Painters of the Holocaust - Bergen-Belsen

I recently wrote about Czech painter Josef Čapek who died in 1945 - only a few days before the prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were freed by the Allied Armies. The Imperial War Museum holds an important collection of works by British artists who were witnesses of the liberation. They all responded to the overwhelmingly distressing scenes there with images that sought to convey detail and narrative.

"The Camp is large 12 sq miles and divided into compounds like chicken runs with huts bare of any furniture or conveniences. The huts normally accommodate 50 but as many as 400 were put in." (Leslie Cole)

 Leslie Cole, The Compound for Women, 1945

Leslie Cole (1910-1977) was born in Swindon. He trained as an artist at the Royal College of Art in London and became a teacher at Hull College of Art in 1937. Cole wrote to the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) in 1940 asking for work as a war artist, but he was turned down. At this time, Cole also joined the RAF only to be discharged on health grounds soon after. Determined to be a witness to the unfolding events, he approached the WAAC again, sending pieces of completed work reflecting the war situation in Hull and his home town of Swindon. Eventually, Cole became a salaried war artist with an honorary commission as a captain in the Royal Marines.

 Leslie Cole, Sick Woman and the Hooded Men of Belsen, 1945

Cole travelled widely, recording the aftermath of the war in Malta, Greece, Germany and the Far East. Cole's work consistently addressed the suffering of human beings, and in three oil paintings he bears witness to conditions in Belsen at liberation. Cole did not return to Britain until the spring of 1946, having witnessed the horrors of Belsen concentration camp as well as Japanese prisoner of war camps in Singapore. Cole was married to Barbara Price, a former friend of Dylan Thomas and the star witness in what one newspaper called "the trial of the century", in which "the Prostitutes' Padre" Harold Davidson, Rector of Stiffkey, was accused of immorality. 

Leslie Cole, One of the Death Pits, Belsen SS guards collecting bodies, 1945

"The shock of Belsen was never to be forgotten. First of all was the ghastly smell of typhus. The simply ghastly sight of skeleton bodies just flung out of the huts." (Doris Zinkeisen)

Doris Zinkeisen, Human Laundry (Belsen), 1945

Doris Zinkeisen (1898-1991) was born in Rosneath, Argyll, Scotland. Together with her sister Anna she studied at the Royal Academy Schools in London. She was a well-known society painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. She also designed costumes and stage sets for the theatre throughout her career. During the Second World War, she joined the St John Ambulance Brigade and in 1944 was commissioned by the Red Cross to paint the work of doctors and nurses in north-west Europe. Zinkeisen arrived at Belsen in April 1945, just after the liberation. You can see more of her work at ArtInconnu.

Doris Zinkeisen, Belsen, April 1945

"I drew the dead and scarcely living people when Belsen concentration camp was overrun, and I witnessed at first hand all the other appalling horrors of war. To me, any attempt to explain in words the overall influence of this experience on my work appears to weaken what I endeavour to say in my painting or sculpture. It means so very much." (Eric Taylor)

Eric Taylor, A Living Skeleton at Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

Eric Taylor (1909-1999) was born  in London. He trained at the Royal College of Art and the Central School of Art, and at the outbreak of war he was already an established painter and printmaker. In 1939, he enlisted to serve with the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers. He took part in the 1944 Normandy landings and crossed the Rhine into Germany. He was among the first liberators to arrive at Belsen. His drawings from 1944 and 1945 document the wreckage left behind by the war; these images of the aftermath of liberation culminated in the drawings he made at Belsen. Human degradation on such a scale was difficult to portray, and Taylor's most potent images focus on single figures. 

Eric Taylor, A Young Boy from Belsen Concentration Camp, 1945

"I made a drawing of a girl aged 22, and in return I offered her a cigarette. She took it and ate it whilst I was fumbling with my matches to give her a light. Conditions such as these are beyond anyone's power to explain away." (Edgar Ainsworth)

Edgar Ainsworth, Wera Berger aged 13 after a year in Ravensbrück (near Belsen), 1945

Edgar Ainsworth (1906-1975) was the Art Editor for Picture Post magazine. Ainsworth visited Bergen-Belsen three times in the months after it was liberated and recorded in his drawings and photographies the changes he saw among the people he met there. In September of 1945, Ainsworth published a number of his drawings in Picture Post along with an article that gave his witness account of life in the liberated camp. This articl was written in response to the ongoing Belsen Trials and to combat the sentiments of scepticism and indifference he had observed among some members of the general public.

