Der Triumph des Todes

Felix Nussbaum finished this in Brussels in June 1944, hiding from the Germans who had occupied Belgium. It is a dance of death: skeletons wheeling through a wrecked landscape and playing broken instruments, while winged death looks on. The organ grinder slumped among them, no longer playing, is a version of Nussbaum himself. He dated the small scrap of paper in the lower corner. Days after he set down his brush, an informer gave him up. He and his wife, the painter Felka Platek, were arrested and put on what turned out to be the last transport from Belgium to Auschwitz, where he was killed at 39. Much of his work survived, hidden by friends, and now hangs in a museum built for it in his hometown, Osnabruck.