Introduction

 Short Biography

The following chronology includes all proven data, information that has up to now been brought to light regarding the life of Felix Nussbaum. Most of the information has been gleaned from his records held by the Belgian authorities dealing with the registration of aliens, i.e. the Belgian Police Foreign Nationals Office.

1904

Born on 11.12. as the son of Philipp Nussbaum (*1872) and his wife Rahel, née van Dyck (*1873)

1922

Leaves the Königliche Realgymnasium (The Royal Grammar School) in Osnabrück on 30.3. without having completed the first year in the 6^th Form

Enrols at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule (The National School of Arts & Crafts) in Hamburg for the summer semester (until the winter semester of 1922/1923)

1923

Spends the summer semester attending the private teaching ateliers for painting and sculpture in Berlin (The Lewin Funke School), as a student of Willy Jaeckel

1924

Meets the painter Felka Platek (born 3.1.1899 in Warsaw) in one of the teaching ateliers

During the winter semester of 1924/1925 he is admitted to the Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Freie und Angewandte Kunst (The United National Colleges of Free & Applied Art) in Berlin. It is a probationary semester and he attends the class of Cesar Klein

1928

Moves into his own atelier in Berlin in Xantener Strasse 23, Gartenhaus, with his lifelong partner Felka Platek

1932

In October he moves to Rome as a studying guest of the Deutsche Akademie (The German Academy) in the Villa Massimo

In December his Berlin atelier burns down along with ca. 150 pictures

1933

On 14.1. the Prussian Minister of Science, Art and National Education responds to Nussbaum’s application of 2 January 1933 and grants the latter a one-off subsidy for the financing of replacement materials

On 16.3. the Prussian Minister of Science, Art and National Education grants the request to extend the length of Nussbaum’s course of study until 30 June 1933

On 15.5. Nussbaum is injured during a dispute with a fellow student, Hubertus von Merveldt

On 17.5. these two students are forced to leave the Akademie, which soon afterwards is closed down

On 11.6. in a letter he asks the Principal of the Academy, Prof. Hubert Gericke, to send his pictures that have been left behind in Rome to Alassio, Vico Nazario Sauro 6

Late 1933 – from San Remo he goes on orientation trips to Paris and other locations; in Monte Carlo he meets his friend Dr. Fritz Steinfeld, who then emigrates to Palestine

1934

Spring – Nussbaum and Felka Platek spend time in Rapallo; there they meet up with his parents, who had emigrated to Switzerland in February 1934 and who, tormented by excruciating pangs of homesickness, wish to return to Germany

1935

January – Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek live in Paris and stay in the Hotel Nicole, 39, rue Pierre Nicole

On 22.1. the couple apply for a tourist’s visa for Belgium

On 2.2., armed with visas valid until September 1935, they arrive in Ostend and stay there in a guest-house called Pension Coulier

On 21.8. Dr. Désiré Steyns, the Art Director of the Ostend Kursaal writes a testimonial for Nussbaum on the merits of his artistic work

On 25.8. the painter James Ensor puts together a similar reference, this time on Nussbaum’s skills as a painter

On 26.9. his tourist’s visa is extended

On 1.10. the couple moves to Molenbeek Saint Jean, 24, rue Jennart

On 8.11. at the police headquarters in Molenbeek, he applies to be included in the Official Belgian Registry of Foreign Nationals, the reason being his wish to study Flemish painting

On 16.11. the couple receives confirmation that they have been entered up in the Belgian Registry of Foreign Nationals (issuing of an alien’s passport)

1936

April – For the London company of Caspar–Color Ltd, Nussbaum provides the illustrations for the outline of an advertising film commissioned by the Gevaert company and drafted and designed by Wolfgang Michael Low, the husband of his former girlfriend, Frieda Edelstein, also of Osnabrück who had emigrated to London

On 14.5. they travel from Molenbeek to Niveze, 37,rue Pré Jonas

On 20.5. they continue from Niveze to Spa, 7, rue des Capucins

On 23.5. they move from Spa to Ostende, 11, Christina Ramp

On 12.10. they move to Brussels, 56, rue Marie de Bourgogne

On 16.11. their alien’s passports are extended to 16 May 1937

1937

On 5.5 they return to Ostend, 11, Christina Ramp

On 20.5. their alien’s passports are extended until 16 November 1937

On 11.6. Felka Platek’s application for a Belgian identity card is rejected by Police Headquarters in Ostend, although she has a deposit account amounting to 22,000 Belgian francs

On 9.9. they leave Ostend for good and move to Brussels, 27, rue Juste Lipse

On 6.10. at 11.00 am Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek are married at the Town Hall of District 1 in Brussels; they now make their home in Brussels in 22, rue Archimède. That is where Nussbaum’s father sends his son’s paintings that, up to then, had been stored in his apartment in Cologne in Sachsenring 93

On 8.11. the newly-married couple apply for a Belgian identity card. The application is rejected

On 16.11. their alien’s passports are extended to 16 May 1938

At the end of the year Nussbaum wins a competition enabling him to illustrate Belgian school textbooks and he draws the pictures for two editions appearing in the Flemish language

1939

In May Felka Platek writes anonymous letters to the Director of Public Prosecution and the Sûreté Publique, in which she accuses a certain Emile Wauters of carrying out illegal dealings with entry permits in collaboration with the Belgian Consulate in Cologne; her aim is to prevent her parents-in-law from moving to Brussels

On 16.11. their alien’s passports are extended to 16 May 1940

1940

On 10.5. as a result of German troops marching into Belgium, Nussbaum is arrested as “an enemy foreigner” and is sent to the Saint Cyprien internment camp (in the Pyrenees); Felka Platek remains in Brussels

On 3.8. while still in the Saint Cyprien camp he appeals to the Kundt Commission to be allowed “to return to the Reich”

In August/September he flees, together with his school-friend Georg Meyer, also from Osnabrück, from the barracks in Bordeaux to Brussels

On 24.12. Nussbaum is entered up in the Jewish Register of the City of Brussels

1942

In May/June he hides that part of his œuvre dealing with oil paintings with Dr. Grosfils and with his friend Dr. Lefèvre in their house in the 255, avenue Brugman in Brussels

In August/September the Nussbaums are taken in by the Belgian sculptor, Dolf Ledel, and his wife in their apartment in the 8, rue Nouvelle in Brussels

On 27.11. Felka Platek is stripped of her German nationality following a regulation that came into force on 25 November 1941

1943

At the end of March, after the Ledel family go underground, the Nussbaums return to the 22, rue Archimède, where the owner of the house arranges for them to hole up in the attic there

In May/June Nussbaum begins using the basement of the 23, rue Général Gratry at the home of the Billestraet family as an alternative studio

1944

On 20.6. in the middle of the night, the Nussbaums are arrested by the German army in the attic of 22, rue Archimède

On 21.6. “an order to take up work” was issued by the Hasselt advertising agency

On 31.7. Felix Nussbaum and his wife, Felka Platek, are transferred with the last transport under the numbers XXVI/284 und XXVI/285 from the collection camp of Malines (Mechelen) to the concentration camp of Auschwitz

On 2.8. they arrive at Auschwitz

1946

On 29.1. following police investigations as to their whereabouts, they are removed from the Belgian Register of Foreign Nationals

 His Life and Work

This descriptive account of the Life and Work of Felix Nussbaum is divided into five chapters and corresponds to the order of information found in the catalogue

Osnabrück/Berlin 1920-1932

Felix Nussbaum was born on 11 December 1904 in Osnabrück as the second son of Philipp Nussbaum and his wife Rahel. He grew up amidst the loving care and security of a decent, honest-to-goodness, Jewish business family that had moved from Emden to Osnabrück. Together with his cousin, Simon Gossels, Felix’s father ran an ironmongery in Osnabrück. Art and music were just as much an integral part of the middle-class lifestyle of this happy-go-lucky family as were holidays on the German North Sea island of Norderney and in the then very fashionable and elegant resort of Ostend. His father, passionate about his own hobby of painting, would in his youth also have liked to have been a painter. He greatly encouraged the artistic learnings of his younger son and supported him when he expressed the desire to study art and painting. In the Nussbaum household, conversations on art revolved primarily around the work of Van Gogh, a painter so admired by the patriarch of the family. But artists such as Utrillo and Hofer were also discussed.

The family lived in a villa in Osnabrück’s Schlossstrasse. They did not adhere staunchly to their religious customs and rites, preferring to follow a reformed brand of Judaism. They belonged to the group of Jews who were integrated into society and they were hopeful of a trouble-free future after all the laborious efforts towards Jewish emancipation during the 19^th century. When he was 21 years old, Felix Nussbaum painted his picture entitled “The Two Jews” (“Inside The Synagogue In Osnabrück”) (Picture Index N° 14) which clearly was his way of publicly declaring his Jewish faith, a subject which he only dealt with more sporadically during his later painting. However, in this picture, he treats the subject of the conflict arising between permanent pressure to adapt to his social environment and the upholding of his Jewish cultural identity, a conflict which was ever present against the backcloth of his parents’ generation, which had become so assimilated into a non-Jewish world. Not only did he use this picture to portray a generation conflict but he also portrayed his very own self-conviction by using the vehicle of art to mirror the position he himself had taken up. And it is this fixing of positions or beliefs that was to become a typical characteristic of his painting. Even if Nussbaum himself was very aware of openly declaring his Jewish faith by means of this picture, it did not mean that he then just wished to be viewed as “a Jewish painter”. During the initial phase of his studies, this subject was virtually non-existent. Apart form the earliest piece of Nussbaum’s work that has been handed down to posterity, the drawing “Remain Pious” from 1920 (Picture Index N° 1), graphics were also produced very early on in the artist’s career, sketches which illustrate “images of Jewish festivals steeped in atmosphere and also Jewish characters, especially old, strange and bizarre figures”. This is the way in which Will Pless described the artist’s work in 1929 when he wrote an essay on “The Painter Felix Nussbaum” for the Jewish family newspaper, the Menorah. Pless also mentioned some of Nussbaum’s illustrations to Karl Emil Franzos “Pojaz”. But not one of these graphics has survived.

In 1922 Felix Nussbaum left Osnabrück to commence his art studies in Hamburg. But already by the summer semester of 1923 he had made his way to the veritable art metropolis of Berlin. His mentors included Cesar Klein and from 1928 onwards he attended the master class of Hans Meid. In the same year Nussbaum, although still only 23 years old, presented his first exhibition in the Casper Gallery located along the Halleschen Ufer, an exhibition featuring just his work.

His first paintings, completed around 1925, were vividly reminiscent of his grappling with the art world of his father, although there were also clear traces of attempts to approach the artistic trends and vibrations that were confronting him in Berlin. His admiration towards Van Gogh is reflected in the two earliest paintings preserved from the year of 1925 "Remembering Grüßau" (Picture Index N° 4) and "Fairground" (Picture Index N° 5), in which the style and signature of Van Gogh but also that of the Osnabrück expressionist Heinrich Assmann, equally very much admired by Nussbaum’s father, can be unequivocally seen. For Felix Nussbaum, Van Gogh remained the shining example throughout the mid-1920s and beyond: paintings such as “Talea” (Picture Index N° 43), Still Life With A Washing Basket (Picture Index N° 44) or the Self-Portrait (Self-Portrait With Green Hat) (Picture Index N° 46), just like those pictures which stemmed from his time travelling through Provence in 1929 (Picture Index N° 83, 92-95) all attest to Nussbaum’s wrestling with the painting style of Van Gogh.