Josef Čapek - The Robot Inventor

 Josef Capek, Mr. Myself, 1920

Josef Čapek (1887-1945) was born in Hronov, Bohemia (Austria-Hungary, now Czech Republic). He was three years older than his brother Karel Čapek (1890-1938), who was to become one of the most influential Czech writers of the 20th century. Josef Čapek at first studied weaving (1901–3) at a craft school in Vrchlabí, but soon it became obvious that his talents for painting and designing called for more intensive training. For the next 6 years he studied decorative painting at the School of Applied Arts in Prague. 

 Josef Čapek, Prostitute, 1917

Like František Kupka and some other modernist Czech artists, Josef Čapek found himself in the right place at the right time - the place being Paris and the time the year 1910. He stayed in Paris together with his brother for about twelve months, while he studied at the Académie Colarossi. Both brothers at that time became friends with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, who through his essays was one of the strongest driving forces behind several streams of modern art, including Cubism. Karel Čapek later became the Czech translator of Apollinaire's poetry. After the brothers' return to Bohemia, for some time Josef Čapek continued to paint essentially in the Cubist style, while gradually modifying Cubism with some elements of Expressionism and Symbolism.

 Josef Čapek, c. 1935

As talented as his brother Karel, though perhaps never quite so well known, Josef Čapek was not only active as a painter, but he was also successful as playwright, graphic artist, illustrator, scenic designer, novelist, writer of children’s books, non-fiction writer, journalist and art critic. Several of his works - notably The Insect Play - were written in collaboration with Karel, who also credits him with inventing the word robot, which made Karel Čapek instantly famous, after he wrote the stage play R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots). In a humorous little article, Karel Čapek told the story of how the word Robot (the czech noun "robota" meaning "labor") was born:

The author of the play R.U.R. did not, in fact, invent that word; he merely ushered it into existence. It was like this: the idea for the play came to said author in a single, unguarded moment. And while it was still warm he rushed immediately to his brother Josef, the painter, who was standing before an easel and painting away at a canvas till it rustled. "Listen, Josef," the author began, "I think I have an idea for a play." "What kind," the painter mumbled (he really did mumble, because at the moment he was holding a brush in his mouth). The author told him as briefly as he could. "Then write it," the painter remarked, without taking the brush from his mouth or halting work on the canvas. The indifference was quite insulting. "But," the author said, "I don't know what to call these artificial workers. I could call them Labori, but that strikes me as a bit bookish." "Then call them Robots," the painter muttered, brush in mouth, and went on painting. And that's how it was. Thus the word Robot was born; let this acknowledge its true creator. (Lidove noviny, 24.12.1933)

 Josef Čapek, Fantomas, 1918

From about the late 1920s, Josef Čapek became much influenced by the Bohemian folk art, which resulted in a series of paintings, lithographs and pastels inspired by country life and children's plays. Another area of activity in Čapek's life was childrens' books, for which he wrote the stories and drew pictures. Well known became his charming book  The Tales of Doggie and Moggie, nine stories about a dog and a cat, who want to do things the way the humans do, quite inevitably with mixed success. It was previously published by Methuen as Harum Scarum (the dreadful film of the same name with Elvis Presley released about the same time in the early 1960s must have swayed the publishers towards using this title, which has not much to do with the stories).

 One of Čapek's last paintings (1939) - a dire vision of things to come

When Czechoslovakia was taken over by the Nazis in March of 1939, Josef Čapek, who was very well known for his anti-Hitler stance, was immediately arrested (his brother was already dead by this time). He was sent to different concentration camps (Dachau, Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen). Josef Čapek nearly survived to see the end of the war, but sadly he died in 1945, apparently of pneumonia, only a few days before the prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were freed by the Allied Armies.

 Josef Čapek, Harmonikár, 1919

More than 60 years after his death, Čapek is regarded as one of the best Czech visual artists ever. Some of his paintings have sold at art auctions for amounts approaching one million US dollars each. You can see more of Josef Čapek's work in Calypsospot's Flickr set.

