The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Paul Klee · oil transfer and watercolour on paper, an upright sheet a little larger than a page of a book · one frontal figure, an angel with a large head crowned by curls drawn as rolled scrolls, two large eyes slid to one side, an open mouth with a row of teeth, arms raised and opened into wings, small legs ending in claws, on a ground of thin warm wash paler about the figure · 1920 · the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, since the late 1980s · the unit scored is the one sheet, as Klee made it and as it now stands
Mode
German modernist drawing and watercolour of about 1920: the child’s hieroglyph, the poetic title and the oil transfer line, applied to a sacred figure
Mythos
The angel, the messenger between the divine and the human, rebuilt as estranged: the sacred become fragile, awkward and unable to deliver
Phase
A single figure, held in one state of startled unease; made in 1920
Presentation
Oil transfer and watercolour on an upright sheet a little larger than a page of a book; one figure filling most of its height; a thin wash ground paler about the figure
Register
Startled unease, half comic and half terrible, with a strange tenderness
Scale
One figure on one small sheet, to be held close rather than faced across a room
Governing Proposition
One small sheet, one figure, no setting. An angel stands frontal and nearly symmetrical, the stance of an icon, and its eyes slide away to one side; its mouth is open on a row of teeth, its arms are raised into wings as much in startle as in flight, and its line arrives blurred and granular from the oil transfer, as if the figure surfaced rather than was drawn. The wager of the sheet is that the messenger of the sacred, the oldest figure of a sent and certain meaning, can be rebuilt from the means of a child’s drawing and the accident of a printing process and still hold: the sacred arriving worn, at one remove, unable to meet our eyes.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Paul Klee made Angelus Novus in 1920 and entered it in his own catalogue of works under that year; the title, the new angel, is his own. It is oil transfer and watercolour on paper, an upright sheet a little larger than a page of a book, and it is in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, where it came in the late 1980s, after the deaths of Gershom Scholem and his widow. The unit scored is the one sheet, as Klee made it and as it now stands. Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis “On the Concept of History”, written in 1940, and the long reception it began are context and reach; they are not the work, and the sheet is not credited with what the text says.
One figure fills most of the height of the sheet, with no setting. It stands frontal and nearly symmetrical about the vertical axis. Its head is large, wider than the body below it, and crowned by hair drawn as rolled or curling scrolls. Its two large eyes have their pupils set toward one side, so that the gaze slides away from the viewer. Its mouth is open on a row of teeth. Its arms are raised and opened into wings, and its small legs end in clawed, bird-like feet. Behind it lies a ground of thin warm wash, paler in a zone about the figure, so that it stands in a kind of light.
Its few organs are nearly all required. Without the scroll curls the head becomes a mask and loses its one sign of the learned or the sacred, the hint of rolled paper and of writing. Without the sideways eyes the angel is a frontal icon, steady and benign. Without the open mouth the alarm, or the hunger, goes; without the raised wings it is no angel but a startled child. What yields is the line in detail. The transfer leaves smudges and stray marks by its nature, and some of what is on the sheet is accident, kept rather than required; the feet and the lower body are summary, and could be otherwise without loss. It is a sheet of strong necessity in its organs, loose in its incidentals.
Movement II
The figure’s contours are made by oil transfer, Klee’s method from about 1919. A drawing is traced with a stylus over a sheet coated with black oil paint and laid face down on the support, so that the line arrives blurred, granular and marked with stray smudges from the pressing hand. Colour is then washed over and around it in watercolour. The hand stands at one remove from its own line: the angel is drawn, and printed, at once.
That is the knowledge the form holds. Drawn directly in pen, the angel would be a sharp caricature. Through the transfer it seems to surface rather than to be drawn, half present, as if printed from memory, and the sacred arrives already worn. Klee commands the method: its line is controlled in its course and accidental in its texture, and he keeps the accidents where they serve, a smudge by the face, a granular contour on the wings. The wash is laid with tact, warmer away from the figure and paler near it. The head, with its scrolls, eyes and teeth, is precise inside its naivety.
The costs are charged plainly. The sheet is deliberately rough, much of the body is summary, and the making, though fitted to the meaning, is not load-bearing at every point, as it is in the greatest works of the hand. Klee’s command of colour, seen in the Tunisian watercolours of 1914, is barely engaged here. And a good part of what the sheet knows survives in a reproduction in line alone: the watercolour ground gives the aura, but it supports the figure rather than constituting it.
