Felix Nussbaum's Self-Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, painted in hiding in Brussels in 1943, is among the most important paintings to have survived the Holocaust and one of the most theologically charged self-portraits in the history of art. Nussbaum - a German-Jewish painter who had studied in Berlin and Rome, winning prestigious prizes before the Nazi seizure of power forced his exile - spent the war years hidden in a Brussels attic, continuing to paint in secret while his world contracted around him. He was betrayed, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered there in August 1944 with his wife Felka Platek.
The painting shows Nussbaum in a dark coat, holding his Judenausweis - the Jewish identity card issued by the Nazi occupation - while the yellow Star of David is visible on his lapel. His expression is simultaneously defiant and exhausted, meeting the viewer's gaze with a directness that refuses victimhood's passivity while making no claim to comfortable resolution. Behind him, a crumbling wall exposes a sky with no visible exit - no open window, no horizon of escape. The composition is claustrophobic but not defeated.
The visual vocabulary Nussbaum deploys has deep roots in Christian iconography, which he would have known from his extensive study of Flemish and German painting. The isolated figure marked with an identifying sign and standing before judgment - the yellow star functioning as a contemporary equivalent of the crown of thorns in its function as a sign of persecution - resonates with the Passion tradition even as it documents the specific atrocity of the Holocaust. Nussbaum was not invoking the Passion as a theological parallel but as a visual grammar, and the resonance was available for viewers who knew that grammar.
The philosophical and theological problem the painting poses is the problem of Lamentations 3:1 and Psalm 22:1 - the texts the painting's biblical references cite - which are canonical expressions of the experience of abandonment by God in the midst of extremity. 'I am one who has seen affliction under the rod of his wrath' (Lamentations 3:1) and 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' (Psalm 22:1) represent the tradition's most honest engagement with the experience that Nussbaum was living when he painted this work. He was not writing theology but making visible what these ancient cries mean when they are not figures of speech.
The Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück - his birth city - was designed by Daniel Libeskind and completed in 1998, housing the largest collection of his work. Libeskind's architecture deliberately incorporates dead ends, disorienting passages, and spaces that constrict, making the building itself a spatial argument about the experience of persecution. The museum's design extends Nussbaum's visual vocabulary into three dimensions: the claustrophobia of the 1943 self-portrait becomes the architecture of remembrance.
The painting's significance for theology lies in its refusal of both comfortable resolution and complete despair. Nussbaum looks out at the viewer - at us - with an identity card that the Nazi state designed to identify him for persecution, and he holds it as a fact rather than hiding it. The defiant clarity of that gaze, in the final year before his murder, is itself a theological statement about the dignity of the human person that no system of dehumanization can finally extinguish. It is the most important single image to emerge from an artist who died in the Shoah.