Lasar Segall - The Eternal Wanderers

 Lasar Segall (right) and Conrad Felixmüller (left) in Segall`s Dresden studio, 1919

Lasar Segall (1891-1957) was born in the Jewish ghetto of Vilnius, Lithuania, which at that time was part of Imperial Russia. He was the son of a Torah scribe. Segall moved to Berlin at the age of 15 and studied at the Akademie der Künste from 1906 to 1909. He then continued his studies at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg. Frustrated with the academic school of painting there, he left for Dresden in 1910 where he worked in the Meisterschule Art Academy as a teacher.

 Lasar Segall, Self-Portrait, 1927

During his tenure at the Meisterschule, Segall became acquainted with Otto Dix and George Grosz. In 1912 he  painted a series of works in an insane asylum. Later that year, he moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where three of his siblings were already living, but returned to Dresden in 1914. In 1919, Segall founded the Dresden Secession Group together with Conrad Felixmüller and Otto Dix. 

Lasar Segall, Die Krankenstube (The Sickness Room), 1921

During the early 1920s, Segall illustrated a book by the poet Theodor Däubler (Ed. Fritz Gurlitt of Jewish Art and Culture), published the album  of lithographs Bübüe and the Erinnerung an Wilna - 1917 (Memoir of Vilna - 1917) with etchings. He also exhibited in many important German museums and galleries.

 Lasar Segall, The Eternal Wanderers, 1919

 

In 1923, Segall finally moved to São Paulo, Brazil, where he was to become a notable figure in Modern Art circles. Shortly after Segall's return to São Paulo he obtained Brazilian citizenship along with his first wife, Margarete Quack. Segall exhibited in the 1923 Semana de Arte Moderna in São Paulo, and established his reputation as one of Brazil's outstanding modern artists during that time, like Candido Portinari and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti. Segall's preferred subject matters now became the Brazilian countryside, mulattoes, favelas, and prostitutes. Due to the harsh and extreme nature of his portrayals and his depiction of human suffering, Segall's artwork was not generally accepted in Brazil. 

 Lasar Segall, Pogrom, 1937

Segall frequently travelled to Paris and Germany for his own personal exhibitions. In 1932, he founded an organization known as Sociedade Pro-Arte Moderna (SPAM). SPAM's central idea was to serve as a link between artists, intellectuals, collectors and the public. But due to disagreements with anti-semitic Integralist members (Brazilian Fascists), the group soon fell apart. Back in Germany, Segall's work was now considered "degenerate" and and could no longer be shown in exhibitions. Segall created one of his most famous artworks in 1939, known as Navio de emigrantes (Ship of Emigrants). A ship is overcrowded with emigrant passengers. Their solemn faces and lack of expression  show the brutal reality of emigrants and their depressing voyage to a new life.

 Lasar Segall, Ship of Emigrants, 1939

Lasar Segall died in 1957. Ten years later his São Paulo home was transformed into a public museum, the Museu Lasar Segall. You can see many more of his works on the Museum's website.

Charlotte Salomon

 Charlotte Salomon, Self-Portrait, 1940

Charlotte Salomon (1917 - 1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theatre?: A Singspiel ) consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. Charlotte came from a prosperous Berlin family. Her father, Albert Salomon,  was a surgeon; her mother, Franziska, née Grunwald, sensitive and troubled, committed suicide when Charlotte was nine (this fact was concealed from Charlotte until she was twenty-two). In 1930 her father married the concert singer Paula Lindberg.

 Charlotte Salomon, 30.1.1933. The day of "Machtübernahme", c. 1941

After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Lotte’s father lost his job and began practicing at the Jewish Hospital in Berlin, while Lotte, at age sixteen, dropped out of school  (which today is named after her) and began drawing on her own. In 1936 she was admitted to the famous State Art Academy in Berlin which allowed only 1.5 percent of the school to be Jewish. There she received conventional but excellent training, but the antisemitic policy was ratcheting up the pressure on all institutions, and in the summer of 1938, her enrollment was annulled. During those dire years Salomon began a passionate love affair with a musician twice her age, Alfred Wolfson.

