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Selbstbildnis (Self-Portrait)
Felix Nussbaum
Oil on Canvas 1933

This is one of the artist's happier works. Nussbaum enjoyed a successful career in Berlin, that is, until Germany was plunged into the darkness of Nazi terror.

Nussbaum was a German Jew, and as such, a target for the monsters who came to rule Germany. His art documented the madness that enveloped his country, and his collected works now form a major body of work about the Jews during the Holocaust.

In order to escape persecution, the artist fled Berlin in 1937 and settled in Brussels. In 1940, after the Nazis attacked Brussels, the authorities branded the German artist an "enemy alien" and had him sent to a detainment camp in France, but luckily he escaped after six months.

The artist went into hiding in Brussels, but was arrested just prior to its liberation - from there he was sent to Auschwitz where the fascists murdered him. He was 40 years old. Today there is a museum dedicated to Felix Nussbaum located in Osnabrück, Germany. The Felix Nussbaum Building is a wing of the Osnabrück Museum of Cultural History where a glorious collection of over 170 of the artist's paintings and graphic works are housed. View Selbstbildnis mit Judenpaß (Self-Portrait with Jewish Pass), to see the unhappy side of Nussbaum's life.