Angelus Novus

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Angelus Novus (Paul Klee)
Angelus Novus
Paul Klee , 1920
Watercolor drawing
31.8 x 24.2 cm
Israel Museum, Jerusalem

Angelus Novus is a watercolor drawing made by Paul Klee in 1920 using ink and oil pastel on brownish paper. The sheet measures 31.8 × 24.2 centimeters and has been in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem since 1989 . It is best known through Walter Benjamin , who related several of his writings to the picture.

Image description

Angelus Novus is considered one of the early pictures in the group of motifs of angels created by Paul Klee , which includes around fifty works created between 1915 and 1940. In Klee's own words, these are creatures that are only in the “anteroom of the angelic community”. Its execution is described as a shorthand-style handwriting with the effect of a bubbling, carefree cheerfulness, in which the joke has triumphed over the suffering. What is striking about the drawn figure is the oversized head, the outstretched arms, which only slightly suggest a pair of wings, and the rudimentary legs with three toes reminiscent of birds' feet. The eyes, nose, the open mouth with visible teeth, ears and the throat are designed. The hair is shown like curly rolled up paper strips and at the same time looks "disheveled by the storm". The figure's gaze goes out of the picture space and past the viewer.

The drawing is signed and dated lower right. The title Angelus Novus was translated as New Angel by Walter Benjamin . In the context of Paul Klee's group of motifs, however, he can also be understood as a young angel , an angel that has yet to become.

Provenance

The picture was exhibited in May / June 1920 in the Paul Klee retrospective of the Hans Goltz Gallery in Munich . Walter Benjamin bought it in May or early June 1921 for 1,000 Reichsmarks (equivalent to 281 euros in today's currency) and initially placed it with his friend Gershom Scholem . In November 1921 Scholem sent the drawing to Berlin, where Benjamin set up a new apartment. In September 1933 Benjamin went into exile in Paris while fleeing the National Socialists and left the picture behind; friends were able to bring it to him in 1935. When Benjamin had to leave the city before the German Wehrmacht invaded in 1940, it stayed behind again. The French writer Georges Bataille hid it with the estate in the Bibliothèque nationale de France . After Benjamin's suicide in 1940 and towards the end of the war, the drawing and other documents were sent to Theodor W. Adorno in New York , who later passed it on to Gershom Scholem, as Benjamin requested in a will from 1932. The Angelus Novus hung in his apartment in Rechavia , Jerusalem, until Scholem's death , when it was given to the Israel Museum as a gift from Fania and Gershom Scholem, John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder . The picture is in a fragile condition and could therefore only be shown in one copy at the Essen exhibition Die Engel by Paul Klee .

reception

The angel of history

Walter Benjamin used the Angelus Novus for multilayered reflections and thought images. Paul Klee's work made an impression on him early on. In October 1917 Benjamin wrote that Klee was the only modern painter who touched him and thus motivated him to study the basics of painting. His wife Dora gave him Klee's demonstration of the miracle in 1920 (watercolor and pen, plaster primer on cardboard, 26.4 × 22.4 cm, since 1962 in the Museum of Modern Art , New York). He received it with enthusiasm: “I love him very much and this is the most beautiful of all the pictures I saw of him.” Shortly after purchasing the Angelus Novus , Benjamin wrote letters to Gershom Scholem, to whom he initially gave the picture to keep had associations about Kabbalah , angelology and demonology and described the figure as a "newly created Kabbalah protector". As a messenger of the Kabbalah , the angel has a firm place in the communication between the two in the following years. In the course of 1921 Benjamin also planned to publish a magazine with contentious philosophical and literary texts, which he gave the title Angelus Novus . However, the project was not implemented. The image was also included as “the other in man” in the essay on Karl Kraus, completed in February 1931, and in the autobiographical reflections of Agesilaus Santander in August 1933 .

The figure was particularly emphasized in the text On the Concept of History , in its IX. Thesis describes Benjamin as the angel of history :

“There is a picture of Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted on it, who looks like he's about to move away from something he's staring at. His eyes are wide open, his mouth is open and his wings are spread out. The angel of history must look like this. He has turned his face to the past. Where a chain of events we appear, as does he , a single catastrophe which unceasingly piles wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. He would like to linger, wake the dead and join what has been broken. But a storm is blowing from paradise, which is caught in its wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him inexorably into the future, on which he turns his back while the heap of rubble grows towards the sky in front of him. What we call progress is this storm. "

- Walter Benjamin: On the concept of history (1940), thesis IX

Angelus Novus in music, film and literature

The Icelandic singer, actor and composer Egill Ólafsson released a solo album in 2001 called Angelus Novus . Both the entire album and the title song of the same name refer to the work of Paul Klee.

