Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” Can’t Reach New York, Leaving a Facsimile to Open the Jewish Museum’s Major Show
A small, famously charged work on paper by Swiss German artist Paul Klee (1879–1940) was meant to be one of the quiet shocks of the Jewish Museum’s new exhibition in New York. Instead, “Angelus Novus” (1920) has remained in Israel, unable to travel amid disruptions to international transport caused by the war waged by Israel and the United States in Iran.
The painting was scheduled to make its American debut in “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” which opened last week at the Jewish Museum. In the galleries, the museum has installed an authorized facsimile in place of the original, accompanied by a note that reads: “Due to current conditions affecting international transport, the shipment of the original artwork has been temporarily delayed.”
James S. Snyder, the Jewish Museum’s director, said the loan from the Israel Museum is still expected to happen. “The Israel Museum’s loan of the work remains operative,” Snyder told the New York Times, adding that it will materialize “when the time is right.” He described the museum’s approach as one of caution: “We knew we had to be prudent and patient and to wait until conditions were appropriate.”
The Jewish Museum’s contingency plan was already built into the exhibition’s design. Because “Angelus Novus” is an oil transfer and watercolor on paper — and, according to the museum, “extremely light-sensitive” — the institution had planned to show the original for only a month before swapping it out for the authorized facsimile. With the original now unable to leave Israel, that rotation has effectively been reversed: the facsimile has taken the opening slot, and the original is expected to arrive only when transport conditions allow.
On the lending side, the Israel Museum has not offered details about the logistics. According to the Times, a spokesperson said the museum does not discuss the shipping of artworks.
The delay has an added resonance because “Angelus Novus” is not simply a Klee highlight; it is a work with an unusually dense intellectual afterlife. The painting was acquired in 1921 by German philosopher and cultural theorist Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who became closely associated with it and later used its central figure as a lens for thinking about history.
In his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin described Klee’s angel in terms that have echoed through 20th-century political thought: “There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched.” Benjamin went on to frame the figure as the “Angel of History,” facing the past and seeing “one single catastrophe” where others perceive a sequence of events — a catastrophe that “unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble.”
Benjamin’s text continues with the image of a storm blowing in from Paradise, driving the angel into the future while the debris grows higher: “That which we call progress, is this storm.”
For now, the Jewish Museum’s exhibition proceeds with a surrogate where the original was meant to hang — a reminder that even the most carefully negotiated museum loans can be overtaken by geopolitics, and that the movement of art remains inseparable from the conditions of the world it travels through.
