The past few days I have been researching the muse of History, Clio. That led me to read (and re-read) a highly academic article written by Stephen Bann in 1987 entitled “Clio in Part: On Antiquarianism and the Historical Fragment.” Aside from leading me to then read a wonderful essay by Nietzche entitled “On the Use and Abuse of History,” it led me to view the Paul Klee monoprint above, Angelus Novus. About which:
Walter Benjamin purchased the monoprint in 1921. Mr. Benjamin committed suicide in 1940 to escape the Nazis. In any event, in the ninth thesis of his 1940 essay “On the Concept of History”, Walter Benjamin describes Angelus Novus as an image of the angel of history and writes:
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”
A useful explanatory work of scholarship explaining the work which I recommend is Behind the Angel of History: The “Angelus Novus” and Its Interleaf by Annie Bourneuf (University of Chicago Press, 2022). The YouTube video below is also a nice summary of the monoprint and Benjamin’s connection with it.
Northcoast Antiquarian 