Outside the Frame: The Josef Nassy Collection and the Boundaries of Holocaust Art

Abstract

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s largely unknown Josef Nassy Collection is situated at the intersection of multiple cultural histories of migration and oppression. Josef Nassy (1904–76) was an artist of African, Sephardi, and European descent from the Dutch Caribbean colony of Suriname. While interned in Belgium and Germany from 1942–45, he created a poignant visual diary that brings into view unfamiliar facets of the Nazi camp system as well as unexpected points of intersection between Jewish and African diaspora experience. This article traces the story of the Nassy Collection’s wartime creation and postwar reception to illustrate how entrenched categories of art and victimhood can obstruct our access to the past. In contrast to this reception history, Nassy’s artworks encourage a relational approach to Holocaust studies, one that is attuned to the entanglement of European and colonial wartime experience and the diversity of Jewish identities.