Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” Finally Arrives at the Jewish Museum
A long-awaited loan has brought Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus” to New York’s Jewish Museum, completing an exhibition that had been forced to show an authorized facsimile in its place. The 1920 work arrived from the Israel Museum in Jerusalem after a delay tied to international transport conditions, and it is now installed in “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” which opened March 20 and remains on view through July 26.
The painting is small — just 12 inches high — but its history is unusually dense. Executed as an oil transfer and watercolor on paper, it is also extremely light-sensitive, which made the loan especially delicate. For weeks, visitors encountered a substitute version and a wall text explaining that the original had been temporarily delayed.
“Angelus Novus” is among the most discussed works in Klee’s career because of its former owner, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin bought the work in 1921 and later made it central to his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” where he described the angelic figure as facing the wreckage of the past. That association has long given the image a place not only in modern art history, but also in the intellectual history of the 20th century.
The exhibition, curated by Mason Klein, senior curator emeritus, brings together about 100 paintings and drawings from the final decade of Klee’s life. Organized by the Jewish Museum in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Kunstmuseum Bern, it places the artist’s late work against a backdrop of political upheaval and global conflict in the 1930s, years that shaped the final chapter of his career before his death in 1940.
The museum will also host a June 4 lecture on “Angelus Novus” by Annie Bourneuf, a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the exhibition, the arrival of the original work does more than fill a gap in the gallery: it restores the physical presence of an image whose meaning has been debated for more than a century.
