Felix Nussbaum, Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card (1943)

"Nussbaum." The last name rang a bell. It took me a moment to remember the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum and her book "The Fragility of Goodness": that human goodness was not enough to defend us from all dangers, as she claimed, was there to see, in that illustration that took up an entire page of the heavy book I had in my hands. "Born in Osnabrück in 1904," the caption still read. Even with the name of that place I had associated memories. A town with a hundred or so thousand inhabitants in Lower Saxony where I've spent a few hours, for a business appointment. There was a house in the center, with a plaque: a Peace Center dedicated to Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "Nothing New on the Western Front", who was born there or perhaps had lived there. Of him, Felix Nussbaum, of whom I was sure I had already seen some painting, somewhere, however, I did not remember anything. What I am about to write to you, what I now know about him and his story, beyond the few lines dedicated to him in that book, is what I have found in the last couple of weeks; the result of a search that I felt I had to carry out, when, after lifting my glasses to my forehead and bringing my nose close to the paper (by now even my middle-age is a memory) I discovered, in addition to his name, what that painting represented that I had observed so dispassionately.

"A fine painting," I had so far confined myself to considering, "just a fine painting," certainly after overcoming the discomfort, I have no better term to describe it, that its subject had caused me. On the other hand, it was a work of denunciation, I told myself, made on purpose to disturb. Its author? Not Otto Dix, not Georg Grosz, I hypothesized, but someone from their milieu; another exponent of the New Objectivity. An artist who must have left Germany in good time; who might have taken refuge in America, just like Grosz, if he had dared to create such a painting. Someone, to tell the truth, closer than them to the "classicist" strand of that movement, the rebellious son of Expressionism, born and died with the Weimar Republic. Here is someone more similar to Carlo Mense, a German painter who, in Florence in 1922, had even exhibited with the group that arose around the magazine "Valori Plastici". Yes, in the setting of the figure there was something that recalled Rousseau, the way the face was framed seemed to owe itself to Van Gogh, but I also saw a lot of Italian in that work: a lot of De Chirico, in the background; even more of Carrà, in that way of suggesting with oil the effects of a fresco and in the Giottesque solidity of the volumes. One thing, however, seemed clear to me: with that fineness of touch and those modulations of light, it had to be the work of a cultured and refined painter with a solid background.

Now, after reading these last few days, I know that Nussbaum, the son of a hero of the First World War, who had become a businessman but with a passion for painting, had already attended the School of Applied Art in Hamburg when he was very young; this was only the beginning of the training that he continued when he moved to Berlin in 1923, where he enrolled at the Lewin Funcke School of Art, and then in 1924 he moved on to the Unified State Schools for Free Art and from there, in 1928, to the Academy of Fine Arts. I also discovered that Nussbaum, during this period in Berlin, had frequented one of the masters of Expressionism, Cesar Klein, who had made him know and love Van Gogh; one of his constant references, together with Rousseau, whose works he had seen during a stay in France in 1929. And De Chirico and the other Italians? Could Felix have had them in mind while painting that picture? Of course, he could. He knew them well; he had studied them, indeed, in Rome. In 1932, in fact, after the success of his first exhibitions and while he was getting closer and closer to the New Objectivity, he had won a scholarship for a two-year stay at the German Academy of Villa Massimo.

Should I be proud of those not-so-bright, "critical insights" of mine? No. Rather, I felt a certain embarrassment in discovering that what I had never seen before was such a famous work, at least in Germany. Blessed ignorance, though: it had allowed me to observe it, admiring its lines and brushstrokes, as if it had been any other painting. I'm afraid that I would not have been able to do so if I had known about Felix and his destiny, and yet I believe that this, evaluating his art as it is, is the minimum of respect we owe to someone like him; to a true painter, by vocation, who certainly did not paint for the market, for pleasure or consolation, but, first of all, despite everything, because he had a thread of life left and only knew how to live with brushes in his hand.

Yes, Felix. I feel like calling him by his first name alone, as if he were a friend, after observing for so long his hollowed-out face, made of little more than skin stretched over bones. This, in fact, is his self-portrait. He must have painted it in autumn: that tree behind it, which, speaking of Italians, seems almost a quotation from Sironi, has just been pruned. Even the atmosphere that permeates it is the livid one that November days can have in Brussels; in what, since 1937, had become his city. Before that, he had lived for a year in Ostend; before that, in Alassio and Rapallo. In Rome? He found himself well. There he was also joined by his great love, Felka Platek, a Polish painter whom he had met at the Funcke School and would later marry in 1937. Theirs was a sort of early honeymoon, but it lasted only a year; in 1933 Hitler came to power, and for Felix, scholarship or not, there was no more room at Villa Massimo. Neither there nor in Germany, where he was no longer a citizen like the others; where he no longer had the same rights as the others. A barrier had risen around him, as real as that high, grey, crumbling, and peeling wall we see behind him: not just a background, not the metaphor of Montali's isolation of the artist, but the precise representation of what had become his condition; of exclusion that, waiting to become something else and even more inhuman, had struck him and those who shared his guilt. Which one? Simply that of being Jewish.

Perhaps it is not just to quote one of Vincent's most famous self-portraits that he painted himself with a hat. Perhaps he went around the city with it on his head and his lapel raised so as not to be noticed; not to be recognized by possible informers. In this painting, however, he hides nothing from us. The symbols of his state, of his reduction to Homo Sacer, to quote Agamben, are indeed in the foreground and are the points of maximum brightness of the painting: we cannot ignore them. We must confront ourselves with the yellow of that star he wears sewn on his coat. We cannot avoid reading the double inscription (Juie, in French, and Jood in Flemish) stamped in blood-red characters on the white of the document that he holds in one hand; indeed, that he shows us. A passport, this one reproduced with such care? It is called so in the title of the painting, but it does not deserve this definition, nor that of pass: it does not allow one to go anywhere; it does not attest to freedom, it certifies its suppression.

Felix painted another detail with patience and meticulousness that deserve to be defined as Flemish. He wanted us to see him as he must have seen him, reflected in the mirror; he wanted to tell us in what hell he was forced to spend his days: I am referring to his gaze. How to define him? Feverish, alienated, or hallucinated? The right word, which includes all these and more, is scared. He is afraid, Felix, for himself and for Felka who is there with him. He is afraid because they are Jewish, it is 1943, they live in a city in Nazi-occupied Europe, and at any moment they could be sent to a concentration camp.

Many, in his place, would have stayed in a corner, paralyzed by terror. Others would have sought refuge in fantasy; they would have done anything to avoid thinking about the horror they were going through. He was an artist, and as such made art of his world, however terrible. He did not try to escape his anguish, but crystallized it in those two eyes that still look at us from the canvas; he did not let fear stop him, but gave it the shapes and colors of this painting.

In what remains a beautiful painting, because he was talented and knew how to use brushes. A beautiful painting to admire again, before remembering that he and Felka, captured in August 1944, in the last round-up that took place in Brussels before the liberation, ended up in Auschwitz, where they died shortly afterward.