 Charlotte Salomon, Der Stürmer. German Men and Women: Take Revenge, c. 1941. [The "Stürmer" was a notorious anti-jewish periodical]

With the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, the so-called Reichskristallnacht, everything changed for the Salomon family. Albert Salomon was interned and tortured in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen and after his release Lotte was sent for safety to her maternal grandparents in southern France. In spring 1940, she witnessed her grandmother’s suicide, learned from her grandfather of seven other family suicides, including her own mother’s, and saw herself as designated heir to this terrible legacy. “Dear God,” Charlotte cries out in the next painting, “just let me not go mad.” To her parents, now refugees in Amsterdam, she wrote: “I will create a story so as not to lose my mind.”  

 Charlotte Salomon, Dear God, just let me not go mad, 1940

In May 1940 the French Vichy government imprisoned German nationals as foreign enemies (many of them Jewish or leftist political refugees), and sent Lotte and her grandfather to the concentration camp of Gurs in the Pyrenees, where she watched many artists produce works amid wretched conditions. Released in summer 1940, they returned to Villefranche. Supporting herself by painting greeting cards, she eventually moved away from her grandfather in 1941 and began creating Leben? oder Theater? in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. The notebook-size paintings were done in gouache, with dialogues and narrations ranging from witty and sardonic to grave and desperate. 

 Charlotte Salomon, Before the departure to Southern France, c. 1941

Essential to Lotte Salomon’s own safety, the Riviera was occupied by Italy in 1942, and Italians were not deporting Jews at that time. Returning to Villefranche, she moved in with another German-speaking Jewish refugee, Alexander Nagler, and after she became pregnant, they felt safe enough to register their marriage at the Nice town hall. Although local antisemitism ran high, the Italian zone of France remained a kind of sanctuary. This anomaly so infuriated the Germans that when they occupied the Riviera in September 1943, Adolf Eichmann sent one of his most notorious agents, SS Captain Alois Brunner, to carry out roundup operations there. On September 24, 1943 Salomon and Nagler were arrested, and shipped by train to the transit camp of Drancy outside Paris. On October 7, 1943, Transport No. 60 left France and they arrived three days later at a location unknown to them. At this last station on the long road toward extinction, men like Alexander Nagler were sometimes sent into slavery. Women usually, pregnant women always, were killed on arrival. And so, in her very first hour at Auschwitz, Charlotte Salomon lost her life.  

Charlotte Salomon, The mother Franziska Salomom tells Charlotte about heaven, c. 1941

But she had packaged and hidden her work, Life? Or Theater? - saying to a trusted friend, “Keep this safe. It is my whole life.” Her “whole life” was found in Villefranche after the war by her parents, Albert and Paula Salomon. Brought to Amsterdam, it was donated to the Jewish Historical Museum there. Albert and Paula Salomon had survived the war by hiding in Holland; later, Albert resumed his career as a physician and Paula became a distinguished teacher of voice. Lotte’s lover Alfred Wolfson had fled to England; Alexander Nagler died of exhaustion in Auschwitz; SS Captain Alois Brunner escaped to Syria where he designed antisemitic propaganda for the government; though tried in absentia in several countries, he was never apprehended. 

 Charlotte Salomon with her Grandparents in Southern France, 1940

Life? Or Theater? went on permanent exhibit at the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam, while the collection also traveled in major exhibits throughout the world. The paintings of Life? Or Theater? and all studies for the work are owned by the Charlotte Salomon Foundation of Amsterdam and housed in the Jewish Historical Museum of Amsterdam. More paintings can be viewed on the museum’s web site.

Erich Salomon - The King of the Indiscreet

Erich Salomon, Self-Portrait on Board of the Mauretania, 1929

Erich Salomon (1886-1944) was born into a prosperous German-Jewish family well assimilated into Berlin society. His father was a banker; his mother came from a line of prominent publishers. He first studied zoology, then switched to engineering before finally settling on law and taking his degree in 1913. With the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the Kaiser´s army and soon thereafter was captured during the first Battle of the Marne. He spent the next four years in prisoner-of-war camps, where he served as an interpreter and acquired the fluency in French that was later to prove invaluable in gaining entry to conferences.

