Biographies

He began his study of art early, with the full support of his father who sent him to private art schools. He was notably the pupil of Willy Jaeckel and later of Cesar Klein and Paul Plontke and his works evinced the influence of Van Gogh, Hofer, de Chirico and the Ecole de Paris artists.

In 1926 in Berlin he met art student Felka (Feige) Platek, a Warsaw-born Jewess he would eventually marry. His parents did not approve as she was one of the “Ostjuden”. The same year he met Felka he painted a fine portrait of his parents and another of himself wearing a prayer shawl inside the Osnabruck synagogue, together with its cantor. By the age of 23, he had gained recognition and established himself in Berlin among the ranks of the leading young German artists of the day where his iconoclastic work “Der Tolle Platz” won him much appraise.

In 1932, having won the Rome prize, he found himself the guest at the German Academy in the Villa Massimo. There, a cycle of tragedies began to befall him and European Jewry as a whole. He lived the life of a refugee from 1932 after his Berlin studio had been set on fire whilst he was in Italy.

He never returned to his native Germany and moved instead to Belgium. From February 1935 until September 1937 he lived in Ostende during which he painted harbours, not in the celebratory manner of the Fauves and artists of the French School. For him, they represented borders, points of departure, edges of unfamiliar worlds.

For the remaining eight years of his life, many of which were spent underground, Nussbaum's work became increasingly concerned with his feelings of vulnerability as a Jew terrorized by the rise of the Nazis in Germany. Ultimately, his art became his autobiography and his personal predicament, as a haunted and hunted artist and Jew, took life on his canvases.

Living in hiding in Brussels during the war with the assistance of some loyal friends, he painted some of the most harrowing images of the period which are now considered as icons of Jewish and political suffering during the Holocaust. He was denounced to the Gestapo and arrested with his wife on June 20th 1944. They were on the last death train that left the Belgian capital for Auschwitz, just over a month before Brussels was liberated.