The longer Nussbaum remained in Berlin, the more he began to break away from his once greatest model and example. His attentions were turned instead to artists like Maurice Utrillo, Henri Rousseau and Carl Hofer. The Parisian urban landscape, depicted by the Frenchman, Utrillo, with its desolate views and rather morbid charm, served as a pattern for the young Nussbaum when he produced some of his own cityscapes such as “Street Scene” (“Old-Berlin”) (Picture Index N° 41) or Süster Street (The Hakenhof in Kommederiestrasse in Osnabrück) (Picture Index N° 42), both dating from 1927. In the painting “Windmill in Xanten, White Mill” (Picture Index N° 37) also completed in 1927, Nussbaum highlights the porous texture of the wall by adding sand to his paints. Carl Hofer, who was teaching in Berlin, stamped his hallmark on an entire generation of art students and so, too, on Felix Nussbaum, who was indeed familiar with the painting of this artist, a man greatly admired by many young painters. Nevertheless Nussbaum never sought him out as a teacher. In addition to Carl Hofer, whose pictures oscillate between a style of painting relating expressly to tangible objects and another style that simultaneously tends to be abstract in its form depicting a simplistic, flat portrayal of figures and objects, Nussbaum found in the “great, naïve” Henri Rousseau an important beacon pointing the way towards his own artistic orientation. Traces reminiscent of this French artist’s work with its open-mindedness towards contemporary “modern” topics, while at the same time dispensing with the classically academic subjects on the one hand and the definitely modern issues, i.e. the abstract method of painting, on the other, manifest themselves particularly in Felix Nussbaum’s pictures dealing with sportspeople and cities painted around 1928 and 1929 (Picture Index N° 57, 98-100, 102). Recourse to Rousseau’s naïve style of painting bestows upon the contemporary-modern themes of these pictures a slight trace of irony and almost a touch of comedy.

And yet at the same time, issues, such as melancholy and sorrow can be perceived here, emotions which only appear ironic on the surface. They begin to bring to light some of Nussbaum’s fears which had plagued him since his youth. A painting that falls into this category is most definitely “Burial” (2) (Picture Index N° 54) from 1928 or “The Desolate Street” (The Cheerless Road) (Picture Index N° 55), both of which convey an atmosphere of gloom and despair. However, the works “Gallows” (Funeral) (Picture Index N° 113) and “Dance By The Wall” (Coffin Bearers) (Picture Index N° 114), paintings from 1928 and 1930, whose essence of dying and death represented by the motifs of the skeleton and the gallows is imbued with a touch of the macabre, take this depressive concept even a step further. Later on in his life Nussbaum was to once again pick up these motifs in response to the political reality governing his circumstances.

The departure from his artistic patterns became a subject running through his painting from 1928 onwards, following what he considered to be the conclusion of his studies and at a time when he had applied to join the master class of Hans Meid. His travelling to the south of France almost seemed to mark a parting of the ways, a journey on which he wished to paint along the same paths as Van Gogh had done, a journey to end his debates with this great artist. The pictures that emerged from this period express his endeavours to break free from all earlier restraints and influences so that he could return to Berlin brandishing his own style of painting. He described the experiences he gained from this trip quite tersely in retrospect in 1939 as follows: “In my role as a painter I learnt absolutely nothing when I travelled down south. Reality remained veiled behind the dreams that I had prefabricated for myself.” When Felix Nussbaum returned from this trip “of taking leave”, he rented his own atelier in the Xantener Strasse in 1929 and such an act clearly stated that he had set himself up as an independent painter and artist. The painting dating from the same year, Memory of Norderney (Picture Index N° 107), has as the main thread running through it the final departure from his youth. The strangely frozen depiction of the Rousseau-like figures appears to point to the happy and bright, child-like world he experienced at that time and which is now truly passé. The text on the postcard seems to corroborate this theory: A feeling of sorrow – which, just like a wheel, rolls over our soul. But, nevertheless, I do not wish to be a killjoy – and, after all, we are quite a merry group here. So let us leave those things that are invisible to our eyes to the modern painters. With all my love and affection, your l.(oving) son, Felix. The frequent holidays spent by the Nussbaum family up on the North Sea island of Norderney surely belonged in Felix’s memory to the happy days of his childhood. But the unreal backcloth and the skull of a dead animal in front of the postcard in this picture are harbingers of feelings of insecurity and fears of separation. Yet at the same time the whole scenario functions as an artistic declaration with which Felix Nussbaum publicly acknowledges his mimetic art, knowing full well that lurking behind the clear, visible world there exists another reality. And he saw it as his task to go in quest of a suitable vehicle to present such a reality in his painting. In such cases he began to make use of the metaphysical forms so redolent of de Chirico. But it was not until later that he succeeded in finding his own language to express the shape and substance of the incomprehensible and the invisible.

As early as 1931 Felix Nussbaum had become one of the true greats amongst the artists of the new generation colouring the scene in Berlin. An extensive collection of exhibition reviews, which had been gathered together up until 1932 and then donated to the Osnabrück Museum courtesy of American private individuals, attests most impressively to this fact. The endless amount of critics, most of whom were positively disposed towards him, is quite amazing for a painter of his age working in the Berlin of the 1920s. The painting, “The Fantastic Square” (“The Parisian Square”) (Picture Index N° 128) of 1931, most definitely contributed to making him so well known. For it was with this painting that Nussbaum was able to create a quintessential image for the art world around 1930. He focused on the shift in the generation, whereby the painting can also be interpreted as an unequivocal piece of criticism hurled at the Preußische Akademie der Künste (The Prussian Academy of Arts): this is where Nussbaum goes into battle against the Akademie supported by a force of like-minded young artists. In this piece of work the Akademie is represented by a delegation of professors, clad in dark robes and sporting long, grey beards. They bar the way to the Akademie and prevent the young artists from entering.

Since 1930 Felix Nussbaum had tried on several occasions to gain “Der Große Staatspreis” (The National Grand Prize) of the Akademie, which was annually awarded to young artists in Berlin and to those living way beyond the city limits, too. He was never granted this outstanding award. However, as a sign of recognition of the esteem in which the work he submitted in 1932 was held, he was invited to travel to Rome from 1 October onwards to spend the winter semester of 1932 there as a studying guest at the Deutsche Akademie at the Villa Massimo.

Italy 1932-1934

And so it came to pass that in the October of 1932 Felix Nussbaum travelled to Rome to become a student guest at the Villa Massimo. He was never to return to Germany. In Nussbaum’s eyes, Italy was a land trapped in a bygone age; it was the anachronistic personification of the understanding of art as perceived by the rather staid middle classes. He firmly believed that all impulses that were jolting the world of art came from Paris and not from Italy. The initial works of art stemming from his time in Italy, landscapes and cityscapes (Picture Index N° 141-144) demonstrate that the light and the colours of the south did not find their way into his painting. On the contrary, these pictures reflect dreary, rather unspectacular motifs such as Wall In Rome (Picture Index N° 141 and 142). He rejects the airiness of the southern ambience by choosing earthy shades for his pictures, which inevitably convey a sense of morbidness. With his painting Entombment (Organ-Grinders) dating from around 1933 (Picture Index N° 162), Felix Nussbaum addresses criticism towards the “classic” academic view of art as he had already done so in 1931 by means of his work “The Fantastic Square” (“The Parisian Square”). This was now the “Roman” variation of such a statement. Once again respectable bearded gentlemen representing the Establishment were shown lined up on the right in the painting and were faced across the way by a group of trumpet-players, a choir of singers and three organ-grinders, while in the foreground could be seen a torso, reminiscent of the Antique World, being ceremoniously carried to its final resting place. The organ-grinders, in Nussbaum’s art always a metaphor symbolising his own artistic leanings, are in the process of helping the choir to tune up to achieve the desired harmony. He himself, to the fore on the left and easily recognisable as one of the organ-grinders, is the only person depicted who has turned in on himself and is shrouded in silence. This picture seems to be already heralding the increasing isolation felt by Nussbaum, a man who was separated from his artist friends in Berlin, from his family and who was virtually standing alone in the world. It was only Felka Platek, a Polish painter, whom he had met in Berlin in 1924, who accompanied him to Italy as his partner and it was she who would also be the woman at his side as he journeyed towards his ultimate exile.

When the National Socialists seized power, the hatred of Jews sweeping through Germany at the time stretched as far away as Rome and thus caught up with Felix Nussbaum there. As a result of carelessness on the part of some of his fellow students, a fire broke out in his Berlin atelier, which he then considered to be a manifestation of this hatred aimed at him personally. The fire destroyed 150 of his pictures, a great amount of his early work. A fight with one of his fellow students in the Villa Massimo, Hubertus Graf von Merveldt, then compelled him to leave the Akademie in Rome. Nussbaum combined these events of his own personal misfortunes with the catastrophic annihilation of Western civilisation at the hands of the Nazi dictatorship and married them together in his painting Destruction (2) (Picture Index N° 161). He described the threat and fear that he felt by making use of the repertoire of form and shape as practised by de Chirico. Nussbaum’s choice of colour, the earthy, lugubrious brown, underlines the significance of colour as an expression of the painter’s mood.

Developments in Germany meant that Felix Nussbaum decided against returning to Berlin. Instead he hastily fled to the Italian Riviera and stayed at Alassio and Rapallo. He then applied for a three-month extension to his residence permit in Italy with the obvious intention of waiting to see how the situation in Germany would continue to develop. For one whole year he managed to counteract the horrific events happening in his home country by painting pictures exuding a quiet kind of soothing beauty (Picture Index N° 166-200). He started to master the gouache technique which up to that time he had never employed. He painted the landscape of the Italian Riviera through the eyes of a tourist, e.g. “Fisherman’s House” (Columned House in Alassio) (Picture Index N° 172). And in White Boat In Front Of A Wall (Picture Index N° 169), using the gouache approach, he worked his way almost to reach the limits of abstract painting. Some works, however, such as “Fishing Boats Width Island” (Picture Index N° 174) with their deserted squares, clearly convey an impression of loneliness bordering on isolation.

But on no account did this kind of painting calm his troubled spirit for any length of time. And it was not able to take his mind off his feelings of the increasing threat looming large. The moods he created through colour and his choice of motifs in works such as Underpass (Road Tunnel) (Picture Index N° 201) or Tree Behind The Wall (2) (Picture Index N° 203) clearly reveal that he no longer was able to suppress his feelings of insecurity and trepidation about a future full of uncertainties. The sweep of the street in the gouache-style painting Underpass (Road Tunnel), which leads into the dark tunnel, obscures any view of the end of the tunnel with its welcoming light. This picture thus exemplifies his message and undoubtedly serves as a metaphor for his feelings of insecurity and fear, a person totally in the dark as to what the future might bring.

In the spring of 1934 Nussbaum met up in Rapallo with his parents, who were planning to emigrate to Switzerland on 26 February of the same year. This was the last time that Felix Nussbaum ever saw his mother and father. Despite their intentions of moving abroad, his parents returned to Germany as their yearning to be in their home country outweighed their fears of the growing threat there. Felix Nussbaum remained abroad. But it was not long before Italy’s allegiance towards Nazi Germany precipitated his travelling through Switzerland and France in order to emigrate to Belgium. His girlfriend, Felka Platek, went with him.

