An exhibition of Swiss German artist Paul Klee, at New York’s Jewish Museum, is now complete, thanks to the arrival of a long-delayed loan from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.
Angelus Novus (1920) has now taken its place in “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” which opened March 20 and focuses on work from the last decade of the artist’s life. The piece, measuring just 12 inches high, was previously stuck in Israel as a result of the war that country and the US are waging in Iran, which began with major joint bombardments on February 28.
Up until Monday, it was represented by an authorized facsimile and a note in accompanying wall text reading, “Due to current conditions affecting international transport, the shipment of the original artwork has been temporarily delayed.” The facsimile was originally planned to replace the work a month into the show, since the piece, an oil transfer and watercolor on paper, is extremely light-sensitive.
The final decade of the artist’s life was itself marked by its own fraught geopolitics, with the political upheaval and global conflict that racked the world in the 1930s, prior to Klee’s death in 1940.
The work was famously once owned by German philosopher Walter Benjamin. Perhaps best known for his seminal 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin bought Angelus Novus in 1921. He would ponder the figure it represents in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” writing, “There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet.”
Angelus Novus will be the subject of a June 4 lecture by Annie Bourneuf, a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
The status of the war in Iran has been clouded by contrasting messaging from its various participants, but on Sunday both US president Donald Trump and Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in separate interviews with different TV news programs, said that the war is not over. The conflict has resulted in as many as 9,000 deaths and more than 40,000 injuries, principally in Iran but also in Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. Trump said on Monday that a ceasefire is “on life support” after Iran’s rejection of the latest US peace proposal.
With some 100 paintings and drawings, “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” remains on view through July 26. It is curated by Mason Klein, senior curator emeritus, and organized by the Jewish Museum in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Kunstmuseum Bern.
