A Rarely Seen Angel With a Lesson From History

The angel is kept in a state of darkness, because it is delicate and vulnerable to light. The subject of a century of philosophical debate, and the inspiration for works of poetry, theater, music and film, the angel, called “Angelus Novus,” is a powerfully enigmatic figure. When this artwork by Paul Klee is presented it in public, it is considered an event.

Klee’s 1920 watercolor print will have a rare appearance starting on May 8, as part of the exhibition, “The Angel of History: Walter Benjamin, Paul Klee and the Berlin Angels 80 Years After World War II,” at the Bode-Museum in Berlin.

On loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Klee’s work — which is about the size of a standard notebook page — will be on show through July 13, a shorter-than-typical exhibition run, to protect it from too much exposure.

The German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin, who owned “Angelus Novus” for nearly two decades, wrote one of his final texts about the angel, just before he died by suicide in 1940. He saw the angel as a witness to an imminent cataclysm. “This is how one pictures the angel of history,” Benjamin wrote in notes that would later be published as “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

“His face is turned towards the past,” he wrote of the angel. “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.”

Since then, thinkers and artists as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Laurie Anderson and Wim Wenders have mused on the artwork.

The subsequent fame of “Angelus Novus,” may seem surprising given the modest nature of the artwork, which depicts a curious angel with ambiguous features. Its handlike wings might be spreading or contracting — either about to take flight or making a gesture of surrender. The curls of its wild hair look like ancient scrolls. Its placid smile reveals a set of jagged teeth.

Klee, a Swiss-German artist linked to the expressionist movement, created “Angelus Novus,” in 1920, during a short but anxious period of peace between the two world wars.

Annie Bourneuf, a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who wrote a book about “Angelus Novus,” said the angel was partially a response to other modernist artists of Klee’s era who were reviving religious symbolism from the Germanic medieval tradition, in “hopes of creating a new religion for modernity.”

“It’s this snaggletoothed, little bird-footed homunculus caricature,” Bourneuf said. “Many artists at this time were trying to make new altarpieces. Klee tended to take a very skeptical distance from the sort of grandiose projects of many of his expressionist peers, so I think it’s actually kind of mocking those hopes.”

Neville Rowley, the curator of the Bode-Museum exhibition, said “Angelus Novus” held a particular relevance for the public on the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.

“Klee made this angel in the aftermath of the First World War and there’s a permanence of this vision of history as a succession of catastrophe,” Rowley said. “It relates also to the Second World War and unfortunately, to today.”

Benjamin had bought the picture in Munich in 1921. He took it with him when he moved to Berlin, and brought it to Paris in 1933 when, as a Jew, he went into exile during tumultuous years when he tried to outrun the Nazi terror in Europe.

In 1940, after Germany invaded France, Benjamin tried to escape to Spain on foot, through the Pyrenees. When French authorities stopped him at the border and threatened to hand him over to the Gestapo, Benjamin swallowed an overdose of morphine.

Benjamin had left “Angelus Novus” behind in Paris, entrusted to his friend, the French philosopher Georges Bataille, who hid it in the French National Library, where he worked. After the war, he sent it to Theodor Adorno, the German philosopher, who was living in the United States.

Once Benjamin’s will was read, however, it turned out that he had intended it for his friend Gershom Scholem, a philosopher and scholar of Jewish mysticism. “Angelus Novus” was sent to Scholem in Jerusalem, where it remained until he died and bequeathed it to the Israel Museum.

Since then, “Angelus Novus” has been exhibited only periodically, but it has resurfaced frequently in popular culture. In Wim Wenders’s 1987 movie “Wings of Desire,” two angels stand watch over a Berlin that has been divided in two after the war. They overhear a woman in the Berlin State Library, in what was then West Berlin, reading a summary of Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” (A 6-minute loop of a clip from the film will be screened in the Bode-Museum.)

The American avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson incorporated parts of a passage from Benjamin’s “Theses” into her song, “The Dream Before,” which appeared on her 1989 album, “Strange Angels.” Tony Kushner, the playwright, also took inspiration from Benjamin’s notion of history for his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1991 theatrical epic, “Angels in America.” The author Ruth Ozeki touches on Benjamin’s angel in her 2021 novel, “The Book of Form and Emptiness.”

Rowley, the curator, who specializes in early Italian art, also chose to exhibit Klee’s angel with a couple of other angels from history, such as a sculpture by Giovanni Battista Bregno, and a reproduction of a lost painting by Caravaggio.

But he didn’t want to “fill the exhibition with dozens of angels,” he said, which would “detract from the main image.” It was more a question of assembling objects that highlighted the impact of “Angelus Novus,” he added.

One image in the show that follows that thread is a famous photograph of Dresden, Germany, taken from the top of the city hall after Dresden was flattened by Allied aerial bombing at the end of World War II. In the foreground is a statue from the building’s tower that seems to look over the ruined landscape, like Benjamin’s angel of history, viewing the “wreckage upon wreckage.”