The
exhibition Paul
Klee: Irony at Work, which has recently opened at the Pompidou
Centre in Paris, features more than 250 paintings and works on paper
by the wily, capricious Swiss modernist. 
It
comes just two and a half years after Tate
Modern’s Klee blowout of 2013 – and while you can quibble
with the Pompidou’s decision to mount another retrospective so
soon, the Paris show has one drawing that London didn’t get.
Angelus Novus, barely known during Klee’s life, has become the
artist’s most famous work largely thanks to its extraordinary
provenance, passing through the hands of four important modern
philosophers before entering the collection of the Israel Museum in
Jerusalem. 
It’s
now in Paris, and its arrival is nothing short of an event.

Like
most critics, I shy away from the words ‘mythic’ or ‘legendary’
when describing works of art – in most cases, those words are
better left to marketing departments. 
But
Angelus Novus, perhaps more than any other artwork of the last
century, really has exceeded the boundaries of the gallery: it is an
image more fully understood as a myth than as a work of art.

Wings
of desire

Klee
was still a young artist when he created his winding, eccentric angel
in the years after World War One. 
He
was conscripted into the imperial German forces during the conflict,
but spent much of his service away from the front, which allowed him
to paint and draw throughout WW1. Later, in 1921, he would join the
faculty of the Bauhaus in Weimar and then Dessau. 
But
between the end of the war and his acceptance of a teaching job, Klee
secured a small income from a Munich art dealer named Hans Goltz –
who presented a major show of Klee’s work in 1920.

That
show, which featured more than 100 works of Klee’s, included for
the first time the mystical monoprint that would absorb a generation
of thinkers. 
The
angel stands suspended like a dummy or a marionette in a mucky yellow
field; his wings are grand but inadequate, and he seems trapped
between forward and backward motion. That suspension appealed greatly
to Walter Benjamin, who was already making a name for himself as a
heterodox thinker about politics and art. 
He
bought the artwork in the spring of 1921 for 1,000 marks – a major
sum for a writer who had endless money troubles – and hung it in
his office in Berlin: a guardian angel, though of a vengeful
sort.

Benjamin
was not a systematic thinker, who propounded principles and laws to
be tested and affirmed. 
He
wrote discursively, dialectically, feeling his way to new ideas
through experiment and contradiction. 
In
this, he and Klee – an unconventional modernist, as comfortable
with Bauhaus-approved function as with woozy Surrealism – were one
of a kind. 
Benjamin
became something like a Klee superfan, and a healthy proportion of
the philosopher’s thinking about art – notably his conception of
“aura,” a numinous quality proper to art that is lost in the
process of mechanical reproduction – can be traced to his
engagement with Klee’s sprightly, dynamic paintings and
drawings. 
None
informed his work more than Angelus Novus, a work he frequently
called his most treasured possession.

But
both artist and philosopher had their careers interrupted by the rise
of Nazism: one severely, the other mortally. 
Klee
was booted from his teaching job in 1933 and moved to the Swiss
capital, Bern; more than a dozen of his paintings would end up in the
Nazis’ notorious Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937. 
As
for Benjamin, he had already left Germany just before Hitler’s
accession to power, first for Spain, then for Paris. 
His
beloved Angelus Novus was stuck in Berlin, but a friend brought it to
him in 1935: the year of the adoption of the Nuremberg laws, which
redefined German citizenship and left the Jewish philosopher a
stateless man. 
When
war broke out, Benjamin began writing On
the Concept of History, a fragmentary text – a set of notes,
really – that tried to make sense of the world’s downward
spiral. 
One
image in particular served as his touchstone.

“A
Klee painting named Angelus Novus,” Benjamin wrote in the ninth
thesis, “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away
from something he is fixedly contemplating.” 
(It
is in fact not a painting at all: Klee’s oil transfer technique, a
method of his own invention, involved slathering a piece of tracing
paper with printer’s ink, then placing a drawing paper underneath
and scratching the top paper with a needle to make an impression on
the one below.) 

Benjamin
went on: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage hurling it before his feet.” Then Benjamin takes a
turn for the clouds: “A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got
caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close
them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which
his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows
skyward.”

Angelus
Novus would have been unknown to Benjamin’s readers; ever since he
bought it from that Munich gallery, Klee’s work had been out of
view. 
But
the angel, in Benjamin’s vision, was nothing less than History
itself, helplessly turned the wrong way as it gazes at the wreckage
of the past. It’s a pessimistic, even fatalistic understanding of
the state of the world, one that would have been anathema to leftwing
thinkers of just a decade before. But history had caught up with
Benjamin since his first encounter with the angel in Munich in
1920.

The
present was debris-strewn already; as for the future, who could
imagine? Remember that, before the late 1930s, many Jews and
left-wing Germans still held out hope that the Soviet Union could
offer a model for a just future once the Third Reich fell. With the
Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, that last hope was shot. 
For
Benjamin, the kind of historical progress promised by Marxist theory
– the certainty that class struggle would necessarily lead to a
shining, beautiful future – had been exposed as a sham. Only the
angel remained, to survey the rubble of the past, and be borne
helplessly into the future.

Angel
come home

Less
than a year later, in a town on the border between Spain and France,
Benjamin swallowed handfuls of morphine pills: a massive, lethal
dose. 
The
fall of France spelled disaster for Jewish refugees like him, and
Benjamin, who had already been imprisoned in a transit camp, had no
hope left for the future. But before he left Paris, he confided his
papers and his angel to the author Georges Bataille, who somehow kept
them safe in the Bibliothèque Nationale until the liberation. 
After
the war, Benjamin’s possessions were passed onto his fellow
Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno, another great Jewish
pessimist; it then came to the Kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem; and
finally Scholem’s widow offered the curly-haired angel to the
Israel Museum in 1987. Having been written about and obsessed over
for so long, Klee’s traumatised seraph at last emerged to the
public – in a country that Benjamin, a complicated Zionist, could
only conceive in the ether.

Klee
was not Jewish. But Jewish mysticism, and the philosophical and
historical traditions associated with the predominantly Jewish
Frankfurt School, have become so intertwined with his youthful
masterpiece that Israel seems the almost inevitable place for the
slack-mouthed angel to call home. He very rarely travels; when the
curators of Documenta, the art megashow held every five years in the
German city of Kassel, wanted to include the work in their 2007
edition, they had to make do with a photocopy. 

So
the return of Angelus Novus to Paris, the city in which Benjamin
conceived his most trenchant and tragic principles of history, offers
a very rare chance to see the artwork behind the myth, and still to
let the myth propel the artwork forward. 
The
angel survives amid catastrophe, powerless but undefeated,
assiduously pushing through an endless and intensifying storm. 
“This
storm,” Benjamin wrote, “is what we call progress.”