Ostend 1935-1937

Travelling via Paris Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek, armed with a tourist’s visa, arrived in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend in 1935. His overwhelming concern about the safety of his parents, who had at the same time returned to Germany, seems to be the direct background for the two pictures painted in the gouache style in the same year, i.e. Cemetery Bench (Picture Index N° 205) and “The Sick Horseman” (Horseman and Death) (Index N° 206). Again we see the subjects and motifs of his Berlin cemetery pictures emerging here, an attempt on his part to quell his fears. While the old couple pictured in the first painting mourn the loss of all things they have come to love, the second one highlights the sheer blindness and the lethal danger bound up with the wish to return to their native land. The edge of the wall as a symbol of menacing danger, centrally positioned in the gouache-style painting entitled “The Sick Horseman” (Horseman and Death), was to develop into a recurrent metaphor in Nussbaum’s work. While the subject of sentimentality revolving around the loss suffered is treated in the first gouache painting, the deadly threat in the second one more closely represents the real situation

The year of 1935 saw a prolific producing of harbour views either as drawings or gouache-style paintings (Picture Index N° 223-260), in which Nussbaum repeatedly represents slumbering boats and ships at peace in the harbour or he also just shows the view out over the quay wall onto sails and masts. As had already been the case in Italy, Nussbaum attempted to get inside this alien world through his paintings. But these later works are much less characterised by the former, carefree, almost tourist feel of the Italian paintings. His Belgian exile was beginning to make him experience more and more what the implications of emigrating to a foreign country entailed: the fight for residence permits, the constant moving from one guest-house to the next, the lack of encouragement for his artistic work. The painting Comic Concert (2), also from 1935 (Picture Index N° 208), elucidates his own situation as an artist living in exile: with no roof over their heads and surrounded by a blasted landscape, the two musicians, a singer and a pianist endeavour to ascertain their cultural origins. Dressed in a tuxedo and an evening dress, they perform their concert against the backcloth of incongruous surroundings and with no audience.

Despite all these feelings of artistic insecurity, Nussbaum still held on tight to all that had always symbolised painting to him: even while suffering the traumas of a life in exile, he continued to view painting as the only way to get to grips with his personal experiences, as the means of determining his position and then analysing it. At this point masks began to appear more frequently in his pictures, both in works of still life and interiors as well as in combination with figures. They are to be interpreted as a self-reflection of the artist’s own situation. As early as 1928 during his time in Berlin he had already used such a motif in his picture “Self-Portrait With Mask” (Picture Index N° 66). His aim was to disclose the split within his own personality. But the return to the motif of the mask is only indirectly connected with the pictures of the Belgian painter, James Ensor, whom Nussbaum met in Ostend, quite characteristically and aptly when he attended a masked festival where Nussbaum, with his Carnival mask based on the drawing “The Sin Of Thought” (Picture Index N° 204), won first prize. Whereas Ensor introduced the mask to his work as a sign of alienation in middle-class society and as a method of exposing the falseness of individuals in the art of the late 19^th century, in the case of Nussbaum, the mask extends way beyond this rather general message. Nussbaum bestows upon the mask a significance of pretence and disguise relating to emigration.

The confronting of his own deep insecurities took place from 1936 onwards primarily in the form of a series of self-portraits pictured in front of a mirror (Picture Index N° 282-299). This work did not revolve so much around the attempts of the artist to discover his true ego. It was more a battle to preserve his own identity. The sinister warping of Nussbaum’s identity (as a German artist and a German Jew) as a result of the prevailing political conditions and also the self-assertion of this identity (as a painter in exile) are both artistically expressed within the spectrum of these studies of the artist’s face: a complete sequence of studies in emotions has resulted, ranging from the poignant helplessness of various grimaces (and masquerade) right up to the image of a reassured, genuine self-portrait. The artist linked up these analyses of his inner reality, works of art which primarily appeared as charcoal drawings, with fragments of his external reality using the vehicle of gouache paintings. The backgrounds for these works are partially taken from pictures produced in Italy, works whose motifs seem to point to important stations along his life as an émigré. Examples of this phenomenon would be Self-Portrait Under An Archway (Picture Index N° 283) and Self-Portrait With Green Bandage (Picture Index N° 293).

In 1936 and 1937 Nussbaum once again returned to the motifs found in the world of the harbour, motifs that were present in his drawings and gouache work of 1935. But this time his harbour pictures appeared as oil paintings on plywood, in which the well-known motifs function as metaphors symbolising stagnation. Images of loneliness and futility are created just like in the painting Harbour Scene (People Waiting In Ostend Harbour) (Picture Index N° 314), which is clearly an example of such a metaphor giving the feeling of static, aimless waiting and which just as clearly refers to his own predicament in exile: Felix Nussbaum painted the figures in the picture, of whom incidentally only their backs can be viewed, as if they have been caught in one frozen moment of time. It is impossible to catch a glimpse of the view over the quay wall. That remains obstructed for the observer. This feature of the view into the distance out over the open sea, which is sadly blocked, had already stamped its mark on some of the harbour pictures completed in 1935. It is undeniable that this genre of harbour painting, so favoured by Nussbaum and which most precisely mirrors the features found at the port of Ostend, only remains “realistic” on the surface. Upon closer inspection of all the various features and scenes included, striking parallels to the artist’s then situation can be discovered. Similarly the paintings entitled “Fish Market” (Fishwife At The Harbour) (Picture Index N° 307), “Locomotive” (Locomotive At A Timeryard) (Picture Index N° 308), Fisherman On The Quay (Picture Index N° 313) and Horses and The Bathing Cart (Picture Index N° 306) are all examples of these desolate, occasionally melancholic scenes which communicate a feeling of deadlock and stagnation.

Felix Nussbaum must have considered the option of leaving the continent by ship bound for England when he painted the picture Ferry To Dover (Picture Index N° 271) in 1935 but he never put this idea into practice. He did indeed leave Ostend in September 1937 but, instead of crossing the Channel with Felka Platek, the two of them moved to Brussels.

Brussels 1937-1940

One month after arriving in Brussels in September 1937, Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek were married and they moved into a flat in the 22, rue Archimède. The painting Forest of Masts (Picture Index N° 329), that was completed in Brussels in 1938 and that, with its wealth of symbolic innuendoes, represents a compilation of all the experiences collected in Ostend with regard to the senseless waiting endured there, appears to be the artist’s way of bidding farewell to this port on the Belgian coast. The tightly-wedged-together masts, representing an artist’s tools, stand for the lack of prospects that an exiled artist has to endure and thus these masts metaphorically describe Nussbaum’s own personal situation.

In various pre-1940 self-portraits painted in Brussels, Felix Nussbaum repeatedly questions his identity against the backcloth of the new situation in which he found himself. In Self-Portrait With Hat (Picture Index N°322), painted in the same year as he arrived in Brussels, the artist portrays himself not as a painter but as a normal individual wearing the standard, everyday clothing of a hat, shirt, tie and pullover. What is missing, however, in this self-portrayal is the well-groomed appearance of a man that has to be taken seriously, an image that was indeed present in “Self-Portrait” (Self-Portrait With Green Hat) (Picture Index N°46) painted in 1927 demonstrating the usual attributes of middle-class appearance and style. Approximately ten years later and living under the different conditions of a person subjected to forced emigration, Felix Nussbaum presented himself unshaven and with an undone tie against the backdrop of a rooftop landscape in Brussels. The dignified self-portrayal of a self-confident man enjoying the advantages of a middle-class background had given way to a picture of neglect and dereliction.

This self-portrait known as “Man With Flower” (Model In The Studio) (Picture Index N°325) takes on a special kind of role: both the physiognomy and also the flower already seen in Self-Portrait With Tea-Towel around 1936 (Picture Index N°281) identify this as a self-portrait of the artist. It belongs to the few self-portraits in which Nussbaum is pictured naked to the waist and, in this way, it openly and bluntly admits to being a self-portrait of the artist, along with the picture already mentioned and entitled Self-Portrait With Tea-Towel, in “Soir” (Self-Portrait With Felka Platek) completed in 1942 (Picture Index N° 423) and again in the 1943 painting Self-Portrait At The Easel (Picture Index N°438). Up until this time Nussbaum had explored the traces of contortion in his face, the masquerade of his personal identity forced upon him. Here, however, he seems to pursue the question of his artistic narcissism as he had already similarly done in 1932 with his painting, Narcissus (Picture Index N°149). The classic female torso in the background of the painting “Man With Flower” (Model In The Studio) is a reference to art, whereby the nudity of the well-defined, elegant figure appears to be a mirroring of the idea of the self-portrait of the artist.

The Self-Portrait In The Sudio (Picture Index N°340) painted around 1938 links up with its form and style to the series of self-portraits of 1936. It goes, however, a step further as it can be interpreted not only on a personal level but also politically. The mouth shut tight, the darkened eye and the closed ear but also the black screen to the rear of the bare scene all paint a clear picture of an artist in exile, forbidden to work and to express himself. Simultaneously the facial expression conveys a look of horror resulting from his own situation which immerses him in a pool of stagnation where recognition is non-existent.

Nussbaum endeavoured to combat this lack of recognition in several examples of his work produced around 1938 by tailoring them to suit the Belgian style of art influenced by the Ecole de Paris (Picture Index N° 342-346). But despite this unequivocal adapting of form and style of these works, Nussbaum’s real situation shines through again and again: stalemate, lack of orientation, enragement. And once again it is the self-portraits that throw light on his whole predicament. The Self-Portrait (Self-Portrait In A Surreal Landscape) (Picture Index N°344) makes crystal clear the feeling of insecurity and the lack of orientation by interlocking diverse spatial planes which partially shield the face of the person being portrayed. The painting entitled The Organ-Grinder (Surreal Landscape With Organ-Grinder) (Picture Index N° 346), in which Nussbaum makes use of the ever-recurrent figure of the organ-grinder as an embodiment of artistry, shows a faceless character standing in the shadows and well away from the other few figures in the background.

In Brussels a friendship developed between Nussbaum and the Belgium sculptor, Dolf Ledel, who enabled Nussbaum to set up a small number of exhibitions. In 1938 he took part in an exhibition staged under the auspices of the Association of Free Artists in Paris. The exhibition bore the name, “Free German Art” and represented a counter-balance to the Nazi exhibition on “Degenerate Art” that took place in Munich in the same year. Nussbaum’s contributions, the paintings “The Pearls” (Mourners) (1) (Picture Index N°332) and Still Life In Front Of A Lattice Window (2) (Picture Index N°331) constituted political statements opposing war and bans on painting. He sent both works of art to Paris but, as a result of complications arising at the customs, they could not be displayed at the exhibition. Another piece of work that falls into the category of political painting is the picture that also dates from 1938, Don Quixote and the Windmills (Picture Index N° 326). The character of Don Quixote embodies the hopeless and insurmountable fight against invisible powers. Nussbaum brutally presents the vestiges of the lost battle in the emaciated figure by painting him with a luminously blood-smeared mouth.

In 1939 Nussbaum, as a German Jew, witnessed the outbreak of the Second World War. Just as in his series of self-portraits of 1936, Nussbaum questions in the painting Self-Portrait With Scabious Flower (Picture Index N° 348) of 1939 his true identity, this time against the backcloth of the outbreak of war. Using the figure of a soldier as a pattern, he draws the picture of the unwarlike German, who does not hold a gun in his hand but the blue flower of art and fantasy.

Art began to take on for him a new significance. Just as in the painting “The Secret” (Picture Index N° 353), an allegory representing the danger of the exchange of information amongst emigrants that he dated to the month exactly, he proceeded to document the political events as if he were writing a diary. He attempted to find pictures for his inner reality, which was, in fact, determined by the outer reality of political developments. His art was able to regain for him a sense of stabilisation in his life. He also increasingly began to recognise a connection between his own personal fate, that he had borne up until that point as a single individual, and the fate of the Jewish population in Germany. It is in this context that the painting Masquerade, around 1939, (Picture Index N° 349) takes on a special role. By collecting self-portraits and motifs (such as the string of pearls or the mask) which were known from previously produced work, Nussbaum was able to create a colourful masquerade. The grotesque disguises and costumes using female accoutrements are reminiscent of the traditional ceremony celebrating the Jewish festival of Purim, which, in turn, with its masquerading is reminiscent of the deliverance of the Jews during the epoch of the Persian king, Xeres. In order to pay homage to the saviour who prevented the imminent destruction, i.e. to Esther, the king’s Jewish wife, during this festival it is allowed to don female garb as a disguise, something that is normally strictly forbidden. In this painting Nussbaum shifts such a masquerade into the contemporary era and places it against a backcloth of high-rise buildings and a wide-open landscape broken by just one tree totally bereft of foliage. Along the horizon a sombre moon casts light over the entire panorama. One presumes that this painting came into being as a result of the Pogrom Night. It conjures up the idea that the cry for help, to be saved from the imminent destruction looming large, falls silent in the mute megaphone pictured on the left or it manifests itself in the grimace of the figure on the right whose contorted face has frozen to form a mask.

