Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus"
From the article:
"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.” "Hannah Arendt, Laurie Anderson and Wim Wenders have mused on the artwork. 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 World War II. 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.)"
oil on wooden box
by Gregg Chadwick
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