Object description:
Paul Klee�s singular drawing Angelus Novus, with its evocation of mystical realms, has a history that echoes the philosophical and political turbulence of its time. It was created during a breakthrough year in Klee�s career: in 1920 he had his first large-scale exhibition in Munich, was about to join the Weimar Bauhaus, and completed his artistic credo, �Creative Confession,� in which he set forth his metaphysical perception of reality. The supernatural beings that inhabit Klee�s work�during the last years of his life he created some fifty celestial angels�must be understood in that metaphysical context.
This drawing intrigued the German Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin (1892�1940), who purchased it in 1921. After World War II Benjamin�s lifelong friend, Gershom Scholem (1897�1982), the distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism, inherited the drawing. According to Scholem, Benjamin felt a mystical identification with the Angelus Novus and incorporated it in his theory of the �angel of history,� a melancholy view of historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair. In September 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide during a thwarted attempt to flee the Nazi regime. There is something almost mystical about the presence in Israel�s national museum of this pivotal work, once the prized possession of two of the greatest Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. In a curious final coincidence, Walter Benjamin�s interpretation of this drawing became the inspiration for German artist Anselm Kiefer�s sculpture Angel of History: Poppy and Memory, 1989, also in the Israel Museum collection.
