| Angelus Novus | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Artist | Paul Klee |
| Year | 1920 |
| Type | monoprint |
| Dimensions | 31.8 cm× 24.2 cm(12.5 in× 9.5 in) |
| Location | Israel Museum, Jerusalem |
Angelus Novus (New Angel) is a 1920 monoprint by the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, using the oil transfer method he invented. It is now in the collection of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
The artist's friend Walter Benjamin, a noted German critic and philosopher, purchased the print in 1921. When he had to flee Germany in 1933, he took it with him into exile. Before he tried to flee further when the Nazi's invaded France, Benjamin entrusted Klee's drawing, together with other important papers, to librarian Georges Bataille, who hid it at his place of work, the French National Library. Benjamin himself was caught at the Spanish border and committed suicide in September 1940. After World War II, Bataille gave the print to Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt, who per Benjamin's last will sent it on to Gershom Scholem, a distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism, who had emigrated to Palestine in 1923. [1] According to Scholem, Benjamin felt a mystical identification with the Angelus Novus and incorporated it in his theory of the “angel of history,” a melancholy view of historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair. [2]
In the ninth thesis of his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, Benjamin describes Angelus Novus as an image of the angel of history:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. [3]
In 2015, in conjunction with her solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, American artist R. H. Quaytman discovered that the monoprint had become adhered to an 1838 copperplate engraving by Friedrich Müller after a portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach. [4] [5]
The name and concept of Klee's "New Angel" has inspired works by other artists, filmmakers, writers and musicians, including John Akomfrah, Ariella Azoulay, Amichai Chasson, Carolyn Forché, Laurie Anderson, Rabih Alameddine, Daniel Boyd and Ruth Ozeki. [6] [7] [8]
In 1997, German art historian Otto Karl Werckmeister included Klee's "New Angel" image among his selection of "icons of the left." He discussed Benjamin's use of the painting as an important contribution to its iconic status. [9]
Paul Klee was a Swiss-born German artist. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually deeply explored color theory, writing about it extensively; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory, published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are held to be as important for modern art as Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting was for the Renaissance. He and his colleague, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture in Germany. His works reflect his dry humor and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Gershom Scholem was a German-born Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
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Rachel Elior is an Israeli professor of Jewish philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Jerusalem, Israel. Her principal subjects of research has been Hasidism and the history of early Jewish mysticism.
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" or "On the Concept of History" is an essay written in early 1940 by German philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. It is one of Benjamin's best-known, and most controversial works.
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Yehuda Liebes is an Israeli academic and scholar. He is the Gershom Scholem Professor Emeritus of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Considered a leading scholar of Kabbalah, his research interests also include Jewish myth, Sabbateanism, and the links between Judaism and ancient Greek religion, Christianity, and Islam. He is the recipient of the 1997 Bialik Prize, the 1999 Gershom Scholem Prize for Kabbalah Research, the 2006 EMET Prize for Art, Science and Culture, and the 2017 Israel Prize in Jewish thought.
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