Angelus Novus (New Angel) was a 1920 monoprint by Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, using the oil transfer method he found. Now in the collection of the Israeli Museum in Jerusalem.
In the ninth thesis of his 1940 essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History," German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who bought the print in 1921, interpreted it this way:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he will move away from something he is definitely contemplating. His eyes stared, his mouth open, his wings spread. This is how one describes the historical angel. His face was facing the past. Where we see the chain of events, he sees a single disaster that continues to pile up debris in the ruins and throw it in front of his feet. The angel wants to stay, wake the dead, and make all what has been destroyed. But the storm blows from Paradise; he has been trapped in his wing with such violence that the angel can no longer close it. The storm constantly pushed him into the future where his back turned, while the pile of debris in front of him grew to the sky. This storm is what we call progress.
Otto Karl Werckmeister notes that Benjamin's reading of the Klee New Angel image has caused him to be "an icon from the left."
The names and concepts of angels have inspired the works of other artists, filmmakers, writers, and musicians, including John Akomfrah, Ariella Azoulay, Carolyn Forchà ©  ©, and Rabih Alameddine.
In September 1940, Walter Benjamin committed suicide during an escape attempt from the Nazi regime. After World War II companion Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), a prominent Jewish mystic scholar, inherited his image. According to Scholem, Benjamin sensed mystical identification with the Angelus Novus and included it in his theory of the "historical angel," the melancholy view of the historical process as an endless cycle of despair.
In 2015, along with its solo exhibition at the Tel Aviv Art Museum, American artist R. H. Quaytman discovered that the monoprint had been obeyed by 1838 copper engraving by Friedrich Muller after Martin Luther's Lucas Cranach.
Video Angelus Novus
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Source of the article : Wikipedia
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