In 2003 the Ensemble Sortisatio recorded the composition N-gl by John Wolf Brennan, which relates to the painting, on the CD 8 Pieces on Paul Klee .

The American artist and musician Laurie Anderson deals with the Angelus Novus in her song The Dream Before on the album Strange Angels from 1989. The story is set in Berlin , probably in reference to Walter Benjamin's birthplace.

In addition, Wim Wenders feature film Der Himmel über Berlin from 1987 refers to the same and Klee's picture.

The Austrian theater group TheaterAngelusNovus (1981–1988) under the direction of Josef Szeiler , who v. a. occupied with texts by Bert Brecht , Heiner Müller and Homer , made reference to the picture and the text by Walter Benjamin.

A series of publications, Engel der Geschichte, by the wood cutter HAP Grieshaber, refers directly to Walter Benjamin's text. Twenty-three issues appeared between 1964 and 1981.

The Afghan author and director Aboozar Amini (* 1985) named his 2014 short film about two Afghan children and their family on the run to Turkey, Angelus Novus - The Journey into the Unknown .

literature

  • Peter Bulthaup (Ed.): Materials on Benjamin's theses 'On the concept of history'. Contributions and interpretations. Suhrkamp pocket book science 121, Frankfurt am Main 1975. ISBN 978-3-518-07721-4
  • Horst Schwebel : Redierunt angeli - revision of the angel myth? Benjamin's interpretation of the "Angelus Novus" by Paul Klee. In: Horst Schwebel, Andreas Mertin (ed.): Images and their power. On the relationship between art and the Christian religion. Verlag Katholisches Bibelwerk, Stuttgart 1989, ISBN 3-460-32821-5 , pp. 52-65.
  • Ester Muchawsky-Schnapper: Paul Klee's Angelus Novus, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Sholem. In: Israel Museum Journal Spring 1989, pp. 47–52.
  • Johann Konrad Eberlein : "Angelus Novus". Paul Klee's picture and Walter Benjamin's interpretation. Rombach, Freiburg i. Br. 2006, ISBN 3-7930-9280-1 .
  • Otto Karl Werckmeister : Walter Benjamin's Angel of History, or the Transfiguration of the Revolutionary into the Historian. In: Critical Inquiry 22 (1996), No. 2, pp. 239-267.
  • Otto Karl Werckmeister: Left Icons. Benjamin, Eisenstein, Picasso - After the fall of communism. Hanser, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-446-19136-5 , pp. 25-31.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Israel Museum, Jerusalem
  2. ↑ Lothar Lang (ed.): Paul Klee. The twittering machine and other grotesques , Eulenspiegel Verlag, Berlin GDR, 1982, p. 206
  3. ↑ Ingrid Riedel: Angel of Change: The Angel Pictures Paul Klees , Herder Verlag, Freiburg im Breisgau, 2000, ISBN 978-3-451-05452-5 , p. 36.
  4. ↑ Ingrid Riedel: Angel of Change: Die Engelbilder Paul Klees , p. 35.
  5. ↑ A fatal angel , Johann Konrad Eberlein , article in the FAZ on July 20, 1991 (PDF; 4.9 MB)
  6. ^ Kobi Ben-Meir: Dialectics of Redemption. Anselm Kiefer's The Angel of History: Poppy and Memory , p. 8 ( Memento from September 26, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 1.8 MB), accessed on December 8, 2011
  7. ^ The angels by Paul Klee , Folkwang-Museum Essen
  8. ^ MoMA Collection: Paul Klee. Introducing the Miracle
  9. ^ Walter Benjamin: Collected Letters , edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 volumes, Frankfurt a. M. 1995-2000, Volume II, p. 93
  10. ^ Walter Benjamin: Collected Letters , edited by Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, 6 volumes, Frankfurt a. M. 1995-2000, Volume II, p. 160
  11. ^ Walter Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften , edited by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Werkausgabe edition suhrkamp), Frankfurt a. M. 1980, Volume I.2: Treatises, pp. 697 f.
  12. ↑ Theater is a waste of time. Der Standard, November 17, 2008
  13. ↑ Angels of History (HAP Grieshaber)
  14. ↑ ANGELUS NOVUS (2014-2015) - Muyi Film. Archived from the original on June 12, 2018 ; Retrieved June 6, 2018 (American English).
  15. ^ Films for one world: Angelus Novus. Journey into the unknown. Retrieved June 6, 2018 .