The fate and the oeuvre of the Jewish artist Felix Nussbaum is inseparably interwoven with German history of the 20th century. Nussbaum began his artistic training by studying art in Hamburg, but in 1923 he was drawn to the metropolis of Berlin. As early as in 1928, the young artist, at that time master student of Hans Meid, had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Casper. While he was still intensively involved with the visual language and painting technique of Vincent van Gogh during in early works, his later creative period was under the influence of the stylistically reserved, clear compositions by Henri Rousseau, Giorgio de Chirico or Karl Hofer, which also becomes obvious in the present work, although Nussbaum was already on a path to his very own, unmistakable visual language at this time. In our still life with an onion plant, a knife and a water glass, he shows himself as a prolific artist: the upper corner of a canvas on a stretcher subtly protrudes into the chosen image section, telling the observer that another painting is already being planned. In fact, in the 1920s he already received positive reviews. Observers recognize stories in his no-frills yet complex visual worlds, they discover melancholy and humor, sometimes "creepiness" or "childlike delight" (cf. Paul Westheim, in: Kunstblatt year 12-13, 1928/29). When the National Socialists seized power, his promising artistic career took a tragic turn. In 1932, a year before the NSDAP came to power, Nussbaum received the highly acknowledged scholarship from the Villa Massimo in Rome. However, after a visit of Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels at Villa Massimo, he realized that his art would have no future within this National Socialist ideology and doctrine. Nussbaum left Rome in May 1933, and his scholarship was revoked shortly afterwards.

Nussbaum never returned to his studio in Berlin. A fire in his studio burned 160 of his paintings. At the peak of his artistic success, as a German Jew, he was finally targeted by the National Socialists and lived in exile in the years that followed, from 1935 in Ostend and from 1937 in Brussels. In 1938 he took part in the widely acclaimed exhibition of the "Freier Künstlerbund" in Paris. After escaping from an internment camp in southern France in 1940, Nussbaum went underground after the so-called Jewish star decree in Belgium in May 1942 and the beginning of deportations to the extermination camps - but he did not give up painting. Art gave him strength and enabled him to render his thoughts, his innermost being, in meaningful and complex pictorial structures on the canvas. In line with the situation he was in, he made dismal works, including self-portraits and still lifes that describe his oppressively isolated, poor conditions and which would make him famous after his death, among them works like "Selbstbildnis mit Judenpass" (Self-Portrait with Jewish Passport) and "Die Verdammten" (The Damned). Even in the almost hopeless situation he was in at the time, painting was Nussbaum's means of resistance against the Nazi regime, against which he painted with his head held up high until the end. His last painting "Triumph des Todes (Triumph of Death) was created in April 1944. On June 20, 1944 he was discovered in his hiding place in Belgium, deported and a little later murdered in Auschwitz. It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that greater attention was paid to his artistic legacy. Through a few solo exhibitions, e.g. in New York, Manchester, Jerusalem and Angers, his oeuvre also received international recognition. Since 1998, a large number of the paintings that have survived to this day are at the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus in Osnabrück's Museum Quarter, designed by the American-Jewish architect Daniel Libeskind. In 2011, stumbling blocks were installed in Osnabrück and in Brussels for the artist who was murdered in Auschwitz. [CH]