Osnabrück-born Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum (1904–44) is renowned for his works, which have shades of Van Gogh and Henri Rousseau. In 1944, after several years in exile, arrest in Belgium and successful escape in France, Nussbaum was denounced and finally deported from Belgium to Auschwitz, where he died. Shaped like an interconnected series of concrete shards, with slit windows and sloping floors, the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus captures the artist's brilliance and is an early masterpiece by Daniel Libeskind.
The building uses space magnificently to illustrate the absence of orientation in the artist's eventful and tragic life. Libeskind designed it in 1998, before his much-lauded and famous Jewish museum in Berlin. One of Nussbaum's most famous paintings is Self-portrait with Jewish Pass , from around 1943. It hauntingly captures what he felt living a life on the run. The museum shares an entrance with the Kulturgeschichtliches Museum (entry included in price), which has cabinets designed by Libeskind holding works by Albrecht Dürer. The local Museum of Cultural History adjoins.
