Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” Is Stranded in Israel, Leaving a Facsimile at the Jewish Museum
Visitors arriving at the Jewish Museum in New York for “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” are met with an unusual sight: a gallery built around a single, iconic work — and an empty space where the original should be. The exhibition opened on March 20 as scheduled, but its centerpiece, “Angelus Novus” (1920), has not arrived. The small oil and watercolor work on paper remains in Israel, delayed by disrupted air travel in the region amid the Iran war.
A museum notice explains the absence in plain terms: “Due to current conditions affecting international transport, the shipment of the original artwork has been temporarily delayed.” In its place, the Jewish Museum is showing an authorized copy, installed within a recessed red panel. The substitution is not merely a stopgap. The exhibition’s plan already accounted for the work’s fragility: the original can be displayed for only four weeks at a time because of its extreme sensitivity to light, with the facsimile intended to rotate in.
On view through July 26, “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” concentrates on the German artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) and his later production, much of it shaped by the tightening vise of European fascism. Klee was not Jewish, yet he became a target of Nazi persecution. A newspaper branded him a “typical Galician Jew,” and the campaign against him escalated quickly: he was dismissed from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, his paintings and monographs were burned, and works were seized from museums and private collections. His art was also swept into “Degenerate Art,” the notorious 1937 exhibition in Munich that sought to publicly discredit modernism.
Klee created “Angelus Novus” in 1920 using his distinctive oil-transfer method. He coated a sheet of paper with black oil paint, then used an etching needle to transfer the drying pigment onto a second sheet, producing a drawn image that he subsequently worked over in watercolor. Roughly A4 in size, the figure’s wide eyes and splayed forms have become one of the 20th century’s most charged images — in large part because of the work’s most influential owner.
In 1921, the German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin purchased “Angelus Novus.” Their biographies would later echo each other in grim ways. After the Third Reich took power in 1933, Benjamin fled to France, while Klee left for Switzerland, the country of his birth. In 1940, Benjamin died by suicide when he faced deportation in Spain, three months after Klee died from complications of scleroderma.
Benjamin’s reading of the work would ultimately fix its place in cultural memory. In an essay written in his final year, he described the figure as an “angel of history,” staring back in helpless horror at the accumulating wreckage of the past as the storm of progress “irresistibly propels him into the future.” Since 1987, the work has been owned by the Israel Museum, where it is kept under strict climate controls. Most recently, it appeared in “The Angel of History,” a 2025 exhibition at Berlin’s Bode-Museum.
The present delay underscores how quickly geopolitics can reshape museum plans — and how the meaning of an artwork can sharpen under pressure. Although Klee made “Angelus Novus” in the aftermath of the First World War and Benjamin interpreted it during the Second, the image’s association with humanity’s recurring appetite for destruction continues to feel uncomfortably current. In 2025, Bode-Museum curator Neville Rowley told The New York Times, “There’s a permanence of this vision of history as a succession of catastrophe.”
There is also an irony embedded in the Jewish Museum’s temporary solution. Benjamin famously argued that mechanically reproduced works lack the “aura” — the singular presence — of an original. Yet for now, it is precisely a sanctioned reproduction that stands in for one of modernism’s most aura-laden sheets of paper, while the original remains grounded by a war that has made the logistics of cultural exchange newly fragile.
The disruption is not isolated. After US and Israeli forces launched their war on Iran at the end of February, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art closed and canceled two forthcoming exhibitions — one on Tom Wesselmann and another on post-1940 Jewish art — along with related shipments from New York and Vienna. Elsewhere, three works could not be returned to the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal for a Carl Grossberg exhibition. In Dubai, Art Dubai was postponed from April to May, and the group show “Global Positioning System” at the Jameel Arts Centre was also delayed.
For institutions built around the careful choreography of loans, climate requirements, and calendars, the missing “Angelus Novus” is a reminder that the art world’s most meticulously planned narratives can still be interrupted by forces far beyond the gallery walls.
