“PAINT ME AS YOU WOULD A SHADOW”: Felix Nussbaum’s Long Hide-and-Seek With the Third Reich

A decade earlier Nussbaum had been the bright hope of Osnabrück, the surgeon’s son who won the Rome Prize and sketched street scenes on the Via Appia. But late in 1933 Alfred Rosenberg, Hitler’s cultural commissar, strode through the German Academy in Rome to inspect its “racial hygiene.” Modernists and Jews were persona non grata; Felix was both. Overnight he and his Polish-born partner, the painter Felka Platek, fled Italy with two suitcases of clothes and a portfolio of half-dry oils.