1904

Felix Nussbaum was born in Osnabrück on December 11 as the second son of the Jewish hardware dealer Philipp Nussbaum and his wife Rahel.

1922—1928

Nussbaum left the Osnabrück Realgymnasium without graduating and studied painting and graphic arts at the Hamburg School of Applied Arts. From 1923, he continued his studies at the Lewin-Funke School and at the United State School of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. He achieved his first successes with exhibitions at the Goldschmidt Gallery and the gallery of the Wertheim department store.

1929

Participation in the exhibitions Women in Distress in Berlin and in the Fourth Great Art Exhibition Kassel with the Self-portrait with Mask, Landscape with Balloon and Berlin Street.

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1934

Die Prussian Academy of Arts awarded him the Grand State Prize for his painting Der tolle Platz (The Great Place) and granted him the Villa Massimo Scholarship, a residency in Rome. A fire in his sublet studio in Berlin destroyed almost all of his early work.

1933—1935

On May 17, Felix Nussbaum was forced to leave the Villa Massimo after an argument and fight with a fellow artist. Nussbaum and his partner, Felka Platek, did not return to the German Reich, but emigrated via Paris to Oostende. Despite the Nazi takeover, his drawings graced the covers of the art magazine Der Querschnitt.

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1935—1937

Felix Nussbaum and Felka Platek stayed in Belgium. On November 16, 1935, he received a Belgian foreign passport. He worked as a freelance artist, porcelain painter and illustrator. In 1937, they moved into an apartment on Rue Archimède in Brussels.

1938

Exhibition of his works in Amsterdam and with the Freie Künstlerbund  in Paris.

1939

Shocked by the pogrom night, Nussbaum's parents fled from Cologne to Amsterdam. They were murdered together with his brother and other relatives in 1944 in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp. Rue Triste was exhibited in Brussels.

1940

Following the invasion of Belgium by German troops, Nussbaum was arrested in Brussels in May and deported as an “unwanted alien” to the Saint-Cyprien camp (France). In September, Nussbaum fled back to Brussels.

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1942-1944

The Nussbaums went in hiding in the mansard on Rue Archimède. Felix Nussbaum hid his paintings in depots and had a secret studio on Rue General Gratry. His artistic legacy was now being created, such as the portrait with the emergency title Self-Portrait with Jewish Passport. In the 1980s, it became an icon of persecution and the Shoah.

1955

Five works by Felix Nussbaum were shown in the exhibition Five Osnabrück painters in Osnabrück. His cousin Auguste Moses-Nussbaum, who lived in Israel, searched for the family and found the picture repositories in Brussels. The legal dispute over the return from the deposits lasted until 1970.

1971

Neither a major museum in Israel nor in Germany was interested in the paintings. Only a small group of committed people in Osnabrück organized the first exhibition in the Dominican Church. Year after year, there were more exhibitions and interest in his work was growing.

1998

On July 16, the Felix Nussbaum House designed by Daniel Libeskind opened in Osnabrück. Felix Nussbaum is now a world-famous painter.

2017

The autobiography of Auguste Moses-Nussbaum Journey with Two Suitcases was published by Wallstein Verlag. She reported on the rediscovery of the works of her cousin Felix Nussbaum in Brussels. Her sons brougt the book to the Center for Persecuted Arts in person.