German-born painter Felix Nussbaum was raised in an upper-middle-class family, allowing him to pursue an extensive arts education. With the rise of fascism in the 1930s, Nussbaum and his wife, Polish artist Felka Platek, were forced to move to Belgium. In 1940, Nussbaum was arrested and interned in France, and although he escaped and was able to live in hiding for several years, he and his wife were later betrayed and turned over to Belgian authorities. The couple was deported to Auschwitz in 1944; neither survived. Nussbaum was remarkably prolific during the final years of his life. Many of his works were destroyed during the war, but he was able to hide more than one hundred paintings with friends. Today, in the city of his birth, Osnabrück, the Felix Nussbaum Museum houses many of his surviving works.
Felix Nussbaum painted this self-portrait while he and his wife were in hiding in Brussels, Belgium, about a year before they were arrested and deported to Auschwitz. Every element of the picture…
Laurence’s Tefillin questions both western art and patriarchal aspects of Judaism. The triptych portrays parts of women’s naked bodies, bound in the leather straps of tefillin, the small black leather…
In the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic, Bleckner began creating artworks that explored death, loss, and sadness. His dark and moody canvases included objects, such as urns, vases, and chandeliers…