Erich Salomom, Five Gentlemen Conversing around a Table, c. 1928 (This picture was taken in the Reichskanzlei in Berlin)

In the postwar years, the family fortune melted away in the inflationary storms that devastated the German economy, and Salomon was forced to live by his wits. He founded an electric car and motorcycle rental service. The enterprise failed, but an advertisement he ran offering to give free legal and financial advice to car-rental customers while chauffering them around attracted the attention of the Ullstein publishing house and, in 1925, they offered him a job in their promotion department. At Ullstein, Salomon immediately was fascinated by photography, and soon began shooting feature pictures for the Ullstein dailies. After experimenting with and mastering the technique of shooting indoors by existing light, Salomon had no trouble convincing Ullstein to let him cove the headline-making trial of a police killer for Berliner Illustrierte.

Erich Salomon, Krantz trial. Hilde Scheller in the witness box, Berlin, 1928. The Krantz trial was one of the most famous murder trials in the Weimar Republic. Hilde Scheller (at that time 16 years old), together with a group of boys deeply in love with her, started a so-called "Suicide Club" resulting in one killing on request and one suicide.

Any pictures taken in the courtroom, where photography was forbidden, would have been a major scoop for the paper, but the ones that Salomon returned with were extraordinary. Salomon had accomplished this by hiding his camera in a bowler hat, cutting a hole for the lens. On the last day, when a court attendant finally realized what he was doing and demanded his negatives, Salomon resorted to a trick he was to use time and time again. He handed over unexposed plates, acted repentant, and left with the exposed ones still in his pockets. In 1928, only one year after he had become interested in photography, Salomon´s career was launched.

Erich Salomon, Court trial against Ringverein Immertreu (Wrestling Association Always Loyal), 1929. At that time Berlin's criminals were organized in so-called wrestling clubs as a camouflage. One of these clubs played an important role in Fritz Lang's 1931 movie M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder - some of the crooks were casted with real gangsters.

Salomon soon covered another sensational murder trial. This time, Salomon, a confirmed gadgeteer, concealed his Ermanox in an attaché case outfitted with an intricate set of levers to trigger the shutter. When these pictures were widely published throughout Europe, he left his staff position at Ullstein to become a full-time professional. That same year, he covered his first series of international conferences: the summit meeting in Lugano, a session of the League of Nations in Geneva, and the signing of the Kellogg-Briand disarmament pack in Paris, where he calmly walked in and took the seat of the absent Polish delegate. In his free time, he frequented diplomatic and social events in Berlin.

Erich Salomon, Albert Einstein engaging in animated conversation with British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, surrounded by a group of luminaries including the Nobel Prize-winner Max Planck, far right, and other German political and business leaders, smoking cigars and sipping cognac. The reception was given by Reich Chancellor Brüning in honour of the visiting British Prime Minister in August 1931. “You have no idea with what affection I am surrounded here, they are all out to catch the drops of oil my brain sweats out,” Einstein noted on this occasion.

Because of his dogged persistence, unobstrusive manner, and dramatic results, Salomon found fewer and fewer barriers to his presence in realms where all other photographers were excluded. Indeed, many statemen began to develop a good-humored acceptance of his ubiquity. At the opening of an international gathering, the French Foreign Minister, Aristide Briand, amused his fellow delegates by looking around and exclaiming, "Where is Dr. Salomon? We can´t start without him. The people won´t think this conference is important at all!"

 Erich Salomon, Aristide Briand points to Salomon and shouts: "Ah ! le voilà ! The king of the indiscreet !" (1930)

By 1931, Salomon had reached the apogee of his career. To celebrate his forty-fifth birthday and the publicacion of his book, Famous Contemporaries in Unguarded Moments, he hosted a party for four hundred leading members of Berlin society at the elegant Hotel Kaiserhof. But Salomon´s celebrity in his homeland was short-lived. Only a year later, he returned from a second trip to America to find Hitler headquartered in the Kaiserhof and the Weimar Republic in its death throes. Salomon, like many others, was soon making preparations to leave.

Erich Salomon, German Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann en route to Paris for signature of the Briand-Kellogg Pact, 1928.

Salomon decided to settle in Holland, which was his wife´s native country. Based in the Hague, he still covered many key events. He also continued to travel. Britain especially fascinated him, and he made frequent visits to photograph government and opposition leaders and members of the royal family. In the late thirties he was invited to come to America by Life magazine that had just begun to take root and had picked up many of his photographs. He considered emigrating, but he kept putting it off. Soon it was too late to leave. In May 1940, the Nazi Blitzkrieg swallowed the Low Countries in four days. The candid photographer who had been the toast of Berlin society only a few years before was now forced to wear a yellow star. In 1943, Salomon and his family went into hiding. They were betrayed by a meter reader who noted an increase in gas consumption. According to Red Cross records, Erich Salomon, his wife and their younger son died at Auschwitz in July 1944, a month after the Allies landed in Normandy.

