Sunday notes

Dear Reader,

Hello from Berlin! Where I am spending a bit of time with Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus painting at the Bode-Museum.

It is not a good painting. Surprisingly awful in fact. I wanted to see it for so long and then when I finally approached it, I burst into laughter. Whatever text might have been written to accompany it has little to do with the painting itself, which I have lovingly renamed the Chicken-Lion of History.

The story of the work is much more interesting than the work. And at least the museum goes to no lengths to present it as an art object.

In April 1920 Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus for about $14 at an exhibition in Munich. It accompanied him for twenty years of his life, and spent some time in Gershom Scholem's apartment. In 1921 Scholem gave Benjamin a birthday poem inspired by the painting:

When Walter Benjamin fled Paris, he gave the Angelus Novus painting to George Bataille to hide with The Arcades Project at the French National Librry. After the war, Bataille gave the painting to Theodor Adorno. When Adorno died 1969, the painting went to Gershom Scholem. After Gershom Scholem died in 1982, his widow gave the Angelus Novus to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1987, which is where it remains today. Here is the Angelus Novus fragment from Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History that made the Klee painting famous:

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. 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. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

And my favorite fact: Klee’s (questionable angel) covers a portrait of Martin Luther:

Surely, if there’s a comment on “the angel of history” it has to do with what the Reformation set in motion. But, I’ll save that for another time.

For now, here’s a picture of Hannah Arendt with her father, Paul.

Until soon,

Sam