A Paul Klee painting famously owned by the philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin is currently stuck in Israel as a result of the war waged by Israel and the United States in Iran. The work was to make its American debut earlier this month.
As noted in a Hyperallergic review and then reported out by the New York Times, Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) was supposed to appear in “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” an exhibition that opened last week at the Jewish Museum in New York. Instead, the work is represented by an authorized facsimile and a note in the wall text that reads: “Due to current conditions affecting international transport, the shipment of the original artwork has been temporarily delayed.”
James S. Snyder, the director of the Jewish Museum, told the Times that the Israel Museum’s loan of the work “remains operative” and will materialize “when the time is right.” Of the situation, he said, “We knew we had to be prudent and patient and to wait until conditions were appropriate.”
The Jewish Museum had already produced an authorized facsimile as part of its planning for the exhibition. The reproduction was slated to take the artwork’s place in the show after a month of the original being on view, given its status as an “extremely light-sensitive” oil transfer and watercolor work on paper. But the understudy got the call to star in the premiere, given the state of geopolitics now. About the scenario on the other side of the supply chain, the Times reported: “A spokesman said the Israel Museum does not discuss the shipping of artwork.”
As for Angelus Novus, it was acquired in 1921 by Benjamin, a friend of Klee’s who mused on the painting’s main figure in an essay titled “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In that text, from 1940, Benjamin wrote: “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.”
A little later, Benjamin compares that one single catastrophe to a storm blowing in from Paradise. He writes: “The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”
