Angelus Novus

It’s a terrible painting, I thought.

In 1920, the Swiss artist and all around maniac of wandering lines, Paul Klee, painted a work that came to be known as the Angelus Novus. I’ll tell you a somewhat shameful story about the history of this painting and the history of me. I learned about the painting by reading Walter Benjamin, as have many. The Angelus Novus appears and plays an important role in Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History.

In my college years, I was so taken with the stories around the painting and with Benjamin’s analysis of it that I titled a youthful novel Angelus Novus. I thought I was being amazingly cool and sophisticated in doing so. I was, if I remember correctly, nineteen years old. No, the novel is not very good, although it was published by an indie/punk rock press in the East Village at the time called Soft Skull. Really I can’t be blamed too much for the pretentiousness. The Angelus is a seducer and the stories around the Angelus are irresistible to any young high-minded, taking-oneself-too-seriously sort of person.

Here are a few tidbits. The painting was made with a technique that I think Klee developed himself where there was a first image made in oil paint and then transferred over to another piece of paper where watercolor was added. I don’t really understand exactly how that was supposed to work, to be honest. But I love the fact that the painting is sort of a drawing and sort of oil and sort of watercolor and so fragile that it really isn’t supposed to be moved or exposed to any light for very long. More on that in a minute.

Anyway, Benjamin saw the painting and wanted it but had no money and so convinced Ernst Bloch, another Frankfurt School philosopher, to buy it for him. Why did Ernst Bloch have money? I’d have guessed that Bloch had the least money of all of them. But no matter. Benjamin got the painting and hung it in his room and declared it the best thing ever. Bloch was, at the time, working on his book about the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer, by the way. And I guess it was more recently discovered that Klee actually painted the Angelus Novus over an older engraving of Martin Luther, based on a Cranach portrait.

Later, the painting ends up with Gershom Sholem for some time and then with Georges Bataille. You can’t make these sorts of things up. The painting is basically spending time with all the figures of twentieth century mysticism and that weird mash-up of theology, Marxism, revolutionary theory, apocalyptic fears and yearnings, millennial fascinations, Kabbalah, etc. Benjamin is meanwhile basically on the run from the Nazis and will tragically end his own life in the process of this flight.

I haven’t even gotten to the embarrassing part as regards my own history with the painting. The thing is, I’d only ever read about the painting in the works of Benjamin and others. I’d never seen it. Definitely not in person and actually not even in reproduction. This was the early nineties, so I couldn’t just look it up online. So what I did instead was to form my own picture, my own mental fantasy of what it must have looked like. And then, sometime later, maybe a year or so later, I finally found a book that had a photo of the Angelus Novus. And I was very upset.

It’s a terrible painting, I thought. It’s not what I wanted it to be at all. It didn’t look like the image in my head. And I couldn’t stand the sort of curly cue hair and hands. It seemed too childlike as a drawing. Here’s the thing. I don’t actually remember anymore what I wanted the painting to look like. I just remember being in a state of shock when I looked at the photo and realized I had been writing about and fantasizing about this.

I have since of course come to appreciate Klee and to appreciate the drawing/painting. I get it now. Really, I actually do. I love the mouth, the crazy teeth, the weirdly sensuous bottom lip and the dinky bird feet and legs. I learned to understand why it was great and why Benjamin loved it so much. But I didn’t understand it for many years. I hated the painting for many years and hated to hear mention of it and hated to ever see images of it. For many years. I hated the Angelus Novus.

And then I began to love it again, the real drawing/painting, not the one in my head. When I realized how deeply the painting had embedded itself in my own life story, I wanted to see it actually in person. But for many years it was basically impossible to do so.

Scholem gave the painting to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. And by the way, Theodor Adorno had it for some time before that. But it ended up in Jerusalem, as such an angel must, I suppose. And it was never really on display because it is so fragile. And then, for the current Paul Klee show at the Jewish Museum in New York, they decided to take it out of hiding and display it. And I was in New York in early May and could have gone to see it. Except that somehow this bit of information never crossed my desk. I didn’t know it was there. I went to New York and missed the Angelus Novus.

Except that, it wasn’t there. Because of its fragility and because of the war with Iran and other difficulties it actually didn’t make it out of Jerusalem. So it wasn’t there when I was in New York. And then, a week after I left New York, the situation stabilized and it was finally shipped to the Jewish Museum Exhibit. It is there now. It waited for me to leave, and only when I was gone did it appear.

Morgan Meis has a PhD in Philosophy and is a founding member of Flux Factory, an arts collective in New York. He has written for n+1, The Believer, Harper’s Magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review and is a contributor at The New Yorker. He won the Whiting Award for non-fiction in 2013. Morgan is also an editor at 3 Quarks Daily, and a winner of a Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant. A book of Morgan’s selected essays can be found here. His books from Slant are The Drunken Silenus. The Fate of The Animals, and The Grand Valley. He can be reached at morganmeis@gmail.com.