The painting “The Refugee” (2) (Picture Index N°351), also completed in 1939, illustrates the figure of a refugee gesticulating in desperation in response to his hopeless situation devoid of all chances and prospects. This lonely character, broken and crumpled, sits at a long table, his bundle of belongings tied up and fixed to a stick, lies next to him on the ground. The view through the arched door-way reveals a dreary, depressing landscape. The globe placed on the table in the foreground gives no indication as to where any refuge or shelter might be found.

At the beginning of 1940 the artist produced a large number of still life works (Picture Index N° 356-363, 380-391), serving the purpose of a kind of stock-taking of his immediate environment. In this series of paintings, things of “a dead nature” became the vehicles he used and the metaphors he employed to highlight the relevance of his political situation. Felix Nussbaum no longer turned his world, which in the meantime made no more sense to him, into pictures that told a story. Instead he made use of a cold and almost callous method of representation, which, with its haphazard and apparently senseless constellation of objects, drew attention to a world that had become incomprehensible and bewildering. An example of this would be Still Life With Puppet (Tombola) (Picture Index N° 390). The headline “(Gr)ande Tombola”, appearing in the newspaper “Le Soir”, a paper which was for Nussbaum one of the few sources of information on political developments and hence its frequent featuring in his paintings, drew attention to the plight of the emigrants. The still life ”La Nature Morte de Felix Nussbaum” (Still Life With Grapefruit) (Picture Index N° 391) was completed on 16 April 1940, shortly before German troops marched into Belgium on 8 May. In this painting, too, a copy of “Le Soir” can be seen and here its headline reads “Tempête sur l’Europe – La Guerre”. The title of the green-coloured book pictured is “La Nature Morte de Felix Nussbaum”. If an allusion is being made here to the literal translation of the artistic genre “Still Life”, then Felix Nussbaum is definitely hinting at the literal translation of the book, too, which would be “The Still Life of Felix Nussbaum”. The “dead” objects become symbols of the extraneous threat. And the constellation of these objects makes it clear that it is the war that has triggered off the situation in which he finds himself. It is the war that is creating the images of his inner reality.

On 10 May 1940 Felix Nussbaum, just like all able-bodied Germans, was arrested by the Belgian authorities and imprisoned in the St. Cyprien internment camp in the south of France.

Brussels 1940-1944

In August 1940, while being held in the internment camp of St. Cyprien, Felix Nussbaum signed an application sent to the French camp authorities, in which he requested “his return to the Reich.” En route to Germany during a stay at a barracks in Bordeaux, he succeeded in fleeing, together with a school-friend whom he knew from his Osnabrück days. He returned to Brussels where Felka Platek was waiting for him. Before the year of 1940 was over the artist had produced countless paintings recounting his experiences at the camp. This subject was to continue to occupy him in the following years, too. In addition, still in 1940, he completed some portrait work in gouache, charcoal and Indian ink (Picture Index N° 392-397) immediately upon his return from France. The initial work relating to his time of imprisonment was primarily concerned with sketches and drafts (Picture Index N° 398-402). Later paintings based on these were produced, such as the Camp Synagogue, 1941 (Picture Index N° 406) or “St. Cyprien” (Prisoners in Saint Cyprien), 1942 (Picture Index N° 421). As well as the crouching prisoner, there appears a solitary figure, which the artist included in the painting “St. Cyprien” and for which there is a precisely drafted sketch (Picture Index N° 402) and a painting (Picture Index N° 403) dating from 1940. But it is especially the work Self-Portrait In The Camp (Picture Index N° 404) that belongs to the most significant paintings of this year. The artist presents himself in the garb of a prisoner but in the style of the painter depicted in Self-Portrait In The Studio (Picture Index N° 340). His piercing stare attests to his considering himself to be a keen observer of the situation. Whereas in the painting Self-Portrait In The Studio the obstruction of artistic work is shown by the shutting tight and blocking of the mouth, in Self-Portrait In The Camp it is the external conditions that impede the work of the artist. In this self-portrait Felix Nussbaum wishes to state that even in prison – when artistic work becomes impossible for him – he is still able to make his observations. The paintings Camp Synagogue (Picture Index N° 406) and Self-Portrait With Key (Picture Index N° 405), both from 1941, clearly demonstrate that Nussbaum continues to grapple with the profound impressions that his imprisonment and experience at the camp have left on him. As in the case of Self-Portrait In The Camp, the painting entitled Self-Portrait With Key is a “perpetuation” of an earlier subject seen from a new and different angle. It follows on from the Self-Portrait As Grimace (1) (Picture Index N°286), the face, frozen into a mask, of the self-portrait series completed in 1936 that symbolised the powerlessness of the artist. In the end the camp became synonymous with his feeling of imprisonment in Occupied Belgium, where the legislation enforced by the German military regime robbed the Jewish population there of every feature of normal life.

From 1941 onwards the subjects of war and exile characterise his pictures, such as the small-sized painting called Fear (Self-Portrait With His Niece Marianne) (Picture Index N° 408) that could very well have been influenced by the bombing campaign launched by the German Luftwaffe on England in 1941. The bombers flew over Belgium en route to their targets. In this picture the angst felt by Nussbaum was depicted in a clear and concrete way in contrast to the people in his paintings, who were, for the most part, shown as characters with pitiful body language and wretched expressions conveying emotions of an abstract and allegorical nature. This was the case of the painting “The Storm” (The Exiles) (Picture Index N° 407), in which individual character sketches performed in 1941 have been brought together to form a group scene: the body language and facial expressions of the figures, who have been forced to huddle together in a confined space, reveal an entire spectrum of the most diverse reactions as an emotional response to the storm: helplessness, despair, fear, resignation, sorrow and commiseration.

The subjects of sorrow and despair continued to preoccupy Nussbaum’s thoughts in three more works completed in this year, works that make up a special category themselves. It is always women who embody this subject and these figures allow Nussbaum to once again present the emotions in an allegorical and abstract way, as can be witnessed in the following examples: Women Lamenting (Two Women In Front Of A Wall) (Picture Index N° 410), Woman Weeping (Picture Index N° 411) and Two Women (Lost Innocence) (Picture Index N° 413).

When legislation regarding the Jews resident in Belgium was completed with the so-called “Enactment of the Star of David” on 28 May 1942, the deportation of Jews began in the following August, a programme designed to shift Jews from the occupied territories to the extermination camps located in the East. The paintings Loneliness (Picture Index N° 418), Prison Yard (2) (Picture Index N° 420) and Self-Portrait In A Shroud (Group Scene) (Picture Index N° 422) are all infused with the feeling of powerlessness and a premonition of death.

When Nussbaum fled from his hiding-place in the Rue Archimède in the autumn of 1942 in order to go undercover at the home of his friends, the Ledel family, he left three large-format paintings behind. These works all dealt with the question of fleeing or the alternative of enduring the situation and holding out to the end – the two possibilities that were still open to him in the light of his very existence being threatened by the legislation introduced to control the Jews: the painting “St. Cyprien” (Prisoners In Saint Cyprien) (Picture Index N° 421), that Nussbaum completed in 1942, i.e. two years after his escape from the internment camp, describes the situation of group imprisonment and thoughts of flight. The figure pictured in the background with the bundle and rod on his shoulder personifies the character of the typical “wanderer”, a person ready to break free who wishes to throw off the restraints of a suffocating situation. The physiognomy of this figure reflects that of Felix Nussbaum, who succeeded in escaping from the camp. There exist hardly any indications regarding Felix Nussbaum’s decision to remain in Brussels following his return from the camp. A possible explanation for his enduring the situation could be given by the painting “Soir” (Self-Portrait with Felka Platek) (Picture Index N°423) that was also left behind and which shows Felix Nussbaum and his wife in a strangely clumsy embrace. He, himself, is semi-clothed and seems to be prepared to take flight while his wife, who is standing on his left foot, appears to want to prevent him from doing so. Such an assumption has been supported by statements of their contemporary associates who substantiated the fact that Felka Platek had been seriously ill and would never have withstood the strain and hardships of fleeing. The third painting abandoned in their apartment, “Organ-Grinder” (Picture Index N° 437) was marked on the back by Nussbaum as “unfinished” as was the painting “St. Cyprien” (Prisoners in Saint Cyprien). He no longer seemed to consider the messages of these paintings to be valid. He picked up the issue of relationships between lovers from “Soir” once again in the painting “Jointed Puppets” (Manikins) (Picture Index N°425) in 1943. But “Organ-Grinder” was painted over and then he signed this picture, that was first dated June 1942 on the back, anew on the front in July 1943. Nussbaum used this picture as a vehicle to portray a scenario of widespread doom and destruction, which also referred to his life as an artist as is shown by his return to the frequently-used motif of the organ-grinder so characteristic of his work. The character in the picture has stopped playing his instrument and the organ-pipes have metamorphosed into bones. The apathetic look in the organ-grinder’s eyes against the backcloth of a ruined city, where the dead are being resurrected as skeletons, unequivocally chronicles that there is now no longer any chance of being saved by one’s own efforts.

After having hurriedly fled from their artist’s studio, Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek were able to take refuge with their friends, the Ledel family, from the autumn of 1942 to March 1943. At the beginning of March these friends decided to flee to the Ardennes and they wanted the Nussbaums to accompany them. Felka Platek, however, did not possess the strength required for such an expedition and decided to stay in Brussels. Felix Nussbaum was not going to leave her alone so both husband and wife returned to their apartment in the Rue Archimède. Their landlord fitted out living space for them in a hidden attic room so that whenever Gestapo raids took place, he could show them an empty flat. During this period of terrifying toing and froing between the attic and the apartment, Nussbaum only produced still life art worked in pencil or gouache (Picture Index N° 426-434), which was often dated to the exact day.

The artist’s final pictures are painted after Felix Nussbaum began using an alternative studio in the basement of the Rue Général Gratry around May/June 1943. The earliest dated picture of this last period of creativity is Still Life With Doll and Tennis Racquet (Picture Index N° 435) in June 1943. Then in two complementary self-portraits, Felix Nussbaum clearly defined his existence which he saw as being characterised, on the one hand, by the persecution resulting from the Nazi regime and, on the other, by his vocational destiny as an artist. In Self-Portrait At The Easel (Picture Index N° 438), which appeared in August 1943, Felix Nussbaum established his position as a personality of the art world. He portrayed himself naked from the waist up in front of his artist’s easel and with paintbrush and palette at the ready. The mask, which so often featured in earlier self-portraits and which served as a means of disguise, has been eliminated. The self-possessed, keenly observant gaze dominates this brutally candid self-portrayal of an artist personality, who is fully aware of his art, its message and its implications. In the second, undated work, Self-Portrait With Jewish Identity Card (Picture Index N° 439), Nussbaum lucidly indicates that, in his role as a Jew with the Star of David and a Jewish identity card – things imposed upon him as a result of the persecution campaign – he corresponds to the true Nazi racist ideals regarding Jews and, as such, he is unable to escape from their deadly machinery of extermination. The painting symbolises an act of resistance inasmuch as he scrupulously reflects upon his own situation without any trace of self-pity and, thus, he is also able to analyse the situation of the observer without introducing the slightest degree of sentimentality.

