Masquerade (Carnival Group) (Mummenschanz)

While in exile in Belgium following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s, the German Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum produced many self-portraits in which he took on different personas, costumes, and exaggerated facial expressions.  Masquerade is one of Nussbaum’s most complex and significant paintings from this period. The composition reflects the influence of the Belgian artist James Ensor (1860–1949), whose images of masked characters in carnival settings often comment on their alienation from society.

Comprised of six figures, each a self-portrait, this painting suggests the statelessness Nussbaum and his fellow Jews must have felt while living as political and religious refugees in the late 1930s. Masquerade may also generally allude to the demise of European modernism, which by the end of the 1930s witnessed the arrest, deportation to concentration camps, and execution of "degenerate" artists and their supports in those territories under Nazi control. Nussbaum’s barren urban setting where nature is dead, buildings uninhabited, and communication impossible—note the broken radio tower—underscore that assault.