Arturo Nathan

 Arturo Nathan, Self-Portrait with Closed Eyes, 1925

 

Arturo Nathan, born in 1891 in Trieste, a city that was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time, was the eldest child of a rich and cosmopolitan Jewish family. Like his father, a merchant who was born in India and had lived in China, he was a British subject. His mother, Alice Luzzatto, was from Trieste. Nathan lived in the city until 1911, attended the Austro-Hungarian lyceum, and was taught in German (he read Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant). After earning a degree in classical studies, he was forced to relinquish his passion for philosophy to follow in his father’s footsteps, embarking on a career in commerce that took him first to London and then Genoa.

Arturo Nathan, Costa Ghiacciata con rovine, 1929

During the Great War he served in the British army in England. A fervent pacifist, he stated that he had only finished the third grade and, as a result, he was assigned menial jobs. In 1920 he returned to Trieste, but became seriously depressed. Consequently, the following year he went into psychoanalysis with Edoardo Weiss, a young doctor who had studied with Freud and encouraged him to take up painting as a form of therapy. 

 Arturo Nathan, Solitary Statue, 1930

 

In the early 1920s Nathan, a self-taught artist, befriended Leonor Fini (who was born in Argentina but grew up in Trieste) and Carlo Sbisà, and began to frequent Trieste’s intellectual circles, where he met notables such as Umberto Saba and Italo Svevo. In 1925 he went to Rome to meet Giorgio de Chirico: the artist’s works made a deep impression on Nathan, who continuously took up the master’s iconographic motifs from then on. De Chirico was equally impressed with Nathan and attempted - in vain -  to have him invited to participate in the first Novecento exhibition curated by Margherita Sarfatti in Milan in 1926. 

 Arturo Nathan, Untitled, c. 1930

 

In 1926 Nathan took part in the Tre Venezie art exhibitions in Padua and showed his works at the Venice Biennale, returning in 1928, 1930, 1932 and 1936. He also participated in important group exhibitions of Italian painting staged internationally. In January 1929 Nathan staged his first and only solo show, along with Leonor Fini and Carlo Sbisà, in Milan at Vittorio Barbaroux’s Galleria Milano. He also entered works in the 1st and 2nd Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale in Rome (1931 and 1935). The first monograph on the artist, written by Jacques Girmounsky, was published in French in 1935 and was followed by Umbro Apollonio’s in 1936. 

 Arturo Nathan, The Exiled, 1928

 

During this period Nathan also participated in important collective exhibitions on Italian painting in Barcelona (1929), Vienna (1933) and Budapest (1936). When Italy entered the war in 1940, Nathan was banished to the Marche, remaining there until the summer of 1943. He was then sent to the concentration camp of Carpi and deported to Germany in 1944, first to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen and then Biberach, where he died in November of that year.

Felix Nussbaum

The name they coined us – emigrants - is fundamentally erroneous, since this was not a voluntary migration for the purpose of finding an alternative place to settle. The emigrants found themselves not a new homeland but a place of refuge in exile until the storm passes - Deportees that’s what we are, outcasts. (Bertold Brecht)

 Felix Nussbaum, Jew at the Window, 1943

Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944) was born in Osnabrück, Province of Hanover, as the son of Rahel and Philipp Nussbaum. His father, Philipp, was a World War I veteran and German patriot before the rise of the Nazis. He was an amateur painter when he was younger, but was forced to work as a merchant for financial reasons. He therefore encouraged his son’s artwork passionately.

 Felix Nussbaum, My Father, 1926

In 1922 Felix Nussbaum began his studies at the Hamburg State School of Applied Arts. One year later Nussbaum attended the private Lewin-Funcke-School in Berlin where he met the Polish-jewish painter and his later wife Felka Platek (who studied there under Ludwig Meidner). In 1924-25 he was a student of the Berlin School of Fine and Applied Arts and a master student of Hans Meid in 1928-29. As of 1929, together with  Felka Platek, he rented a studio in Berlin (Xantener Straße 33).

