Qualla: Felix Nussbaum Haus

Felix Nussbaum Haus: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Three of the museum's walls are aimed at cities. Berlin, Rome and Hamburg - the places where Felix Nussbaum learned to paint. The fourth wall is aimed at Auschwitz. This is not a metaphor bolted on afterwards by a curator; it is the geometry of the building, and once you have been told it you cannot unsee it. Daniel Libeskind titled his winning competition entry Museum Without Exit, and he meant it literally. Inside, the passages are narrow, the lighting is low, and several routes simply stop. You turn around and go back the way you came. It is an awkward, unwelcoming, deliberately difficult building, put up in a city that took four decades to come looking for the painter it was born to.

Read more: Felix Nussbaum Haus on Qualla

Felix Nussbaum Haus: The Painter Who Kept Painting

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Felix Nussbaum was born in Osnabrück on 11 December 1904 and began formal study of art in 1920, first in Hamburg and then in Berlin. By late 1932 he had reached the point most young German painters were aiming for: a place at the German Academy's Villa Massimo in Rome, where he w...

Read more: Felix Nussbaum Haus on Qualla

Felix Nussbaum Haus: 22 Rue Archimède

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The last address Nussbaum and his wife, the painter Felka Platek, lived at was 22 rue Archimède in Brussels. He worked in rooms barely large enough for a canvas, and the work he made there is the reason anyone outside Osnabrück knows his name. In Self-Portrait with Jewish Identit...

Read more: Felix Nussbaum Haus on Qualla

Felix Nussbaum Haus: Museum Without Exit

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The recovery took a long time. A show of his major work opened at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1985; soon afterwards Osnabrück's Museum of Cultural History cleared two rooms for a permanent display. In 1991 the city decided that two rooms were not enough, and in 1996 Libeskin...

Read more: Felix Nussbaum Haus on Qualla

Felix Nussbaum Haus: The Argument in the Corridor

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Not everyone thinks the building serves the paintings. The Times noted that the narrow tunnel and subdued lighting impose an atmosphere of oppression, and that the architecture clearly uses the idiom of displacement, loss and incomprehension. Jonathan Glancey, writing in The Guar...

Read more: Felix Nussbaum Haus on Qualla