At a later stage pictures painted under the auspices of the Star of David appeared, which extended way beyond comments on his own personal fate. These became pictures embodying the fate of the entire Jewish population. His very last pictures are coloured by a feeling of profound sympathy for this fate: the helpless waiting of all the Jews threatened by death is the line of thought running through paintings like Couple Mourning (Picture Index N° 441) dated 6.12.1943, Jew At The Window (Picture Index N° 440) also dated from December 1943 and Jacqui On The Street (Picture Index N° 448) dated late January 1944. This category of picture also includes the large-format painting The Damned (Picture Index N° 446). This painting, completed on 5.1.1944, shows a group of persecuted Jews who are relentlessly getting closer and closer to a group of skeletons bearing coffins. In this picture Nussbaum returns to motifs, figures and poses of some of his previous paintings including Self-Portrait With Jewish Identity Card and, thus, uses these to build up a picture of inescapable death.

With his last painting Death Triumphant (The Dance Of The Skeletons) (Picture Index N° 456) which is based on a sketch (Picture Index N° 449) and on countless individual studies (Picture Index N° 450-455), the artist does not create a dance of death in the classic sense. On the contrary, he allows Death personified to triumph tumultuously over the successful annihilation of Western civilisation while the witnesses of this destruction lie exterminated amongst the rubble and ruins. The organ-grinder, the artist’s alter ego, surrounded by the skeletons as they uproariously play their music, also shows signs of decay himself. All colour has been obliterated from the picture, the entire scene has been immersed in a cadaverous shade of brown. A leaf of a calendar, torn off and positioned in the lower right-hand corner of the picture, announces the date of Tuesday, 18.4.1944.

After having been deliberately denounced by an informer, Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek were arrested on 20 June. They were first sent to the collection camp of Malines (Mechelen) and then on 31 July 1944 the couple were deported with the last of a total of 26 train transports from Belgium to Auschwitz, where they were ultimately murdered. On 3 September 1944 the Allies marched into Brussels and liberated the city.

 The Handing Down Of The Works

Today we are privileged that more than 460 of Felix Nussbaum’s works have been handed down to us and to posterity. The lion’s share of his legacy is either in the possession of public collections or is privately owned. It is thought that about 60 pieces of work have been lost. And it is extremely difficult to determine the exact number of pictures that were destroyed. We know that approximately 150 pieces of art perished in a fire that broke out in Felix Nussbaum’s Berlin atelier, which he had sublet to fellow students during his sojourn in the Villa Massimo in Rome. Details referring to only a few of these works remain and have been gleaned from magazines, catalogues or from a variety of other documents. Indeed the very fact that so many paintings and drawings are still in existence, and particularly those from the painter’s later period of creativity between the years of 1940 and 1944, is thanks to the donating of various inheritances and bequests:

The first group of works to become known following the death of Felix Nussbaum was the legacy from the Avenue Brugman in Brussels. This involved a cache of more than 100 works that Nussbaum had entrusted to the dentist, Dr. Grosfils, and to the latter’s friend, Dr Lefèvre, in Brussels in 1942.

The path that this legacy followed can be traced back as far as 1933: in a letter written by Nussbaum on 11 June 1933 and addressed to the Principal of the German Academy, Prof. Herbert Gericke, the artist requests that the pictures he had left behind when he so hastily took his leave of Rome be sent to Alassio. In 1937 the artist’s father, Philipp Nussbaum, sent more paintings, which he had taken from Osnabrück to Cologne, to his son in Brussels where Felix Nussbaum and his wife, Felka, had moved into their own apartment in the 22, rue Archimède in the same year.

The exact time when these pictures and other works produced in the following years up until 1942 were handed over to Dr. Grosfils can be dated as occurring between March and June of 1942. This reckoning can be substantiated by the following: the last precisely-dated piece of work from this legacy bears the date of 5 March 1942 and the earliest precisely-dated work not belonging to this batch is from 18 June 1942. After the war a distant relative of the artist and a member of the German army came across the name Grosfils. In 1969, following legal proceedings carried out in the Belgian courts that lasted for one whole year because Grosfils refused to recognise the German probate claim, this part of Nussbaum’s estate was adjudged to the joint heirs of the artist. In the course of the following years, works from this collection put in the safekeeping of Dr. Grosfils came to light at regular intervals. It became obvious that Grosfils had kept back some of the pictures.

Auguste Moses-Nussbaum, a cousin of the artist, and her husband, Heinz Moses, took the legacy of pictures that had been handed over to them, to Osnabrück, the artist’s place of birth. The Felix Nussbaum exhibition that revolved around this collection of pictures and that was staged in Osnabrück in 1971, together with the resulting research carried out on the artist’s life culminating in the appeal in the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung of 24 February 1971 “Who Remembers Felix Nussbaum?” are two developments that led to the first, large-scale investigations surrounding the artist, enquiries that were soon to stretch far beyond the city limits of Osnabrück. Not only did the trail of clues found lead to Berlin, Italy and Belgium, cities and countries where Felix Nussbaum had spent a great deal of time, but traces of the artist pointed towards France, Great Britain, North and South America and also Israel. Reports began to flood in from relatives of the artist, his school-friends, neighbours and friends of the family in Osnabrück, from his artist colleagues, fellow prisoners and friends and acquaintances from his time as an émigré. When pieced together with the small number of papers and documents referring to his life that were still in existence, these personal recollections were able to provide the basis for the reconstruction of the artist’s biography.

Moreover, investigations in and around Osnabrück brought about the unearthing of a second group of the artist’s works: pictures which Felix Nussbaum and his father had sold or given to people as presents in their home town of Osnabrück up until the year of 1934. This category of work also included those pictures that Osnabrück citizens had bought at exhibitions held in the Rackhorst’schen Bookshop in 1927 and in the Otto Meyer Gallery in the Altes Rathaus (The Old Townhall) in 1928.

Then in 1975 Willy Billestraet, a Belgian antiques dealer from Brussels, contacted the Museum of Osnabrück. He had heard about the Nussbaum exhibition that had taken place in Osnabrück and he was offering the Museum eight of the artist’s late paintings as well as some sketches from the years 1942 to 1944. These included such significant pictures such as “St. Cyprien” (Prisoners in Saint Cyprien) (dated 18 June 1942), Organ-Grinder (dated June 1942 / July 1943), Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, Self-Portrait At The Easel (dated August 1943) and Death Triumphant (The Dance Of The Skeletons) (dated 18 April 1944). Billestraet explained how Felix Nussbaum had had lodgings with Billestraet’s father in the 23, rue Général Gratry in Brussels. It was, however, later revealed that he had only made use of a studio there from mid-1943 onwards. According to Billestraet, Nussbaum had paid the rent and for his meals in kind, which explained how Billestraet’s father had come to be in possession of the said Nussbaum paintings. When in 1980 Willy Billestraet presented the Museum with a scroll of drawings and gouache-style paintings covering virtually every period of the artist’s work, it soon became apparent that he was in possession of those pictures which had been abandoned in the studio in the 23, rue Général Gratry following the arrest of Felix Nussbaum and his wife Felka on 20 June 1944. The numbering, mounting and framing of drawings that later turned up in the private possession of Belgian individuals additionally attested to the fact that Billestraet, even as early as the 1950s, had sold individual works – gouaches as well as paintings – belonging to this group of art, primarily to Jewish art lovers. The logical consequence was that a third set of works was now clearly in existence: pictures and graphics covering the complete period of the artist’s work from June 1942 up to his arrest, works that had not been hidden in the cellar of Dr. Grosfils but that had been stored away by Nussbaum in his studio.

Fifteen years later, a fourth legacy of Nussbaum pictures was discovered. In 1990 three paintings of Felix Nussbaum were delivered to Christie’s Auction House in Amsterdam. The signatures on these paintings were either missing or they had become indecipherable. Two years later eight paintings, partially displaying similar features, once again appeared at Christie’s. All these works of art, now 11 in total, had belonged to the artist’s parents, Rahel and Philipp Nussbaum, who emigrated in 1939 from Cologne to Amsterdam. In August 1943 they were arrested by the Germans and, in the following year on 8 February 1944, they were deported from the collection camp of Westerbork to Auschwitz. The sending of mail between Amsterdam and Brussels was obviously possible up to 1942 despite the German occupation. And according to the recollections of Auguste Moses-Nussbaum, as a result of connections of the brother Justus Nussbaum, such correspondence by post was even possible via German military vehicles. A certain Lucas Kok of Tiel was the person who sent the pictures to the auction house. He maintained that the eight works had been given to his aunt as a present during the war. She apparently had been a neighbour of the Nussbaums in the Legmeerstraat in Amsterdam. Lucas Kok himself had inherited eight paintings from his father and the other three had been put up for auction by his aunt. One more piece of work was in the possession of yet another member of Lucas Kok’s family, thus bringing the number of art works left by Philipp Nussbaum up to a grand total of twelve.

Today we can now talk about a fifth and probably last collection of paintings to be handed down: the pictures sold by Nussbaum himself during the time of his emigration in Belgium or those sold via his father. In the wake of the exhibition staged in Brussels in 1982, a few works privately owned by Belgium individuals had already come to light. These had been purchased during the artist’s lifetime. And then finally, at long last, outstanding paintings from the 1930s such as Horses On The Beach, Surrealistic Composition and Comic Concert (2) were put up for auction. No further details are known on the origin of these works stemming from private ownership in French hands. The gouache painting Stairway, which was purchased in Belgium in 1934, had also been in French hands before it was bought for the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück in 2006. One can assume that there are more works of Felix Nussbaum somewhere in the world which research has so far not uncovered.

 The Osnabrück Collection

After the first exhibition had taken place in Osnabrück in 1971, displaying works of art from the Avenue Brugman legacy, the question arose as to what should be done with this heritage of wonderful pictures. The heirs and beneficiaries wished to sell them, one reason for the sale being to pay for all the costs incurred by the earlier long-drawn-out court case regarding the fate of the works. In collaboration with the Museum, they fixed prices and sold some of the works to private individuals in Osnabrück. Some of the pictures were acquired by the Museum itself. But the sale of the entire portfolio, with which the Museum had been entrusted, proved to be more difficult than originally expected. In 1974 the beneficiaries commissioned an art dealer in Munich to sell the œuvre. The prices were recalculated and assessed much higher. Much later the city of Osnabrück was forced to reproach itself quite frequently. For in 1971 it had not seized the opportunity of acquiring an extensive basis for building up a collection of the works of one of its most important sons at a relatively low price! The reason why the city did not make available larger sums of money for the purchasing of the Nussbaum pictures in 1971 is surely connected with the protracted and difficult rediscovery of the artist. Dr. Heinz Heumann, the Town Clerk at the time, bemoaned the fact in a letter to the beneficiaries that it was burdensome to find the required widespread response for the Nussbaum exhibition in the press “while Nussbaum is still not a name in the art world.” Nussbaum remained an almost unknown, even in Osnabrück, for a long time. The City Council and Corporation had to slowly become accustomed to their new task, i.e. the resurrecting of an artist and his legacy as a political objective. They had to rethink their short, sharp burst of effort and commitment of 1971 and turn it into a long-term strategy of cultural politics for their City.

