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Lot Essay
To be included in the forthcoming Felix Nussbaum catalogue raisonné being prepared by Mrs. Inge Jaehner, Felix Nussbaum Haus, Osnabrück.
Felix Nussbaum had been travelling out of Germany as of 1932, thus he and his companion, Felka Platek, were able to avoid the experience of the early years of the Nazi Regime in Germany. In 1935 the couple visited Paris, Ostend in Belgium and moved to Molenbeek Saint Jean. In 1936 they returned to Ostend, lived briefly in Brussels and returned again to Ostend.
"As he was facing up the wretchedness of his existence in exile in his self portraits between 1935-1938, Felix Nussbaum was trying at the same time to appropriate in his paintings the foreign world in which he was leading his "uprooted life", as he himself was still calling it in 1939. They were pictures of harbours and street scenes, mainly in Ostend. But the view which was at first of the picturesque tourist attractions, was changing, and the pictures display an increasingly darkening monotony. We see streets and quaysides as places of isolation and abandonment. The intensity with which Nussbaum worked, and which Rudi Lesser remembered from his visits to Nussbaum in 1936, was possibly a means of distraction, a way of coping with his fear of the uncertain future; almost all his subjects show growing menace" (in E. Berger et al, Felix Nussbaum, New York, 1995, p. 207).
Felix Nussbaum had been travelling out of Germany as of 1932, thus he and his companion, Felka Platek, were able to avoid the experience of the early years of the Nazi Regime in Germany. In 1935 the couple visited Paris, Ostend in Belgium and moved to Molenbeek Saint Jean. In 1936 they returned to Ostend, lived briefly in Brussels and returned again to Ostend.
"As he was facing up the wretchedness of his existence in exile in his self portraits between 1935-1938, Felix Nussbaum was trying at the same time to appropriate in his paintings the foreign world in which he was leading his "uprooted life", as he himself was still calling it in 1939. They were pictures of harbours and street scenes, mainly in Ostend. But the view which was at first of the picturesque tourist attractions, was changing, and the pictures display an increasingly darkening monotony. We see streets and quaysides as places of isolation and abandonment. The intensity with which Nussbaum worked, and which Rudi Lesser remembered from his visits to Nussbaum in 1936, was possibly a means of distraction, a way of coping with his fear of the uncertain future; almost all his subjects show growing menace" (in E. Berger et al, Felix Nussbaum, New York, 1995, p. 207).