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Felix Nussbaum

(1904 - 1944 )

Works

Self-Portrait with Mask
Self-Portrait with Tea Towel
Self-Portrait with Easel
Self-Portrait with Jewish Passport
Self-Portrait with Key at Camp St. Cyprien
The Camp Synagogue

Country

Germany


Biography

Felix Nussbaum as born December 11, 1904 in Osnabruck, Germany. He was determined to be an artist as a young teenager and his early artistic efforts feature Eastern European Jewish themes. In the 1920's his father sent him to study art in Hamburg and Berlin and by the end of that decade and the beginning of the next, he enjoyed moderate success with his exhibitions in Berlin. In 1932, in recognition of his work, he was awarded the Villa Massimo scholarship to study at the German Academy in Rome. While he was in Italy, a fire in his Berlin studio destroyed virtually all of his early works. After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Nussbaum was dismissed from the German Academy in Rome. He remained for a year in Italy with his future wife, Felka Platek, a Polish Jewish painter, before seeking refuge in Belgium, first in Ostend and then in Brussels. In 1936 he sent several paintings to the Free German Art exhibit in Paris, held to protest the Nazi's notorious Degenerate Art show in Munich, in which his work was included. After the Germans invaded Belgium in 1940, Nussbaum was arrested and interned at the Saint Cyprien camp in southern France. He escaped and in 1942, he and Platek went into hiding in Belgium, where he continued to work underground, painting his experiences in the camps. In 1944, the couple was arrested and deported to Auschwitz that summer, where they both perished, less than a month before the Allies liberated Brussels. Nussbaum was entirely forgotten by art historians after his death - it wasn't until 1971 that he received his first post-war exhibition, organized in his native city of Osnabruck, where a museum dedicated to his works opened in 1998. Knowledge of his work spread beyond West Germany with the 1980 exhibition Resistance not Adaptation - Art in Opposition to Fascism 1933-1945, followed by numerous other exhibitions including a retrospective of his work at the Jewish Museum, New York City (1985), the largest exhibition of his work at the Osnabruck Museum of Cultural History (1990), an exhibition of his work at the Venice Biennal (1995) and at the Hayward Gallery, London (1995).


Further Reading

Burger, Eva and Karl Georg Kaster, Felix Nussbaum: art defamed, art in exile, art in resistance: a biography / Eva Berger...[et al.]; edited by Karl Georg Kaster; translated by Eileen Martin, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, N.Y., c1997.
Junk, Peter and Wendelin Zimmer, Felix Nussbaum. Leben und Werk, Koln, 1982.
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