Michael Wood on the New Angel | "Few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of past owners"

"It’s an iconic image for the 20th century, certainly, but for our own century, too", writes historian Michael Wood

Published: June 24, 2025 at 10:54 AM

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A postwar baby boomer and a late sixties student, in my adult life I naturally grew up optimistic. I believed in progress. I witnessed the civil rights movement, feminism, decolonisation, the beginning of ‘Reform and Opening Up’ in China at the end of the seventies, and the break-up of the communist tyranny in Europe a decade later.

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Not that there weren’t bad things in the world: horrific wars in Vietnam and Biafra (Nigeria), the ravages of international capitalism, the first manifest intimations of climate disaster. But, despite terrors in far-off places, it seemed that – to paraphrase Martin Luther King – the long arc of the moral universe was indeed bending to justice. But now?

On the wall in my student room I had a black-and-white copy of a monoprint by the artist Paul Klee. He served as a soldier in the German army in the First World War – a conflict in which a number of his friends, including fellow artists such as August Macke and Franz Marc, were killed. When the war was over, Klee returned to his art, and in 1920 created the picture that I put on my wall.

He called it Angelus Novus – New Angel – and it is now the subject of a compelling new exhibition at the Bode-Museum in Berlin, displayed alongside images and sculptures of angels from Berlin museums that were smashed by bombing in the Second World War. There are excerpts, too, from Wim Wenders’ famous film Wings of Desire (1987), in which two mournful angels stand watch over the people of a divided Berlin, and in which Klee’s picture is namechecked. More than 100 years on from its creation, Angelus Novus is now seen as one of the seminal artworks of the 20th century.

It shows a strange, deformed creature – a weird, scrawny, transparent homunculus, wings raised, hair like parchment scrolls, cloven bird feet, opaque eyes looking sideways at something that causes distress (or is it wonder?). Behind him are eddying clouds of chaos. The title suggests the beginning of a new order. Perhaps we might better translate it as ‘Angel of the New Age’.

At least, that implicitly was the haunting interpretation by the great cultural critic and essayist Walter Benjamin who, like so many, saw the First World War as a shattering blow to the idea of European civilisation. A friend of Klee, Benjamin was possessed by the image, and bought the monoprint in 1921; he hung it in his office in Berlin, and took it with him wherever he moved, carrying it on his exile from Germany in 1933. For Benjamin, the figure was the Angel of History – “a melancholy view of historical process as an unceasing cycle of despair”.

In 1940, trapped on the Spanish border after the Nazi invasion of France, Benjamin – a Jew – killed himself. Before he died, he gave the picture to a friend, the novelist and poet Georges Bataille. He kept the Angel safe during the remainder of the war, then passed it on to the German philosopher, musicologist and cultural theorist Theodor Adorno. As Benjamin had asked, Adorno sent it to his old friend Gershom Scholem, the great historian and scholar of Jewish mysticism. (Surely few works of 20th-century art have such a distinguished list of previous owners!).

Scholem’s widow, Fania Freud, eventually gave the picture to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, where it remains today – still dangerous, crackling (as it were) with a mysterious spiritual radioactivity. It’s an iconic image for the 20th century, certainly, but for our own century, too. That’s a heavy weight to bear for a small picture, but on it our view of history is inscribed: a warning from the past.

Here’s what Benjamin wrote about the picture in his 1940 essay Theses on the Philosophy of History: “His eyes are staring, his mouth open, his wings 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 again 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 is irresistibly propelling 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.”

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This column was first published in the June 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

Authors

Michael Wood

Michael Wood is professor of public history at the University of Manchester

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