bidders | |
n.出价者,投标人( bidder的名词复数 ) | |
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16 tempting | |
a.诱人的, 吸引人的 | |
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17 monstrous | |
adj.巨大的;恐怖的;可耻的,丢脸的 | |
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18 malicious | |
adj.有恶意的,心怀恶意的 | |
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