Movement III
The frontal, nearly symmetrical stance is the stance of an icon, and it is set against the sliding eyes. The conflict between the icon and the glance is the instrument of the sheet’s unease: a figure built to face us that will not look at us. Its one law reaches the most distant elements, the iconic symmetry and the accidental smudge, and both obey it, the sacred figure rendered by means that undo its authority. The comic and the terrible obey it too. The curls and the claws, the teeth and the wings, are drawn in one idiom of the child’s hieroglyph, and none breaks register.
What this discloses can be held as true. The messenger of the sacred, the oldest figure of a sent and certain meaning, is shown uncertain, alarmed and half comic, its eyes averted, its mouth open as if to cry out or to devour, its wings raised as much in startle as in flight. The angel after 1918 is not a bearer of tidings but a creature caught by something it sees. The disclosure is held below the upper band because it is suggested rather than articulated: most of what is given is a state, unease, astonishment, a strange tenderness, and not a meaning stated.
The elevation is of one cold kind, the uncanny. At its true size the figure is small, and its effect is a check, a stare returned askew, not transport. The eyes and the teeth give a flicker of dread inside something otherwise naive and almost playful, and that mixture is the sheet’s one height. It rises once, at the first look, and the gaze sustains it; the pale aura gives a faint radiance and the raised wings a moment of lift. There is nothing of grandeur, scale or terror at full force. The range the law governs is as narrow, one figure, one idiom, one tone, and narrowness is not coherence.
Movement IV
Benjamin bought the sheet in Munich in 1921 and named his planned journal of 1921 and 1922 after it. In the ninth of his theses of 1940 he made it the angel of history: “Der Engel der Geschichte muss so aussehen” (“The angel of history must look like this”); and, of the storm that drives it, “Das, was wir den Fortschritt nennen, ist dieser Sturm” (“This storm is what we call progress”). The thesis gives the angel a face turned toward the past and history as one catastrophe heaping wreckage at its feet. The sheet shows a face turned toward us, with its eyes slid away. No wreckage, no storm and no past are drawn on it. Both are stated here, and the sheet is scored.
So scored, the archetype is partly built. The angel is among the deepest figures the West owns, messenger, guardian, destroyer, annunciator, and a clumsy creature with paper curls, rolling eyes and claws is made to carry it: the messenger estranged and unable to deliver. The Latin title makes the claim, and the Jewish tradition of new angels created each moment to sing and pass into nothing fits the image without being shown in it. A single static figure builds less than a myth set in action. The swerve is real, a sacred figure rebuilt from a child’s means and a printing accident, but by 1920 the idiom and the method were Klee’s settled ones, used across many sheets, and the stake had been laid in the drawings of the war years and the Tunisian watercolours of 1914.
This is what holds the work below Tier IV: a disclosure suggested rather than articulated, a single small sublime, an archetype held in one static figure, a swerve that is an instance of Klee’s turn rather than the turn, a reach that runs almost wholly through a text, and few orders of reality held. Its nearest in period, Kandinsky’s Yellow-Red-Blue (7.8), stands a tenth above it, winning the making, the form, the sublime and the swerve, while the angel wins the archetype and the depth of return. Self-Portrait with Physalis (7.8), a small German-language modernist work of the decade before, stands a tenth above it on the same terms. Angel of the North (7.8), the same figure at the opposite scale, stands a tenth above as well: its scale and force outweigh the sheet’s age and literature.
Movement V
Benjamin kept the sheet in Berlin and in exile. When he fled Paris in 1940 he left it in the care of Georges Bataille, and after the war it passed through Adorno to Scholem, as Benjamin had willed; after the deaths of Scholem and his widow it came to the Israel Museum. At a hundred and six years it is whole: one sheet, never cut, its figure and ground legible, with no loss known. Its survival through exile and war is part of its record. As an image its presence is very wide, reproduced on the covers of books of philosophy across the world, but that presence is largely Benjamin’s; as an object, watercolour on paper and sensitive to light, it is seldom seen.
A century of return has left an unusually large literature for a sheet of its size, and the questions are still open: whether the angel looks back or forward; whether the figure is terrified, astonished, hostile or comic; what the scroll curls are; what an open mouth with teeth means in an angel. Its reach is wide and particular, but it runs through a text: Scholem wrote a poem to it, “Gruss vom Angelus”; Heiner Müller’s poem “Der glücklose Engel” answers it; Laurie Anderson’s song “The Dream Before” (1989) sets the thesis. In visual art no line of artists is shown taking the sheet as a starting point, and Klee’s own late angels of 1939 and 1940 are the larger body on the figure. Beside Rilke’s Duino Elegies (8.9), the angel as terrible and estranged made in the same years, it stands lower on every axis: the Elegies articulate what the sheet suggests. Beside Magritte’s The Son of Man (7.6), another image whose fame outruns its making, it stands a tenth above.
