This picture index includes all the works known up to today of the artist Felix Nussbaum, who was born in Osnabrück in 1904 and who was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. As well as showing all his paintings, graphics and the miscellaneous works of art he produced to help him earn a living - together with all the relevant supplementary information on any one particular opus - this database, which is being permanently updated, provides informative texts revolving around the complete œuvre of the artist. It also supplies details regarding the way in which the pictures have been pointered down to posterity and gives information on research carried out on them. Three search options enable comprehensive research to be performed.
The works of art have been arranged in such a way as to correspond chronologically to the creative periods of Felix Nussbaum. All miscellaneous pieces of work produced to help the artist earn his living, which are also catalogued in their entirety, are listed separately.
The artist’s early work was produced primarily in Berlin between 1920 and 1932. From 1924 onwards he attended the Preußische Akademie der Künste (The Prussian Academy of Arts) and as early as 1931 he was a well-known great amongst the artists of the young generation. If in his early pictures there are still traces of the painting style of Vincent Van Gogh, the art to emerge from his time in Berlin is primarily influenced by Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico and Carl Hofer, the painter who taught his trade in Berlin at that time. These were Nussbaum’s artistic models. However, he increasingly began to develop his own individual style embracing naivety and new functionalism, a type of art where the use of symbolism and allegorical motifs played a significant role.
In October 1932 Felix Nussbaum travelled to Rome to be a studying guest at the Villa Massimo there. As a result of the political situation evolving in Germany, he was never again to return to his home country. During his travels along the Italian Riviera, he succeeded, at least for a certain time, in counter-balancing the threatening events taking place in Germany by painting pictures that exuded a soothing kind of beauty. But, from 1934 onwards, painting took on for him an existential significance: the colours, motifs and metaphors of his pictures attest to a foreboding, which warned of an uncertain future.
The February of 1935 saw Felix Nussbaum travelling on a tourist visa to the Belgian seaport of Ostend. This is where he proceeded to paint rather monotonous street and harbour scenes that became increasingly drab and gloomy. In 1936 his work focused on a series of self-portraits, which show the way in which he was grappling with feelings of profound insecurity. The spectrum of this self-exploration ranges from the emotional helplessness demonstrated by the grimaces (and masquerades), which signal “the alienation of his own ego”, right up to a traditional, serene and genuine depiction of a normal self-portrait.
In 1937 Felix Nussbaum moved to Brussels and took up residence in an apartment in the Rue Archimède. A group of works dating from this period bears witness to his, up to a point, seemingly ironic brush with Belgian tastes in art, that were so influenced by the “Ecole de Paris” school of thought. But in spite of the unequivocally precise and well-ordered style and objectives of these works, Nussbaum’s real situation always seemed to shine through and mirror what he was experiencing in those days: a standstill in his life, a loss of orientation and general exasperation. In addition to some political works completed around 1938, as the year 1939 moved into 1940 the artist began working on a series of still life paintings, in which things of “a dead nature” or still life were turned into symbols and metaphors reflecting his own political circumstances.
In the wake of German troops invading Belgium, Felix Nussbaum was arrested on 10 May 1940. He was sent to the internment camp at Saint Cyprien (in the Pyrenees) and was imprisoned there. In August/September he succeeded in escaping and returned to Brussels where he went into hiding in an attic in the Rue Archimède. His experiences in the internment camp most definitely influenced and made their mark on Nussbaum’s painting in the following years. The subjects of war and exile, of fear and sorrow coloured his pictures. Nussbaum developed an allegorical and metaphorical language so as to create artistic ways of expressing the existential threat to his situation and to his very life that he was experiencing. His last piece of work is dated 18 April 1944. A matter of weeks later on 20 June, Felix Nussbaum and his wife, Felka Platek, were arrested in their attic hide-out and were sent with the last transport from the collection camp at Malines (Mechelen) on 31 July to the concentration camp of Auschwitz.
As early as 1932 to 1934 Felix Nussbaum designed a series of covers for the literary magazine “Der Querschnitt”. During the years of his emigration and as a result of the growing artistic isolation he was subjected to in exile, it became increasingly necessary for him to carry out a variety of “casual jobs” of an artistic nature in order to earn his daily bread. And, moreover, around 1942 he created pictures of painted glass and of ceramics with touchingly childlike motifs for the daughter of his friends in Brussels, the Ledel family.
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