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OPENING HOURS
Tuesday – Friday:
11 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Saturday and Sunday/public holidays:
10 a.m. – 6 p.m.
1st Thu of the month
11 a.m. – 8 p.m.
School classes by special arrangement

Guided tours andsupplementary activities
More information about guided
tours for school classes, workshop
programmes and excursions canbe obtained from Ralf Langer,
Museum education services,
under the telephone number+49 541 323-2064

Tickets
Adults: 5€
U18: Free
Concessions: 3€
Groups (minimum 12 persons):4€ p.P.

Museumsquartier Osnabrück
Lotter Straße 249078 Osnabrück
www.museumsquartier-osnabrueck.deTelephone: +49 541 323-2207 / 323-2237

A Place for Nussbaum – The Museum by Daniel Libeskind

More than a visual experience

Architecture elevates art Daniel Libeskind, the architectof the Jewish Museum in Berlin, who has beencommissioned to develop Ground Zero in New York,has created in Osnabrück a touching memorial to theartist’s life and work. It is the Felix-Nussbaum-House,the “Museum without Exit”. In the Felix-NussbaumHouse the architecture enters into a dialogue withthe artist, his work and biography in a unique way.
The architecture “carries” the art, it intensifies thepaintings’ themes and statements – and: It is art in itself.

Libeskind challenges the visitor with oblique-angled walls, sloping
windows, structures dividing the rooms, angular niches, holes
between the floors, covered only by gratings. The feeling oforientation lost, and hope gone, becomes physical to the visitor.
Here art is not just a visual experience but a subtle communicatoron other levels too.

A building baring a message
The architecture of the Felix-Nussbaum-House reveals a lot about
Nussbaum’s life and fate through its use of materials and the layoutof the interior. The museum consists of a narrow and high Nussbaumcorridor, the main-section and the so called Nussbaumbridge. Thethree parts are clearly distinct from each other by virtue of theircolours and materials. The long, windowless Nussbaumcorridor ismade of raw concrete. The main-section is covered with Germanoak, while the Nussbaum-bridge is faced with zinc. The growing
coldness of these materials suggests Nussbaum’s fate. The layout ofthe building, based on a system of lines pointing towards places ofimportance in Nussbaum’s life, is also informative. The main-section
looks towards the Alte Synagogenstraße where the old synagogue
once stood; it was burnt down in 1938 during Kristall Nacht. The
Nussbaum-corridor, symbolising the way into exile faces directly theplace from which the NSDAP directed terror from 1933 until 1945.
On the occasion of the opening of the Imperial War Museum Northin Manchester Libeskind wrote in 2002 in an article in “The New
Statesman”:“Architecture is a communicative art. All too often, however,architecture is seen as mute. Buildings are understood as disposable
consumer items whose sole fate is to disappear with their use. […] I am
determined to get away from this over simplified view of architecture’stradition.”
Libeskind’s idea was realised four years before this article appeared,
for in 1998 the Felix-Nussbaum-House, his first building to befinished, was opened in Osnabrück.

FELIX
NUSSBAUMA GERMAN PAINTERENGLISHFrom Osnabrück to Berlin

Refuge in art

From 11 Schloss Street, Osnabrück, to Berlin

A German painterBorn in 1904, Felix Nussbaum enjoyed a sheltered upbringingin Osnabrück. His father, a prosperous businessman, had a giftfor music, was enthusiastic about the theatre and interested inart; he supported his son’s attraction to painting. Conversations
about art played a vital role in the Nussbaum household.
His father especially admired Vincent van Gogh. When Felix
Nussbaum left Osnabrück in 1922 he went to Hamburg, andthen on to Berlin, to study art. In Berlin he had his first success,obtaining the “Rome-prize” and winning a coveted scholarshipto the Villa Massimo in Rome.