The year of 1975 witnessed the City Council and Corporation, the Museum and, above all, the citizens of Osnabrück showing their commitment in an endeavour to take up the cause of Felix Nussbaum’s lifetime work and achievement and to see it as their political mandate. And, of course, their ultimate aim was to put his pictures on display in the Osnabrück Museum. In 1983 Dr. Karl Georg Kaster set up a permanent exhibition in two large rooms situated on the upper floor of the Museum of Historical Civilisation and Culture in Osnabrück. This display enabled museum visitors to be confronted with the works of Nussbaum and with documents elucidating his life and the political times in which he lived. The collection of artefacts was complemented by works of his contemporaries, his artist friends and various lifelong companions from Osnabrück, Berlin and Brussels. On the occasion of a congress held in Osnabrück to extol literature written in exile, the exhibition was opened on 20 March 1983 by the then President of The Federal Republic of Germany, Karl Carstens. It was attended by Felix Nussbaum’s two cousins who were living in Israel, Auguste Moses-Nussbaum and Schulamith Jaari-Nussbaum.

Following a large-scale retrospective look at the life of Felix Nussbaum in 1990, again outlined and organised by Dr. Karl Georg Kaster, the problem of space for such a permanent exhibition became increasingly evident. And although the exhibition no longer displayed the works of Nussbaum’s contemporaries and colleagues and a plethora of documents had also been removed, nevertheless the pictures had to be hung in the museum above one another and the drawings were for the most part displayed without a passe-partout for reasons of space-saving. But in 1994, the Year of Felix Nussbaum and the 50^th anniversary of the artist’s death, the collection could be spread out and displayed in four rooms on the Museum’s upper floor. Under the auspices of the building of a planned extension designed for the improved presentation of the Nussbaum collection, a good third of all the material was temporarily put into storage. And in the same year, thanks to the sale of virtually the entire collections of the Museum of History of Civilisation and Culture to the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung (The Lower Saxony Savings Bank Foundation) that then returned the pictures to the Museum on permanent loan, the financial foundations necessary for the building of the required extension had been laid. Finally on 16 July 1998 The Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, designed and built along the lines proposed by the Jewish American architect, Daniel Libeskind, was opened and then ready to exhibit the collection of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung. In order to accommodate the unconventional design of the new museum with its extremely angular-shaped rooms running into sharp points, its sloping, almost precipitous floors and dark concrete passages, a design which aims at aptly reflecting the course of Felix Nussbaum’s life, a special exhibition and presentation concept had to be developed. Not only did it have to offer an overview of the life and work of Nussbaum but it also had to be able to adapt simultaneously to the architectural environment. The aim was to marry together the art and the architecture so that they could communicate the message in a mutual dialogue.

Despite the difficult situation of the municipal budget, in the last few years the collection gathered together in the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus has been steadily extended. And, in particular, praise has to be given to the Felix Nussbaum Foundation, founded on the initiative of Hubert Schlenke in 2001, which has conscientiously endeavoured to enlarge the collection by the acquiring of specific works. Moreover, the City of Osnabrück is deeply indebted to the generous help offered by those donating sums of money, by sponsors and by various foundations, all of which have enabled the further purchasing of paintings for the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus. One example of this is the way that the portfolio in the possession of the Seev family and that of Shulamith Jaari-Nussbaum could be incorporated into the collection in 2000 and 2001 as a result of financial support given by Osnabrück businesses. In the past couple of years gifts have also played an important role when it came to the acquiring of some of the artist’s outstanding work. Here particular mention has to be made of the Lisbeth Klein Foundation and the legacy of Dunham Klein that was given to the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in 2001 as a gift. In addition to a total of 22 works of art and the correspondence carried on between Felix Nussbaum and his friends, the Klein family, in the USA during the 1930s, this legacy also included the so-called “Reviews” Notebook, which had belonged to the artist and in which he had compiled press reports and reviews of exhibitions of his work that had been staged between 1927 and 1931.

 The Exhibitions

The first exhibition showing Felix Nussbaum pictures that took place after the artist’s death was “An Exhibition of Remembrance”, arranged by the then Director of the Osnabrück Museum, Dr. Walter Borchers. This exhibition highlighted “Five Osnabrück Painters.” In the administration building in Hakenstrasse the pictures of Franz Kortejohann, Wilhelm Renfordt, Gustav Redeker, Heinrich Assmann and Felix Nussbaum were put on display. Using basic details discovered in the 1931 entry in the Thieme-Becker Dictionary of Artists, Dr. Walter Borchers had put together a few facts on the life of Felix Nussbaum –about his time as a student in Hamburg and Berlin, his first successes and even some conjecture regarding the artist’s exile and his death. Three early paintings of Nussbaum and an Indian ink drawing, which the citizens of Osnabrück had purchased prior to 1933, were exhibited. These four pictures together with a scant amount of details on the artist himself comprised the very meagre basis on which the local art critics had to work. It was indeed the first time after the war that they once again could come to grips with the painter, Felix Nussbaum. Nevertheless on 18 June 1955, the Osnabrücker Tageblatt printed the following: “Felix Nussbaum (born 1905) is the youngest and the most original of the five artists and indeed also the most talented (….). As a non-Aryan he left Germany and moved to Belgium. He was arrested there during the war by the Gestapo. What exactly happened to him and when he died remain a mystery.” One reviewer interpreted the four pieces of work exhibited as expressionist, i.e. in accordance with the only available categories at the time. “His pictures are controlled by a dynamic rhythm and a wealth of inner suspense without their becoming immersed in deliberate eccentricity. The taut, linear movement found in many of the pictures is reminiscent of Van Gogh (…). Later Nussbaum tackled the concept of the functionalism of the surface of an image.” The newspaper had pictured two of the exhibited pieces, “Fairground” and “Remembering Grüßau.” After the exhibition, however, interest waned and there was no follow-up. Felix Nussbaum, who had left his home town as a very young man to go to the metropolis of Berlin, had never been “an Osnabrück painter.” Although the Osnabrück Establishment was always prepared to patronise its indigenous artistic spirits, Felix Nussbaum simply did not belong to the category of those artists whose pictures adorned the houses of the Osnabrück middle classes. So Osnabrück swiftly forgot him once again.

Years later in 1971, with just these bare bones of the Felix Nussbaum story, Dr. Walter Borchers, the then Director of the Museum, and his successor, Dr. Manfred Meinz, set up in Osnabrück the first exhibition after the artist’s death that showed exclusively Felix Nussbaum pictures. At the same time it was the most extensive Nussbaum exhibition that had ever been staged, including those held while the artist was still alive. This exhibition, which exhibited about 100 works of art derived from the Avenue Brugman legacy in the Dominikanerkirche in Osnabrück, ushered in the beginning of a quest that was to last years and was to be carried out with passion and commitment. It was the quest for the artist, Felix Nussbaum, for his life and for his works of art. Dr. Manfred Meinz appealed to the world of art history “to give to Felix Nussbaum the standing in German painting that he truly deserves.” The tasks on the agenda at that time were manifold: to pick up and highlight in Osnabrück the work of the artist who had fallen into obscurity, to explore his fate and to accept it as a part of Osnabrück history as well as a mosaic stone  in the tableau of general European history and also to position Nussbaum’s painting critically and accurately within the context of art and universal history.

The subsequent exhibitions in Berlin in 1972 and in Hamm in 1973 did not receive the hoped-for national response. It was, however, the spectacular exhibition of the Baden-Württemberg Art Association in Karlsruhe in 1980, an exhibition entitled “Resistance Instead Of Submission – Art Resisting Fascism 1933-1945” – which brought together for the first time ever work of artists persecuted and murdered by the National Socialists and which had on its catalogue’s front cover Nussbaum’s picture Self-Portrait With Jewish Identity Card – that marked the turning point. For it was not until this exhibition that Felix Nussbaum’s work received the long-awaited attention from far and wide. This exhibition, staged at the three locations of Karlsruhe, Frankfurt am Main and Munich, presented five main pieces of work performed by the artist: together with the rather unique Self-Portrait With Jewish Indentity Card, these paintings were “St. Cyprien” (Prisoners in Saint Cyprien), The Damned, Jacqui On The Street and Death Triumphant (The Dance Of The Skeletons). In the countless press reports and reviews, it was so often the works of Felix Nussbaum that were selected to illustrate the subject of the exhibition. More articles subsequently appeared describing the painter and focusing on the artistic significance of Nussbaum’s work but especially on its importance regarding contemporary history. The name that up until that time had failed to secure its niche in the history of art all of a sudden became known way beyond the borders of Germany as belonging to the painter of a self-portrait with the Star of David and the Jewish identity card. The anti-fascist message of his work strengthened even more the exhibition of the Ruhr Festival, “Dreams Of Peace, Buried Hopes”, that took place in Recklinghausen in 1982 and that included six of the artist’s works.

Three exhibitions abroad also attest to the interest aroused regarding Felix Nussbaum and his painting: In 1982 the Franz Hals Museum in Vishal in Haarlem exhibited about forty Nussbaum pictures. In the same year the Goethe Institute in Brussels presented an overview of the lifetime achievement of Nussbaum in an exhibition organised by Hans Schoemann and Dr. Anton Regenberg, the Head of the Institute. This exhibition then went on show in Luxembourg in exactly the same form. It essentially comprised the collection of works that had been gathered together over the preceding 10 years by the city of Osnabrück. It had been augmented by artefacts on loan from private individuals in Brussels and included, for the first time, recently discovered handicraft articles produced by Nussbaum in order to earn his living. He had been putting these up for sale, sometimes with the help of friends, up to 1943.

The exhibition in Brussels received an extraordinarily huge international response in the Belgian, Dutch, German and Swiss press not least because the exhibition coincided with the publishing of the first large-scale Nussbaum essay by Peter Junk and Wendelin Zimmer that came out as a joint production of the publishing houses, DuMont Cologne and Rasch Bramsche. This had an effect, too, on the way in which Nussbaum was received on television. Within two weeks, three in-depth documentaries about the painter were televised. These programmes focused almost exclusively on his late contemporary work. Impressed and encouraged by this success, The Jewish Museum of New York staged a retrospective exhibition in 1985, which was accompanied by a catalogue appearing in the English language. This opened the door for Nussbaum for the first time to the Anglo-American world and that world was, in turn, thus introduced to Nussbaum. The exhibition in New York was a sensational success, which was duly mirrored in an article appearing in the Sunday edition of the New York Times of 2 June and in a report featured in the July copy of the art magazine “Art In America.” The year of 1988, the 50^th anniversary of Kristallnacht or the Pogrom Night, witnessed Nussbaum’s work being received with particular interest when it went on display in two exhibitions on the occasion of the Duisburger Akzente (The Duisburg Highlights Festival) in the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum and in the Berlinische Galerie.

With the selection of “The 100 Most Important Works”, as Karl Georg Kaster described them in the foreword he wrote to the catalogue accompanying the 1990 exhibition in Osnabrück entitled “Felix Nussbaum. Verfemte Kunst, Exilkunst, Widerstandkunst”, a comprehensive inventory was carried out on the œuvre of Nussbaum, which resulted in a new structuring of the works. The objective of this retrospective performed under the auspices of the city of Osnabrück was to clarify Felix Nussbaum’s artistic status and to elucidate his position in the history of German and European art of the last century. Reading between the lines of contemporary history and the interpreting of the psychological patterns revealed – as the catalogue observes – provided information that was able to contribute to throwing light on the very personal iconography of the artist. But, when it comes to its significance regarding the history of art of the 20^th century, there are many questions that still remain unanswered.

