Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” (1920) is the Mona Lisa of early modernism, a famous work whose history gives it a fabulous mystique. It was purchased by Walter Benjamin, who hung it in his German study, then in his Paris office when he was in exile, and wrote about it in his famous last essay “On the Concept of History” (1940). Surviving the war while Benjamin did not, after being in the possession of Theodor Adorno and (by Benjamin’s will) gifted to Gershom Scholem, the painting entered the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. A fragile work on paper, it is rarely exposed to the public for long.
The story told by Annie Bourneuf in Beyond the Angel of History: The Angelus Novus and its spacer begins in 2015 when American artist Rebecca Quaytman makes an astonishing discovery. Klee had pasted his work, an oil and watercolor drawing on paper, directly onto an old engraving, identified by a date in the 1520s and the initials LC. No previous account mentions that hidden under the Klee is an engraving of Martin Luther based on Lucas Cranach’s portraits. Given that Luther’s anti-Semitic ideas were adopted by the Nazis, what did Benjamin have in mind when he referred to this Klee in his essay on historiography? The engraving is not easy to see, either in Bourneuf’s reproduction or, at least in my experience, when viewing the image itself. It is therefore natural to wonder if Benjamin knew about it. But answering this question may matter less than understanding this process in which the hidden engraving might guide the interpretation of Benjamin’s influential essay. “On the Concept of History” hangs between Scholem’s Jewish mysticism and Adorno’s Marxism, so “Angelus Novus” may be a key to understanding the author’s thoughts.
Bourneuf’s masterful and incredibly lucid commentary deals with Matthias Grünewald, whose Issenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, France, contains a figure resembling this angel. It also discusses the debates between Benjamin and Scholem on the philosophy of Martin Buber and the broader implications of Benjamin and Scholem’s questions on Jewish cultural identity. And I, too, am involved in this process of interpretation, as my own previous publications suggest how to prolong this difficult story. As I noted in a test 2015, Quaytman is the daughter of Harvey Quaytman, a Jewish painter who astonished Leo Steinberg by using the cruciform in a dechristianized way in abstract compositions. Here, the already complex analysis of Benjamin’s Jewishness becomes more complicated. Even though Benjamin was unaware of the presence of this engraved image, it enters his interpretation of “Angelus Novus” from the margins. If Benjamin didn’t see this hidden image, what does that say about his visual acuity. Perhaps, however, he saw it but deliberately did not talk about it. Or, finally, since the Klee is only an example, perhaps this detail does not matter in evaluating his historiographical argument. Some books resolve the debate. This advances but does not resolve the discussion. Instead, it brilliantly shows that the meaning of this famous image can still be hidden.
Beyond the Angel of History. THE Angelus Novus and its spacer by Annie Bourneuf (2022) is published by University of Chicago Press and is available online and in bookstores.
