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Felix Nussbaum and the Art of Resistance. - Review - book review
Judaism, Fall, 2000 by John Felstiner
Felix Nussbaum: Art Defamed, Art in Exile, Art in Resistance. KARL GEORG EASTER, ed. Translated by EILEEN MARTIN. Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press. 1997.
"Keep this safe--It's my whole life," C'est toute ma vie, Charlotte Salomon said, handing over for safekeeping her autobiography in 786 paintings, Life or Theater?, before being deported to Auschwitz in 1943. And Felix Nussbaum, entrusting his work to a Brussels dentist in 1942: Wenn ich untergehe, "If I perish, don't let my paintings die, show them to people."
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Born on 11 December 1904 to middleclass parents in the Prussian city of Osnabruck, Nussbaum always meant to be an artist. In 1922 he went to study in Hamburg, then the next year in Berlin, where he met a Polish Jewish painter, Felka Platek, who eventually became his wife. Nussbaum felt the perennial tug between Jewish identity and German assimilation. At age twenty-one he sat himself inside Osnabruck's Romanesque synagogue and painted "The Two Jews": an older Cantor alongside the artist wearing a prayer shawl, staring out somewhat defiantly. This painting barely survived the Nazi Kristallnacht pogrom, when the synagogue was burned.
After numerous Berlin exhibitions, Nussbaum won a 1932 residency at the German Academy's Villa Massimo in Rome. But that year a fire back in his Berlin studio, of dubious origin, destroyed 150 paintings. In May 1933, while Germans were burning books, Goebbels visited the Villa Massimo, which closed soon afterwards. As anti-Jewish persecution intensified, Felix and Felka wandered to the Italian Riviera (where he painted some warm southern scenes), Switzerland, France, and finally Belgium in 1935.
Settling in Ostend, Nussbaum knew the influential James Ensor, whose bitter and cynical mask icons helped him configure his own dismal alienation. (This superb biography provides, on nearly every page, examples from the artists strongly reflected or refracted in his work: Durer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Rousseau, Ensor, Beckmann, Dix, Hofer, Chirico.) Then in 1936 came a rash of self-portraits: Self-portrait with Grimace, with Mask and Paper Horn, with Crazy Laugh, with Green Head Bandage, with Shadow, Self-Portrait Whistling. For the emigrant, the unwanted alien, an insecure, threatened identity demanded recognition--forming, in fact, the painter's only standpoint.
Much of what's known about Felix Nussbaum derives from his having registered with the Belgian Police Foreign Nationals Office. The story involves shifting residences, renewing visas, applying futilely for a Belgian identity card. In 1937 he married Felka and they moved to Brussels. That summer the Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) began traversing Germany, demonstrating the corruptive danger of cultural Bolshevism. A response was organized, entitled "Free German Art," for which Nussbaum contributed two melancholy canvases. This Paris exhibition took place in early November 1938, only days before Herschel Grynspan assassinated a German diplomat there, precipitating Kristallnacht. Nussbaum's 1938 "Self-Portrait in the Studio" shows a closed portfolio beneath a darkened picture on the wall. The artist's right eye looks out wildly, the left is in shadow; one hand claps over his mouth in terror and muteness.
Yet he went on painting, experimenting with surreal and grotesque form. In "Masquerade" (1939), a bunch of revelers are all citations of earlier self-portraits: the grimace, the mask and paper horn, the staring eye and covered mouth. Also from 1939, "The Refugee" brings on Nussbaum's last phase. Leafless trees and black birds can be seen outside a bare room; inside, a globe of the world rests on an overlong table; at the table's end near his sack and stick a figure huddles, back bent and head sunk in his hands like Van Gogh's despairing old man painted just before he shot himself.
Now does tracing Felix Nussbaum's career by way of historical circumstance suggest he was more a Jewish victim than a brilliant painter? He was both, the artwork at once reflecting and resisting his destiny.
On September 1,1939 Germany invaded Poland, then Belgium on May 10, 1940. Nussbaum and others, now "hostile aliens," were deported in cattle cars to SL Cyprien on France's Mediterranean coast below Perpignan, a detention camp originally for Spanish refugees from Franco. As at Gurs in the western Pyrenees, where Charlotte Salomon also was sent in 1940, appalling conditions prevailed under French control. Pablo Casals called SL Cyprien's sun-ridden beach barracks Dante's Inferno, others said "the Pyrenees hellhole," and that acrid tone permeates Nussbaum's 1940 "Self-Portrait in the Camp."
Again in three-quarter profile a severe countenance, unshaven, its left side in shadow and right side lit, stares sharply out at us. Nussbaum's threadbare work shirt has a patch sewn on where the Jewish star might have been. Bones on the sand behind him lead to a prisoner with his head sunk in his hands and to Bosch-like images of degradation: one man, naked from the waist down, half squats over an excrement-stained gray barrel; another, emaciated white, holds rough bed straw to wipe himself. Then beyond: barbed wire, smoldering dunes, a lowering dark violet sky.
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