Felix Nussbaum is recognized forthe most part as a painter of the“Jewish fate”, and his paintings
are seen as “Jewish art”. Yet thisview is too limited, because it loses sight of Nussbaum’s paintings
as paintings, and does not adequately measure the artistic valueof his work. Above everythingelse Nussbaum is a painter, anda “German painter” at that. His
famous “Self-portrait with Jewish
Identity Card” (1943) should not
be considered primarily as a declaration of his Jewishness but as a
sharp observation of the situationin which he found himself. Nussbaum saw himself as an artist, asmany of his works plainly show.

Artistic emancipation
During his time in Berlin, Nussbaum formulated an artisticstance, one in conscious opposition to the artistic opinions of
his academic “fathers”. Nussbaum was relatively unimpressedby the established avant-garde. Instead he turned to van Goghand Henri Rousseau as painter-models and studied the Pittura
metafisica. Through this artistic debate, Nussbaum developed
a personal style, in which allegorical representations wereimportant. Nussbaum also started using his art to express hisemotional – inner – reality.

Portrait-group, 1930, Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück,
Donation, widow of Dr. Wassermann, Tel Aviv

The Refugee (European Version), 1939
Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück, on loan from Irmgard Schlenke

Uncertainty, Flight, Exile
The shuttered horizon
In 1932 Nussbaum left Berlin to take up a scholarship in Italy.
He never returned to Germany. After being expelled from theVilla Massimo in May 1933, he emigrated to Belgium in 1935 by
way of Switzerland and France. He was still in possession of a
tourist visa and was officially recognised as a refugee. However,Nussbaum had no fixed abode in Belgium. The fact that he wasprohibited from working and was only given temporary residence
status put a strain on the everyday life of the persecuted artist
as regards his emigration plans. In 1937 he arrived in Brussels
at long last and moved into an apartment in Rue Archimède 22.
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the situation changed
dramatically – for refugees too. National Socialist tyranny
threatened to spread throughout Europe. Nussbaum put his
bitter premonition of no longer being protected in the country towhich he had fled into the painting “The Refugee“.

CaptivityShortly after the war had begun and Belgium was occupied byGerman troops, Nussbaum was sent to an internment camp in
the southern French town of St Cyprien from May to August
1940. He managed to escape from the camp and returned toBelgium as an illegal immigrant. Nussbaum went undergroundand lived a solitary life, constantly under threat. The years hespent in Belgium were increasingly characterised by a feeling ofdesperation and loneliness.

Triumph of Death, 1944, Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück, on loan from Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung

The internal dialogue
This is especially clear from “Selfportrait at the Easel” (1943),painted shortly before his death.
In this reflection Nussbaum
the Painter presents himself
as cool, self-conscious andrelaxed, with all the attitudes anddisguises removed. In spite ofhis melancholy he remains
assertive. The large numberof self-portraits indicate how
indispensable they were toNussbaum as reassurance andSelf-portrait at the Easel, 1943,
affirmations of his standpoint. In
Felix-Nussbaum-Haus Osnabrück,
the “internal dialogues” with hison loan from NiedersächsischeSparkassenstiftungmirror image Nussbaum renders
an account of himself – andconfronts the spectator with an open view into the artist’s soul.

Camp, Hiding, Extermination
Mortal fear and certainty of deathIn the last years of his life mortal fear crystallizes into acertainty of death. He knows he will not survive and yet
he resists by, with, and through his art. Nussbaum’s mostimpressive works emerge while facing the inevitability of thewaiting catastrophe – Auschwitz.

Painting as an act of liberation
In the “Triumph of Death” – his last known painting –Nussbaum successfully freed himself from fear and eternal
resignation by an artistic act of liberation. In this painting
the 39 year-old Nussbaum describes the end of civilisation
as an early-modern-age dance macabre. The world isdepopulated and in ruins, but it has not reached the end– the dance of death goes on, redemption is not in sight.
Painting alone comforts; it is the only tool capable ofself-assertion amid all the barbarity. Nussbaum tries
in his paintings to give the incomprehensible a form, ahuman form, and thus to accord it a dimension whichis endurable.