The appeal made by Dr. Manfred Meinz way back in 1971 “to give to Felix Nussbaum the standing in German painting that he truly deserves” was once again picked up and regarded as the challenge for the large-scale exhibition held in Osnabrück 2004/2005 on the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Felix Nussbaum. This exhibition, which was conceptualised by Inge Jaehner, the Director of the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, had, as its quintessential aim, the task of examining Nussbaum’s position in the art of the 20^th century in comparison with that of his models, contemporaries and fellow-sufferers. The title of the exhibition “Zeit im Blick. Felix Nussbaum und die Moderne” is programmatic inasmuch as the long-awaited, critical evaluation of his painting set against the backcloth of the creative talent of other artists was to be finally undertaken. The concept underlying the selection of approximately 40 key works of Felix Nussbaum, juxtaposed and then contrasted with more than 100 œuvres of artists such as Max Beckmann, Carl Hofer, Paul Klee or Jankel Adler, was this: that in such a context the variety of Nussbaum’s work and aspects thereof that have not yet been researched “(…) could only be revealed and properly comprehended when viewed from two separate angles – taking in the political events of the era and the art of the period”. This was the theory propounded by Rosamunde Neugebauer in the introduction of the catalogue accompanying the exhibition.

 The History Of The Investigative Research

The first monumental biography with its first-ever, comprehensive and complete indexing of the artist’s œuvre was compiled by Peter Junk and Wendelin Zimmer and was published in 1982 under the title of “Felix Nussbaum. Leben und Werk”. It represented the fruits of the first “tracking down” of contemporary history, a search that commenced following the major exhibition featuring only Nussbaum’s works that had taken place in Osnabrück in 1971. Although the two authors in their book endeavour to treat Nussbaum’s work in a thorough and critical manner and attempt to carry out the first steps towards a stylistic categorisation of the New Functionalism, their monograph has been one-sidely viewed as an interpretation of contemporary history. It was undoubtedly necessary, at the outset of any such work, to reconstruct the artist’s biography, which the Nazis – along with Nussbaum’s life itself – had virtually obliterated. His existence only remained in a series of pictures.

Even up until today, apart from his pictures, we still only have twelve letters, one postcard and a short autobiography of Felix Nussbaum. (All documents that have been handed down and verbal accounts given by neighbours, art critics, artist friends and fellow-students as well as the numerous catalogues and magazines dating back to the lifetime of the artist are archived in the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück). As a result of the reports given by witnesses from those days and thanks to documents coming from archives in Osnabrück, Germany in general, Belgium and America, the circumstances surrounding Nussbaum’s existence that had totally been eclipsed, have now successfully been once again brought to light. The fact that the first monograph still includes a whole range of misunderstandings cannot be so much attributed to the authors but rather to the subject matter itself. That can be especially shown by the way that these misconceptions are still being repeated up until the present. Such discrepancies begin with the titles of the pictures, titles which predominantly stem from those who set up the initial picture indexing system. In contrast to Nussbaum’s own titles, which for the most part and indeed quite intentionally refer tersely to a characteristic element of the picture, these secondary titles attempt to interpret the pictures and in so doing restrict the scope for any further interpretation. In some cases they even contradict the concept of the picture. The painting “The Storm” (The Exiles) (The title that appeared in Junk and Zimmer’s picture index was Die Vertriebenen) was named “The Storm” by Nussbaum. He called The Mourners “The Pearls” (an allusion to the tears streaming from the eyes of a mother) and European Vision was simply “The Refugee”. The original titles were revealed by photos and newspaper reviews that fell into the hands of researchers at a much later date.

Many of Nussbaum’s pictures, which we categorise today as “a self-portrait”, works that inevitably resulted from the increasing restraints on his life so that he, in turn, became more and more inward-looking, are in actual fact of an allegorical nature. As early as 1926 he had called a self-portrait in the Osnabrück synagogue “The Two Jews” and in June 1942 he called one picture simply “Soir” (Evening), which was later to become officially Self-Portrait With Felka Platek. And in the cases of many other pictures such as Self-Portrait With Brother, the allegorical implication is never very far away for us, even if we are not aware of Nussbaum’s original titling of such pictures.

A more or less “teleological” exposition of death by gassing in Auschwitz resulted in omens and premonitions of this fate being depicted in all the works, even in those that otherwise can be interpreted in a positive way: the undated painting “The Desolate Street” (The Cheerless Road), which according to Fritz Steinfeld had already been completed in 1930 when he first visited the artist’s atelier in Berlin. This statement is substantiated by a review written on the 1939 exhibition in Brussels that expressly describes this painting as a piece of work from the artist’s early years. However, because of its subject matter, it has been dated to 1939. The Coffin-Bearers (Nussbaum’s title for this was “Dance By The Wall”) was dated to 1934 although the year of 1930 is clearly visible on the painting. Even in such a personal painting like Memory Of Norderney, of which the artistic impetus is unequivocally and critically shown by the wording on the postcard incorporated into the painting, “signs of decay brought about by advancing time” have been detected as an early-warning system telling of the menacing evil about to befall everyone. In this way many Jewish elements have been incorrectly foisted upon many pictures for the simple reason that the artist’s horrific fate and end were so closely bound up with Judaism.

Finally there is the difficulty in the comprehending of the message in the absence of any verbal communication associated with every critical and historical interpretation of the art in view of the given situation, into which Nussbaum, against his will, had been thrust by the political circumstances. Once in this situation, he could no longer rely on iconographic traditions relating to the representation of war or flight and expulsion. Nussbaum’s pictures of the “Holocaust” experienced by the Jews in Europe are unique. Not only has no other artist pictorially documented the situation as Nussbaum did - he was in the midst of the events – but also nobody has artistically interpreted it as he did, either (In order to use these two important distinctions of Ziva Amishai-Maisels, who, on the one hand, separates depiction, the pure representation of circumstances experienced, from their explanatory interpretation; and, on the other, she distinguishes between artists, who were directly affected by the nightmare of the Holocaust and those who dealt with the subject later by using information from witnesses of the events). From 1939 onwards Nussbaum was virtually permanently preoccupied with the task of inventing new pictorial formulae or at least of reworking traditional forms as he grappled with the situation in which he found himself and which he wished to document in his art. The lack of understanding brought about by these endeavours then manifests itself as criticism of the “unsuitability” of Nussbaum’s pictorial language.

The “Faltblätter” (leaflets) that came out in 1983 to mark the opening of the permanent exhibition in the Museum of Historical Civilisation and Culture were aiming, however, at something else. They wanted to interpret the works according to the principles of structures found in history and along the scientific lines of art. Their plan was to use the vehicle of some key works of art to achieve this end. And, in particular, it was wished to arrange and categorise the pictures anew. Such cataloguing is fraught with difficulties as Nussbaum did not sign a relatively large number of pictures and no details exist that can throw light on the chronology of the pictures dated just by the year of their completion. The fact that the internal drive of his art’s development can only be explained to a smaller extent by his pictures and is then consequently defined by details taken from his biography has coloured the beginnings of the psychological interpretation of his work with the reproach of “psychologism”.

Screened behind all this were the unspoken questions: “Who was Felix Nussbaum and how did he surmount the various crises in his life?” Categories that were selected to structure and then to throw light on such questions included the generation conflict, Nussbaum’s “melancholy”, his family relationships, the role of women in his eyes, his “narcissism”, feelings of guilt, role behaviour, the relationship to his wife Felka Platek, the rivalry with his brother, identity problems resulting from lack of recognition while in exile, the new interpretation of his art as a witness of the political situation and the use of his creativity to combat the stress of persecution.

The psychological explanations were buoyed up and verified by the “recollections” in 1984 of the medic, Dr. Fritz Steinfeld, who knew Nussbaum from his Osnabrück days and who was in close contact with the artist in Berlin from 1929 to 1933. A typewriter’s carbon copy of a lost original, which had been bundled together with authentic, proven documents like some of Nussbaum’s fantastic drawings from his Berlin time, letters when he was abroad, photographs of his works and some sketches, turned out to be able to provide a rounded, more complete picture of his personality. Up until this time, there had only been a few vague memories contributed by some of his contemporaries but this new image of Nussbaum, even when being observed in a critical way, showed a profound friendship that the author and Nussbaum had shared.

In one way this document confirmed what Junk and Zimmer had already written in their monograph, i.e. the fact that Nussbaum’s art cannot be put under the heading of any one particular style. On the contrary, relatively uninfluenced by the usual stylistic  stereotypes, it constitutes an unbroken reflection of his personality. And it seems to be a form of art without any particular or definite wish to have a special style. “It was not through theorising but by painting that he gradually developed and moved away from the traditional, aesthetic notions of provincial life to the universal metropolitan tastes of the era, predilections, which – indifferent to the general Weltanschauung of the times and to the politics of the day, i.e. conservative – collapsed for Nussbaum under the pressures of a deadly chapter in history and which ultimately led the artist to his own unique style of pictures.”

Moreover, the document expounded what, up until that point, had been the incomprehensible elements in Nussbaum’s work: the constant of his profoundly depressive character, which in the early work had been veiled by the shield of pictorial language used by Van Gogh, Rousseau and de Chirico. But already in 1929, then throughout the 1930s and certainly under the strain of living life as an exile, this character trait came increasingly to the fore. It was not Nussbaum’s art that became more and more “depressive” as a result of the existential conditions prevailing in his life (as it had seemed to be up to then) but it was the political situation that caught up with and overtook even his most depressive visions. In this way Steinfeld’s correspondence turned upside down the former “teleological” idea of the development of Nussbaum’s art.

The two exhibitions staged in 1988 in the anniversary year of the Pogrom Night inevitably pushed Nussbaum’s Jewishness to the fore of any kind of interpretation, especially as Peter Junk wrote an extensive article for the catalogue of the exhibitions that explicitly dealt with this subject. In addition to some astonishing new interpretations (e.g. of the pictures “The Two Jews” (Inside the Synagogue in Osnabrück), Painter In The Studio, Masquerade), this article also perpetuated the need that can be observed primarily when Nussbaum’s work is reviewed and interpreted by Jewish people, i.e. the desire to recognise elements of his religion and culture in almost all his paintings. Since his death is ultimately and inextricably bound up with Judaism (whereby it must be mentioned that a difference is not always made between his “Jewish” faith and Jewish culture on the one hand and the racist definition of “the Jews” by the Nazis on the other), many pictures or elements of his pictures are “teleologically” interpreted: for example when the kitchen towel in Self-Portrait With Tea Towel or the painter’s rag in Self-Portrait At The Easel is seen as a prayer shawl or at least as an indication of one.

But it was only in a few situations in his life (usually particularly critical ones) that Nussbaum unmistakably came to grips with his Jewish faith or that he demonstrably paraded Jewish notions or elements of the Jewish culture and faith in his paintings. One must not forget that, although in the early days Nussbaum certainly saw the discussion of his pictures in Jewish magazines in a positive light, those of which he painted in his youth really did grapple with Jewish topics in several instances, nevertheless even when he was in Berlin he did not wish to be viewed as a “Jewish” painter (a fact which is borne out by the total absence of this subject in his work during this period). And on the basis of available documents, it can also be concluded that at least up until 1941, Nussbaum, even when in exile, did not ascribe his fate to his Jewishness but he associated it with his lot of being a political émigré. Not until 1 April 1943, when he wrote a letter in Brussels to the little Karin Ledel, did he expressly describe himself as “a homeless Jew”. But from 1941 onwards and then increasingly so following the exacerbating of the political situation by the passing of the so-called “Jewish Legislation” mid-1942, indications of his Jewishness and of the racist Nazi doctrine (the pictures with the “Star of David”) began to intensify. Simultaneously the paintings increasingly reveal “typically Jewish traits”: gestures, conduct, physiognomy – many survivors of the Holocaust are of this opinion.