Felka Platek, Self-Portrait, 1927

Nussbaum's early work was produced primarily in Berlin between 1920 and 1932. From 1924 onwards he attended the Preußische Akademie der Künste (The Prussian Academy of Arts) and as early as 1931 he was a well-known great amongst the artists of the young generation. If in his early pictures there are still traces of the painting style of Vincent van Gogh, the art to emerge from his time in Berlin is primarily influenced by Giorgio de Chirico and Carl Hofer, the painter who taught his trade in Berlin at that time. The artistic breakthrough came in 1931 with the great painting The Paris Square. It ridicules the "nobility" of the Prussian Academy of Arts (which was located there): 

 Felix Nussbaum, The Fantastic Square (The Parisian Square), 1931

As an award for his work, in October 1932, Felix Nussbaum travelled to Rome to be a studying guest at the Villa Massimo. As a result of the political situation evolving in Germany, he was never again to return to his home country. After Hitler came into power, Nussbaum's Berlin studio was set on fire because of his Jewish belief and some 150 works fell victim to the flames. During his travels along the Italian Riviera, Nussbaum succeeded, at least for a certain time, in counter-balancing the threatening events taking place in Germany by painting pictures that showed a soothing kind of beauty. But, from 1934 onwards, the colours, motifs and metaphors of his pictures attest to a foreboding, which warned of an uncertain future.

 Felix Nussbaum, Puppets, 1943

In 1934, Nussbaum took Felka Platek to meet his parents in Switzerland. Rahel and Philipp Nussbaum eventually grew homesick for Germany and, against his fiercest objections, they returned. This was the last time Felix would see his mother and father - the source of his spiritual and financial support. Felix and Felka would spend the next ten years in exile, mostly in Belgium. Thus began Felix's emotional and artistic isolation. 

Felix Nussbaum, Self-Portrait with Felka Platek, 1942

The February of 1935 saw Felix Nussbaum travelling on a tourist visa to the Belgian seaport of Ostend. This is where he proceeded to paint rather monotonous street and harbour scenes that became increasingly drab and gloomy. In 1937 Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek moved to Brussels where they married and took up residence in an apartment in the Rue Archimède. In addition to some political works completed around 1938, Nussbaum began working on a series of still life paintings, in which things of  a "dead nature" were turned into symbols and metaphors reflecting his own political circumstances.

Felix Nussbaum, Prisoners in Saint-Cyprien, 1942

On May 10th, 1940, Germany invaded Belgium. The Belgian police then embarked on a massive wave of arrests of thousands of refugees originating from German territories. The refugees were taken from their apartments at dawn and instructed to take 48 hours worth of supplies. Also Felix Nussbaum was arrested on May 10th and, together with the other refugees, sent to the French internment camp at Saint Cyprien. In August/September he could escape and returned to Brussels where Felka (she had stayed in Brussels) and Felix were hidden and supported by Belgian sculptor Dolf Ledel. 

 Nussbaum's most famous painting: Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, probably from late 1942. The Nazi occupation ID card states JEW in French: JUIF, and in Flemish: JOOD. 

1944 marked the fruition of the deadly Nazi machine’s plans for the Nussbaum family. Philipp and Rahel Nussbaum were killed in the concentration camp of Auschwitz in February. Like being aware of his own upcoming death, in Nussbaum's last painting, Triumph of Death (dated 18 April 1944), skeletal creatures play and dance to music within a a barren wasteland: 

Felix Nussbaum, Triumph of Death, 1944

A matter of weeks later, on 20 June, Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek were denunciated, arrested by German armed forces and given the numbers XXVI/284 and XXVI/285. On August 2, they arrived in Auschwitz where both were murdered a couple of days later. On September 3, Nussbaum’s brother was sent to Auschwitz, and three days later his sister-in-law and niece were murdered there. In December, Nussbaum's other brother Justus - the last of the family - died from exhaustion in the concentration camp of Stutthof. With one fell swoop, the Nussbaum family was officially and completely exterminated.

 The Nussbaum family, 1915. Justus, Rahel, Felix and Philipp.

In 1998, the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück - designed by Daniel Libeskind - opened its doors. More of 170 of his is works are permanently exhibited there. They also provide an excellent online catalogue.