Felix Nussbaum painted small stages. A man sits at a table with his head in his hands while a globe stands beside him. A painter stands before a blank wall and holds out an identity card. Skeletons play music in a ruined landscape. Each picture is built from a handful of props placed in a tight, deliberate space, and each prop has a job. That economy rewards study by anyone who designs posters, covers or campaign images.
None of his paintings appear as public-domain-flagged records in the open-access collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago or the Cleveland Museum of Art, the sources this site uses for images, so this guide describes his work in text. For public-domain prints and posters you can study and reuse, browse the MGD museum inspiration collection.
Who was Felix Nussbaum?
Yad Vashem and the German Historical Museum’s online biography both record that he was born in Osnabrück in 1904 into a Jewish family. According to the World ORT Holocaust art archive and the Jewish Virtual Library, he began studying art in Hamburg in 1922 and moved to Berlin the following year, where he later became a master student of the painter and printmaker Hans Meid.
In the early 1930s he won a stay at the German Academy in Rome, the Villa Massimo; Yad Vashem and the auction house Ketterer Kunst date the award to 1932, and the German Historical Museum records that he lost the scholarship and left Rome in May 1933, after a dispute with a fellow artist. With the Nazis now in power, he did not return to Germany. The German Historical Museum places him in Alassio on the Italian Riviera in 1933–34, and Yad Vashem and the Jewish Virtual Library record that he settled in Belgium in 1935 with his partner, Felka Platek.
When Germany invaded Belgium in May 1940, he was arrested in Brussels as an enemy alien and sent to the Saint-Cyprien internment camp in southern France, as both Yad Vashem and the German Historical Museum note. He escaped and returned to Brussels, where he and Felka Platek lived in hiding. They were arrested in the summer of 1944 and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was murdered that year.
In 1998 Osnabrück opened the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, a museum for his work designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind; Libeskind’s studio and Lower Saxony’s tourism board both give the date.
Key works and dates
1931, Der tolle Platz. The Berlinische Galerie, which owns it, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales describe a crowded satire set on Berlin’s Pariser Platz: artists unload paintings outside the Prussian Academy of Arts while its professors file through the door. The Art Gallery of New South Wales borrowed its English title, The Mad Square, for an exhibition of Weimar-era art.
1939, The Refugee. Held by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, oil on canvas, about 60 by 75 centimetres. Yad Vashem describes a refugee holding his head in his hands at a table, beside a globe that offers him no shelter. The work is also known as European Vision.
1940, Self-Portrait in the Camp. An oil on panel from the Saint-Cyprien period, catalogued by the Neue Galerie in New York.
1941, Camp Synagogue. Another Saint-Cyprien subject; Yad Vashem presents it as a key work in his exhibition pages.
About 1943, Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card. Now at the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück, on loan from the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung, according to the Neue Galerie, which exhibited it in New York.
1944, Triumph of Death. The German Historical Museum dates its completion to 18 April 1944, and the Jewish Museum in New York, which holds a study of a skeleton playing a clarinet for it, gives the same date.
What to look at: the wall as a frame
The Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card is a lesson in enclosure. Writers in Tablet and on the painter Leslie Parke’s blog describe the artist standing close in front of a wall, in a tan coat, an identity card in his hand. There is almost no space behind him. The wall pushes the figure forward and leaves nowhere for the eye to go except his face and the card in his hand.
The card itself is a piece of typography inside the painting. Tablet and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency both note that it is stamped with the word for “Jew” in French and Dutch. The National Library of Israel’s blog adds that he shows himself wearing the yellow star. These are official marks designed to label people, and Nussbaum places them at the centre of a portrait, showing how an administrative graphic, set in the right place, can carry the whole meaning of an image.
For designers, the lesson is about removing depth on purpose. A shallow, flat background is not an empty background: it can create pressure and closeness. When a campaign image needs to feel urgent or confined, bring the subject forward and close the space behind it.
Objects that tell the story
In The Refugee, as Yad Vashem describes it, the key prop is a globe on a table. The whole world is in the room, yet it offers the seated man no place to go. One object turns a figure study into a statement about exile.
This is the method of the emblem and the poster: choose a single object everyone can read and let it stand for an idea. Nussbaum’s globes, documents and instruments work like icons in a pictogram system.
If you design symbols or editorial illustrations, look at how few objects he needs. Remove anything that does not add meaning, and make the remaining props large enough to read at a distance. Our poster references show the same discipline in public-domain posters.
Theatre, crowds and the dance of death
Der tolle Platz and Triumph of Death sit at the two ends of his career and use the same tool: a staged crowd. In the 1931 picture the crowd is a satire of the Berlin art world, with paintings carried across a square and professors at the Academy door. In 1944 the crowd is a band of skeletons. The German Historical Museum notes that the organ player in Triumph of Death, whose instrument is silent, bears the artist’s own features, and accounts of the painting describe the skeletons playing and dancing among the debris of a ruined city.
The skeleton orchestra echoes the old European tradition of the dance of death, familiar from late medieval woodcuts and prints. Our woodcut collection holds public-domain examples of the kind of imagery that tradition produced. For designers, the useful point is the structure: a crowded scene still reads clearly when each figure performs one distinct action and the stage is defined by a few strong architectural lines.
Technique and context
The museum records that are available describe oil paintings on canvas and on panel. A German-language study by the art historian Thomas Röske, on Nussbaum’s early work from 1925 to 1931, traces the influence of late Vincent van Gogh on some of his early pictures. His Berlin years overlap with the painters of Weimar Germany, such as Otto Dix and Christian Schad, whose cool, sharp style is often grouped under the label New Objectivity.
His late paintings were made in exile and in hiding. Yad Vashem’s exhibition pages present this late work as a deliberate record of what was happening to him and to European Jews.
For more on the German painters around him, see our guides to Otto Dix and the Weimar portrait and Christian Schad’s precise portraits.
How designers can borrow Felix Nussbaum’s ideas
Use the background as pressure. A close wall or flat field behind a figure focuses attention and adds tension.
Let one object carry the idea. A globe, a document or an instrument can explain a whole situation when it is large, clear and placed at the centre.
Put the evidence in the frame. The identity card shows how a real document or label inside an image can be more forceful than a caption beside it.
Give every figure one action. In crowded scenes, distinct gestures keep the picture readable.
Make the self-portrait a document. Nussbaum painted himself with the papers and marks imposed on him. A portrait that includes its sitter’s real context says more than a neutral headshot.
Frequently asked questions
What is Felix Nussbaum known for?
For paintings made in exile and in hiding in Belgium, including The Refugee (1939), Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (about 1943) and Triumph of Death (completed in April 1944), which record his experience of persecution before his murder at Auschwitz in 1944.
Where can I see Felix Nussbaum’s paintings?
The Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück, designed by Daniel Libeskind and opened in 1998, holds a large collection of his work. Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Berlinische Galerie and the Neue Galerie in New York also hold works by him.
What does the identity card in his 1943 self-portrait say?
According to Tablet and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, it is stamped with the word for “Jew” in French and Dutch.
Can I use Felix Nussbaum’s paintings in my designs?
The museums used by this site for public-domain images do not hold his work, so this guide shows no reproductions. Check the rules where you work and the holding museum’s terms before reproducing any of his paintings.