A decisive factor in the equation when it comes to assessing the intention of his work was provided by a cache of 23 photographs, which was discovered in 1985 in the attic of the house, 22, rue Archimède where Nussbaum had lived up until the time of his arrest in 1944. These were photographs of his paintings, which he had commissioned to be taken in the photo studio of Robert Martin in the 51, rue du Commerce in the city centre of Brussels. This was carried out right up until 1944, and not without danger to his life but, seen from an archiving point of view, it was “a way of filming his work for safe keeping”: “When I perish, do not allow my pictures to die with me. Show them to the people.” This is what he apparently urged his friends to do when in June 1942 he hid his pictures at the home of Dr. Grosfils. We can safely assume that these works were particularly important to him; he saw them as “documents” exhibiting political distortion and representing mental and physical annihilation. And so, for research reasons, the existence of such photographs is mentioned in remarks made about the relevant paintings. Nussbaum kept these photographs separate from his art in case anything detrimental might happen to his pictures (The same was practised by Karl Hofer, who repainted his pictures twice after losing the originals in bombing raids. Photographs he had previously taken were his patterns).

The photographs testify to Nussbaum’s incorrect assessment of himself up to that time as an “apolitical” painter (which in line with left-wing ideology equates the term middle-classes with that of the apolitical). But as early as the 1930s Nussbaum saw his art as political. In 1934 his father, when he was excluded from the Osnabrück Veterans’ Association, penned a poem and sent it to his “comrades”. It read: “And when they call me one day to serve my land, I shall stand firm and will be there.” To which Nussbaum added “For just a moment and then I’ll be gone without a care!” In his gouache painting “The Sick Horseman” (Horseman and Death) of 1935, he quite correctly characterised this misjudgement of his father as being deadly.

In the face of the aesthetic „disposing“ of his works, these photos prove that Nussbaum, while living as a displaced person, increasingly saw the sense in the “political” responsibility and task of his art and in its power to act as a witness of the times by documenting events. This revelation was a counter-balance to the growing uncertainty he felt as the result of the little response he received about his work in exile. It is perfectly true that he had always rejected the “obvious”, political support expected of the typical, anti-fascist artist. Nevertheless, from 1938 onwards when he took part in the Paris exhibition entitled “Free German Art”, which directly opposed the defaming objectives of the Nazi show “Degenerate Art”, his pictures displayed signs of resistance and political commitment. His wish was to offer resistance to the political circumstances by way of his art and then from this resistance to draw on strength and drive to ensure his physical survival.

In 1988 Franz Joachim Verspohl presented this new evaluation of Nussbaum’s work as a form of Resistance Art. With the help of essays by Jean-Paul Sartres, he pointed out structures of resistance in the artist’s last pictures and proved that Nussbaum was defying the distorted picture presented in Nazi propaganda just as much as he was attacking the affront to human dignity at the hands of the fascist regime of terror. His art enabled him to combat the image of the victim that was being forced upon his being. And it is exactly here that we can find his achievement on the stage of art down through the ages and his legacy, two facets of Nussbaum which are inextricably linked (the cynical question, which even up until today is occasionally being asked, of whether in the end it was his persecution by the Nazis that made him into the artist that he is considered to be today, yet again forces him into the role of the “guilty” victim, whose deeds seem to be misread and virtually turned upside down.

The catalogue “Felix Nussbaum. Verfemte Kunst, Exilkunst, Widerstandkunst”, that came out in 1990 for the eponymous exhibition being staged in Osnabrück at that time, directed attention for the first time at the pictures themselves and, thus, focused on the aesthetic qualities of the artist’s painting. This approach was essentially set in motion and developed by Dr. Karl Georg Kastor, who at the time was Curator of the Museum of Historical Civilisation and Culture in Osnabrück. This new evaluation of Felix Nussbaum’s art is based on each and every individual analysis of more than 170 pictures, which have all been verified as making up part of the complete framework of the oeuvre – i.e. statistically seen, this comprises about a third of all the works that are known today. With its listing of the individual pictures, its categorisation of the oeuvre and the biographical and iconographical interpretation of the works, the fourth edition of the catalogue, which has been completely revised, provides, as did the previous editions, an important basis for future research.

In the last few years numerous theses for Master’s degrees have dealt with particular aspects of Nussbaum’s work and, in some instances, have shed a great deal of light on the various issues. One such dissertation that deserves particular highlighting is that of Jürgen Kaumkötter. He wrote this in 2002 under the title “Klassizismen im Werk Felix Nussbaums” (Classicism In The Work Of Felix Nussbaum) and in it he examined the use of classic phenomena as “a linguistic form” of communication. Such traces of the classic models were already becoming evident in Nussbaum’s pictures by the end of the 1930s and from mid-1942 onwards they had manifested themselves as a firm feature of his art. The reason for this was that the artist attached particular importance to the fact that the statement of facts included in his pictures should be totally unambiguous for the observer; that it was clearly “legible” and easily “understood.” In her Master’s degree thesis, also from the year of 2002, the London student, Anna Andrea Lehmann, concentrated specifically on the topic of “Felix Nussbaum in Brussels (1937-1944)” and thanks to her precise analysis of single motifs such as that of the Belgium daily paper “Le Soir”, she succeeded in producing a glowing piece of work that has contributed to an improved analysis of Felix Nussbaum’s later works.

The catalogue “Zeit im Blick. Felix Nussbaum und die Moderne”, which accompanied the exhibition of the same name in Osnabrück during 2004/2005, has also taken a great step towards the academic wrestling with Nussbaum’s work within the context of 20^th century art. In this way a direct comparison can be drawn with artists of his generation, who, just like Felix Nussbaum, mirrored in their work the contemporary history that they had felt, tasted and experienced firsthand. The early works of the artist have been scrutinised in an essay by Thomas Röske, who posed the question of the “primitive” influences on the aesthetics of early Nussbaum that had no connection with features of the modern era and also in an analysis by Olaf Peters, who focused on categorising the historical styles of the early works. The pictures dating from the period of emigration are spotlighted by an article written by Andreas Vohwinkel, who has carried out a comparative analysis of selected works of Nussbaum, Max Beckmann and Paul Klee. While Martin Papenbrock examines Nussbaum’s art from the point of view of its being theoretically capable of bringing about action, Sabine Eckmann focuses on the aesthetic strategies of the artist against the backcloth of his exiled state and compares her findings with those relating to Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Karl Zerbe. Essays of Bernd Apke and Ulrich Pfarr are devoted to the central significance of the self-portrait as a genre of the Moderns and also to the special strategies of divulging and masking as a vehicle of presenting oneself. Rosamunde Neugebauer’s treatise revolves around the central motif of the wall in Nussbaum’s work. Here she makes a comparative analysis with the painting of other artists. The melancholic element running through the oeuvre of Nussbaum constitutes the subject matter of observations made in an essay by László Földényi. And finally the contribution made by Jürgen Steinmetz elucidates the artistic working of the premonition of death and in Nussbaum’s later works the certitude of death. In contrast to previous Nussbaum research, the various findings appearing in this catalogue take on a special significance thanks to the attempt that has been made to always examine the special elements in the work of Felix Nussbaum against a universal backcloth, while at the same time comparing them with the works of other artists of his generation, whose art reflects related topics and subjects.

A catalogue raisonné, completed in 2006 by Anne Sibylle Schwetter, now provides a necessary update on the first picture index that was published by Wendelin Zimmer and Peter Junk more than twenty years ago in 1982. And it will also contribute greatly to further research on Nussbaum’s work in the future. More than 150 Nussbaum works of art, which have only come to light in the last two decades, have necessitated a fundamental revising and new enumerating of the first index. Details relating to paintings, graphics and all manner of random, casual work carried out by the artist to help earn his living, that were used for the Junk/Zimmer project, have all been completely revised, updated and augmented. It is intended that the picture index, now accessible as an online database, by compiling all the works known today in conjunction with all the relevant details and additional information on every individual piece of art, will complement and thus complete the panoramic presentation and interpretation of the oeuvre as this appears in the new, revised edition of the

catalogue, “Felix Nussbaum. Verfemte Kunst, Exilkunst, Widerstandkunst”, brought out in 2006.

 Tasks Of The Research Programme

Despite the endeavours made towards achieving a comparative analysis of the artistic and academic merits of the artist’s work, as can already be seen in the catalogue “Felix Nussbaum. Verfemte Kunst, Exilkunst, Widerstandkunst” and then in more detail in the catalogue “Zeit im Blick. Felix Nussbaum und die Moderne”, there still remain some unanswered questions regarding the aesthetic structures and the original features of Felix Nussbaum’s work. These questions cannot be clarified by an (improved) interpretation of single pieces of art. The answers will only be found in thematic sectioning of the works and in comparisons drawn along academic, artistic lines (It is not enough to be satisfied with answers relating to Nussbaum’s stylistic dependence on the likes of Rousseau, Utrillo, Van Gogh, de Chirico, Hofer, Ensor, etc.). Such questions also require the analysing of his use of metaphors, their origin, mutations and areas of significance, an analysis that could possibly provide a sound answer when it comes to the question of the part played by Judaism in his art. Nevertheless only the tiniest part of the pictorial elements can be explained by statements made directly or indirectly by Nussbaum, by the iconographical traditions, proverbs and the like. The meaning of the majority of the metaphors and symbols can only be revealed by closely examining the areas of significant relevance where they appear. It must, however, be taken into account that a rash generalisation of Nussbaum’s metaphorical language is dangerous when it comes to the issues of “accuracy” and selectivity: he follows a pattern of definite differentiation when using masks – the clown’s mask, the eye mask, the black mask (of the “Negro”), the bourgeois mask with monocle, the mask of rage, the grimace, etc. This analysis also defines the themes that thread their way through Nussbaum’s art: human communication, fear, time, death, narcissism and the world of art

A characteristic of his art is the way in which Nussbaum “explored” his themes in sequences, in order to deal with as many of the important aspects as possible and also the way in which he always returned to a subject if he were able to add a new dimension to it in the light of new experiences.

The obvious loss of spontaneity which expresses itself, above all, in the varying degrees of reality shown in his figures, ranging between realism and a high level of “formalisation”, and secondly the origin of his formulas denoting pathos, so typical of his late work, are both subjects that should be examined in order to determine the real nature of his art.

The apparently simple, spatial composition of his pictures is also of tremendous significance for the aesthetic structuring of the art: the symbolic use of the picture’s space (a composition offering parallels to the picture itself, a corner space being filled or an edge of a body/object towering into a space); the spatial view and the complicated, significant relationship between the interior and the exterior; and the layering of the pictures, whereby the figures standing behind the frontal scene still maintain contact with the beholder, are all examples of this technique.

Similarly art history’s tradition of single types of pictures can throw light on the meaning of his work: the still life motifs “steeped in significant messages” to a certain extent and their relation to the still life of New Functionalism; in this category also falls the uninterrupted series of self-portraits; and especially his self-portraits as an artist and his portrait of a group of artists “The Fantastic Square” (“The Parisian Square”)  functioning as an indicator of a position taken up in a critical situation. It is undeniable how all these things prove that the world of art and artists is a central theme constantly weaving its way through Nussbaum’s art.

And the question of resistance in art could, once again and without any particular doctrine being enforced, be brought to bear against the agitprop clichés simply by taking the example of Felix Nussbaum.

In 1993 Dr. Hubertus Schlenke pointed out the significance of the image of Jewish history in the work of Nussbaum. He believed this applied both to the understanding of the synonyms of exile (expulsion) and wilderness and also to the Messianic hope mirrored in his pictures, which radically changes in his last painting Death Triumphant (The Dance Of The Skeletons) into the awareness of imminent death or the absence of God in the world.

But this last work of Nussbaum marks the beginning of another era in yet another sense: as an allegorical representation of the end of art. Its end does not only have its grounds in the futility of art in the face of the utter destruction of Western civilisation and culture. It is much more a question of the incapability of art to illustrate the world via the vehicle of “mimesis”, i.e. by reproducing the things found in the world around us.

Right up until the end, Nussbaum himself had clung to the idea of mimetic art. Attempts at abstract art in the style of the Ecole de Paris were very swiftly abandoned almost as soon as they had begun.