The Arts         © The New York Times              WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 12, 1998
________________________________________________________________________

Reviled in Life, Embraced in Death
_____________________________________________________________________________
A German Museum Honors an Artist Lost to the Holocaust
________________
By ALAN RIDING
________________
     OSNABRUCK, Germany – Gustel Moses-Nussbaum knew that her
cousin, Felix Nussbaum, had been a painter. She also knew that, along with his parents and most of her family, he had died at Auschwitz. But it was only in 1960 that she learned that many of his oils were stored in a Brussels basement. Nussbaum had once said: “If I perish, do not let my paintings die. Show them to the people.” Mrs. Moses-Nussbaum felt duty-bound to make this happen.

     On July 16, this northwestern German city where he was born in 1904 opened the new Felix Nussbaum Museum to house some 160 of his paintings. As a measure of the important that Osnabruck gives to the initiative, the museum was designed by the Polish-American-architect Daniel Libeskind and inaugurated by Gerhard Schroeder, the president of Lower Saxony and the front-runner to become Germany’s next Chancellor.
     That all this has come about is, of course, a tribute to the efforts of Mrs. Moses-Nussbaum and her sister, Shulamith Jaari-Nussbaum. But it also tells the story of a German city’s determination to turn its back on its own and reinvent itself as a symbol of peace. When Mrs. Moses-Nussbaum first brought the paintings here in 1970 in the hope that someone would be willing to restore the works of a local though largely unknown artist, she needed Osnabruck. Today, the city needs Felix Nussbaum.
    Nussbaum left Osnabruck in 1922 at the age of 18 to study art in Hamburg. He returned to visit his parents, but he never again lived here. In 1925 he moved to Berlin and continued to study while setting up a studio and sharing an apartment with his girlfriend, an artist from Poland named Felka Platek. He was a prolific painter, his figurative oils evocative of van Gogh and his landscapes influenced by de Chirico, but he sold little. Indeed, his main client and fan was his father, Philipp, a prosperous iron merchant who donated several of his works to friends in Osnabruck.
     Nussbaum and Platek moved to Rome in October 1932 after he won a scholarship as a guest student at the Prussian Academy in the Villa Massimo. That December a fire in his Berlin studio destroyed 150 of his paintings. According to some accounts, it was set by Nazi youths. In May 1933, with Hitler now firmly in power, Nussbaum was ejected from the Prussian Academy and began wandering through Italy, Switzerland and France, eventually reaching Oostende, Belgium, in January 1935.
     By then, at least half of Osnabruck’s 500 Jews had fled the city, including Nussbaum’s parents, who successively lived in Switzerland, Cologne and Amsterdam. Osnabruck was a hotbed of Nazism and anti-Semitism: it had a flourishing Nazi party as early as 1926, and its Roman Catholic Archbishop, Wilhelm Berning, was known as the Nazi prelate. Osnabruck’s large synagogue, like those of many German cities, was burned on the night of Nov. 2, 1938. And during the war, says Peter Junk, a local historian, “no one here hid a single Jew.”

     In Oostende, where he was befriended by the painter James Ensor, Nussbaum’s life was unsettled by the refusal of the Belgian authorities to grant him and Platek, who was also Jewish, identity papers. In 1937 they married and moved to Brussels, where Nussbaum’s work was still mainly portraits, still lifes and landscapes, although the gathering darkness of Europe was evoked in a handful of oils. In May 1940, after Germany occupied Belgium, Nussbaum was arrested and interned in a camp at St. Cyprien in southwestern France. Six months later, he escaped and somehow made his way back to Brussels.
      
