![]() ![]() ![]() He wrote in an autobiographical essay called "Agesilaus Santander" that year while in exile on Ibiza. Angelus Novus, he wrote, makes it possible “to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction."Īnd then in 1933, the year in which the Nazis came to power and Benjamin fled Germany for the last time, he left the painting behind. Ten years later, Benjamin cited the painting his essay on the Austrian writer and satirist Karl Kraus. No matter: in the eye of Benjamin the beholder, the young Swiss artist’s painting took on a new, and profoundly influential, resonance. Klee was not Jewish and so his Angelus Novus was unlikely to be the visual representation of Talmudic legend. ![]() In the same year Benjamin bought Angelus Novus, he set up a literary journal of the same name, “in part,” as he put itīecause of the attempt to draw a connection between the artistic avant-garde of the period and the Talmudic legend about angels who are being constantly created and find an abode in the fragments of the present. Today, after a torrid history, its home is Jerusalem, though until August 1 it can be seen in Paris as part of the Pompidou Centre’s Klee retrospective. The German-Jewish philosopher and critic hung Angelus Novus in every apartment he lived in, not quite as a guardian angel but a suggestive presence that would keep making appearances in his writings until Benjamin’s death in 1940. What was so marvellous to Benjamin about this goofy, eternally hovering angel with hair that looks like paper scrolls, aerodynamically hopeless wings and googly if rather melancholy eyes? “This,” he wrote in one of his greatest essays, “is how one pictures the angel of history.” His friend Charlotte Wolf then recalled how this “gauche and inhibited man” had “behaved as if something marvellous had been given to him." In 1921, Walter Benjamin bought Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, an oil transfer drawing with watercolour, for 1,000 marks in Munich. Below, Stuart Jeffries examines the meaning that Klee's Angelus Novus held for Benjamin. Each text in the book is accompanied by a Paul Klee illustration. The Storyteller: Tales Out of Loneliness gathers for the first time the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. ![]()
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