Archangel

Klee had painted an angel now and then, most famously the small Angelus Novus of 1920. In the late 1930s, back in Bern, angels became a whole family in his work, and their titles read like a roll call: Angel in the Making, Angelus Dubiosus, Angel from a Star. This one, from 1938, is among the large ones, a metre tall. The Lenbachhaus reads the late angels as beings on the line between life and death, painted by a man who sensed his own end approaching while Europe moved toward war. Klee worked in oil and paste on cotton glued over coarse jute, and the rough ground has soaked up the thin colour beneath, which the curator Rosel Gollek described as the many colours of a fading rainbow. Over that glow stand heavy black bars, set in a clear order that rises from the angel's body to a sign pointing upward, crowned as if by a flame.