Angelus Novus

Klee made this small print in 1920, a monk-faced angel scratched out with his own oil-transfer technique, a way of pressing an ink drawing onto a new sheet to get that trembling, nervous line. Its whole fame comes from who bought it. The critic Walter Benjamin acquired it in 1921 and kept it close for the rest of his life. Two decades later, writing as a Jewish exile with the Nazis at his back, he turned this angel into one of the most quoted images of the last century, the angel of history, blown backward into the future by a storm out of paradise while the wreckage of the past piles up before its eyes. Benjamin died in 1940 trying to escape France. The print passed hand to hand through friends until it reached Jerusalem, where it hangs in the Israel Museum.