The orders it holds are the sacred, the self in its startled and estranged look, perhaps writing and learning in the scroll curls, and faintly the natural order in the claws and the animal mouth, held in one figure and lightly. History, the burden its reception has laid on it, is on the sheet only as the date of an image made after the war. The figure describes the form. The angel still stands frontal in its pale light, its wings still raised, and its eyes still slide away.
Act III · The Twelve
Tested part by part, the few organs of the figure hold. Take away the scroll curls and the head becomes a mask, losing its one sign of the learned or the sacred, the hint of rolled paper and of writing. Take away the sideways eyes and the angel becomes a steady, benign icon; its whole unease lives in that displaced gaze. Take away the open mouth with its teeth and the alarm, or the hunger, goes. Take away the raised wings and it is a startled child, not an angel. What yields is the line in detail: the oil transfer leaves smudges and stray marks by its nature, some of them kept rather than required, and the feet and lower body are summary.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The sheet discloses something that can be held as true: that the messenger of the sacred can be shown as uncertain, alarmed and half comic, an angel whose eyes will not meet ours and whose mouth is open as if to cry out or to devour; that the angel after 1918 is not a bearer of tidings but a creature caught by something it sees; and, through the transfer line, that the modern image of the sacred arrives already worn, as if reprinted or remembered. What holds the axis below 8 is that this is suggested rather than articulated, given as a state of unease and astonishment, and that the proposition about history which made the image famous is not drawn on the sheet.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The elevation is real and of one cold kind, the uncanny. Met at its true size, a sheet a little larger than a page of a book, the figure is small, and its effect is a check, a stare returned askew, not transport. The eyes and the teeth give a flicker of dread inside something otherwise naive and almost playful, and that mixture is the sheet’s one height. It rises once, at the first look, and is sustained by the gaze rather than renewed across the field. The pale wash about the figure gives it a faint radiance, and the raised wings a moment of lift. There is nothing of grandeur, scale or terror at full force: a real, single, small sublime.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The angel is among the deepest figures the West owns: messenger, guardian, destroyer, annunciator. Here it is partly built, not merely evoked. A clumsy creature with paper curls, rolling eyes and claws is made to carry the archetype rather than illustrate it: the messenger estranged and unable to deliver, the sacred become fragile and awkward. The Latin title makes the claim, the new angel, and the Jewish tradition of new angels created each moment to sing and pass into nothing fits the image without being shown in it. The sheet holds the archetype in one static figure without narrative, and so builds less than a work that sets the myth in action. The angel made strange is load-bearing, not decoration.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The inheritance is the angel of Christian art from the Annunciation to the Baroque putto; German Expressionism, beside which Klee had stood with the Blaue Reiter; and the avant-garde turn toward child art, the art of the insane and the “primitive”. The departure is a sacred figure rebuilt from the means of a child’s drawing and the accident of a reproductive process, so that the hand stands at one remove from its own line. That is a real swerve. What holds it is that by 1920 the idiom was Klee’s settled one, the transfer method a year or so old in his practice and used across many sheets; the stake had been laid earlier, in the drawings of the war years and the Tunisian watercolours of 1914.