A Burst of Creativity Unlocked by Terror
          
     The years that followed became increasingly difficult. In the spring of 1942, Nussbaum hid his paintings with two acquaintances, including a Belgian dentist whose name is remembered only as Dr. Grosfils. Nussbaum and his wife also went into hiding, first in an attic and then in a basement. Remarkably, he continued painting. Indeed, as if his greatest talent were unlocked by terror, it is the work done during this period that has earned him a place as a rare artistic witness t the persecution of Jews.
     His best-known painting is perhaps “Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card” from August 1943, which shows Nussbaum wearing an overcoat, the collar turned up to reveal a yellow star, and his right hand holding up an identity card stamped
“Juid-Jood.” Other works, like “Organ Grinder,” show scenes of desolation. Several, like “Couple Grieving,” “Jew by the Window” and “Jaqui in the Street,” capture the fear and solitude  of defenseless Jews awaiting their fate at the hands of the Nazis.
    On June 20, 1944, Nussbaum and Platek were arrested, and five weeks later they were deported to Auschwitz. Nussbaum’s parents and brother were arrested in Amsterdam and sent to the death camp. Mrs. Moses-Nussbaum and her sister were in hiding in the southern Netherlands, but their parents, a brother and a sister also died in Auschwitz. After the war, the surviving sisters made their way to Israel, where they live today.

     When they call their life’s work to rescue Nussbaum’s paintings began in 1960 when they heard that Dr. Grosfils had a collection of their cousin’s work. Because the Belgian dentist refused to hand them over, demanding proof that the cousins were legitimate heirs, it was nine years before a Belgian court ruled in their favor. The 177 paintings they recovered were in dismal condition, damaged by dirt and moisture and in some cases ripped.
     “We wondered what would be the best way of letting people know what a great artist he was,” recalled Mrs. Moses-Nussbaum, who was visiting for the inauguration of the museum. “No one knew him in Belgium. The Israel Museum in Jerusalem said they couldn’t help. Eventually a curator told us to go to the only place where Felix was known, to Osnabruck. It wasn’t easy. I had been here in the 1950’s, and it was still full of Nazi’s. But we had no choice.”
      The timing proved fortunate. Walter Borchers, the director of the local Museum of Cultural History, offered to have the paintings restored. The next year, 1971, the first retrospective of Nussbaum’s work was held here. Osnabruck had changed, along with the rest of Germany. The Holocaust was no longer a taboo subject. Opening the show, the city’s Mayor, Willy Kelch, said it represented “a contribution to reparation of the injustice which Jewish citizens in Osnabruck and all over Germany suffered in the name of an inhuman ideology.”
              
Tracking Down Crucial Works
                         
     In the years since, as Mr. Junk, the local historian, and others set about researching Nussbaum’s life, more of his works appeared. A handful were in Osnabruck, owned by families that had been given them by Nussbaum’s father. In 1975, a Belgian antique dealer offered eight paintings from Nussbaum’s critical 1942-44 period, paintings that were probably recovered from the artist’s basement after his arrest. Others were traced to Amsterdam and acquired by the city.
     By the 1980’s, Osnabruck had begun to embrace Nussbaum as a native son. An exhibition of his major works was organized at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1985. Soon after, the Museum of Cultural History here set aside two rooms for a permanent exhibition. Finally in 1991, the decision was made to build a museum extension dedicated to the collection, although it was not until 1996 that the money was available and Mr. Libeskind’s design was chosen.
     Mr. Libeskind, who is also the architect for the new Jewish Museum in Berlin, chose to juxtapose the existing late-19th-century museum with his ultra-modern extension in an almost aggressive manner. “The violent geometry reflects the displacement of Nussbaum’s life to create collisions within the building,” he explained of his sharply angled construction, which   from the air resembles three broad lines of a triangle.
    Although about 75 of Nussbaum’s works are on display, the full collection will not be installed until February 1999 so room will be available for an exhibition later this year linked to the 350th anniversary of the Treaty of Westphalia, signed here in 1648 to end the Thirty Years’ War. Just as Osnabruck now likes to publicize that it is the birthplace of the antiwar German writer Erich Maria Remarque, its celebration of the Treaty of Westphalia is part of a campaign to identify itself with peace.

Not Just a Museum Or a Homage

    The new Felix Nussbaum Musuem is clearly the cornerstone of this strategy. The catalogue to the collection notes that is Osnabruck had never before invested so much in a single artist, it was because the preservation of Nussbaum’s memory and legacy was “a political task.” Or as the museum’s director, Thorsten Rodiek, put it more simply: “Its important to have a museum like this because we should never forget."