Score: 7.4 / 10
Another form would change what the sheet knows. Drawn directly in pen, the angel would be a sharp caricature; the transfer line, blurred and granular, makes it seem to surface rather than be drawn, a figure half present, as if printed from memory. That is the sheet’s knowledge: the sacred arriving worn and at one remove. The frontal, nearly symmetrical stance of an icon is set against the sliding eyes, and the conflict between the icon and the glance is the instrument of its unease. The small scale belongs to it: an image to hold close. What holds the axis is that much of what the sheet knows survives in a line reproduction; the wash ground gives the aura but supports rather than constitutes.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: a century of return and an unusually large literature for a sheet of its size. The questions it sustains are real and still open: whether the angel looks back or forward, and whether the famous reading of it describes the sheet or wills a misreading; whether the figure is terrified, astonished, hostile or comic; what the scroll curls are, paper, text, the rolls of the Torah or merely hair; what an open mouth with teeth means in an angel; how the image changed for its owners through exile and war. It yields to return at two distances, the whole figure and the grain of the line. The discount is plain: much of the return is to the text, and the figure, once seen, is largely seen.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is German modernist painting and drawing of about 1920. The sheet’s own force is modest: it reorganises nothing that Klee’s work of 1914 to 1922 as a whole had not already reorganised, the fusion of sign, child’s drawing and poetic title, and within that work it is one strong instance among many; his late angels of 1939 and 1940 are a larger body on the same figure. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Walter Benjamin named his planned journal of 1921 and 1922 after it; Gershom Scholem wrote a poem to it; Benjamin’s ninth thesis made it the figure of the critique of progress; Heiner Müller’s poem “Der glücklose Engel” answers it; Laurie Anderson’s song “The Dream Before” (1989) sets the thesis. That reach runs through a text into thought, poetry and song; no line of artists is shown taking the sheet as a starting point.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at a hundred and six years. Form: whole. One sheet, never cut, its figure and ground legible, with no loss known. Its survival through exile and war, left in Paris in 1940 and carried at last to Jerusalem, is part of its record. Presence: as an image, very wide, reproduced without end on the covers of books of philosophy across the world; but that presence is largely Benjamin’s, and fame is presence, not proof. As an object it is seldom seen, since watercolour on paper is sensitive to light. Fabric: oil transfer and watercolour on paper, the most fragile of the usual supports, charged lightly since its condition is not known to be poor. The usual figure for its span, not the widest.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of watercolour and the oil transfer method, to the same anchors as every medium. The method is Klee’s own and he commands it: the transfer gives a line controlled in its course and accidental in its texture, and he keeps the accidents where they serve, a smudge by the face, a granular contour on the wings. The wash is laid with tact, warmer away from the figure and paler near it, so that the angel stands in a soft light. The head, its scrolls, eyes and teeth, is drawn precisely inside its naivety. What holds the axis well short of the top: the sheet is deliberately rough, much of the body is summary, and Klee’s command of colour is barely engaged here.
Score: 8.0 / 10
One law governs the whole. Take the two most distant elements, the most iconic and the most accidental: the frontal symmetry of the figure, the stance of an icon, and the smudges and stray marks of the transfer. Both obey the sheet’s one law, the sacred figure rendered by means that undo its authority. The comic and the terrible obey it too: the curls and the claws, the teeth and the wings, are drawn in one idiom of the child’s hieroglyph, and none breaks register. The ground does not illustrate a place but gives the figure its aura, and figure and ground agree. The range governed is narrow, one figure, one idiom, one tone of startled unease, and narrowness is not coherence.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The orders held are few and lightly held: the sacred, in the angel; the self, in its startled and estranged look; perhaps writing and learning, in the scroll curls; and, faintly, the natural order, in the bird’s claws and the creature’s animal mouth. They are held in one figure, not listed. History, which its reception has made the figure’s whole burden, is not on the sheet except as the date of an image made after the war. A single figure on a small sheet cannot hold labour, the state or the family, and does not try. That is what holds the axis lowest of the twelve; the figure describes the form, and the floor is met.
Score: 6.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Bottomless Well, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.0. One sheet whole after a hundred and six years, its survival through exile and war part of its record; a century of return and open questions about the gaze, the curls and the mouth; a transfer line commanded in its course and kept in its accidents; and one law, the sacred figure rendered by means that undo its authority, under which the icon’s symmetry and the stray smudge agree.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.4: the sacred, the estranged self, perhaps learning, and faintly nature, held lightly in one figure; history only as the date of the image. Next above it, The Sublime at 7.2: one small, cold sublime of the uncanny, a stare returned askew, rising once. Then The Swerve at 7.4: a real turn, but one instance within an idiom and a method already settled in Klee’s work by 1920.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 8.0, The Inner Law at 8.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 7.6, The Archetypal Deep at 7.9, The Swerve at 7.4 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, and at The Swerve, 7.4, both below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.4. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 92.7, an average of 7.73 that displays 7.7. The work stands where its aggregate places it: in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the sheet as an image and as a history, from reproductions and the literature; without first-hand knowledge of its present condition, of the colour of its ground in the original, which reproductions give variously, or of how often it is shown, so that where a judgment turns on these it is held more loosely. The work scored is the one sheet of 1920, oil transfer and watercolour on paper, as Klee made it and as it now stands in the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. Walter Benjamin’s ninth thesis “On the Concept of History” (1940) and the reception it began are context and reach, credited under Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable, and are not scored as the work. The words quoted are the title, Klee’s own, and two sentences of the ninth thesis, given in the original with English beneath. Facts that could not be verified are not given or are stated as open, among them the sheet’s exact dimensions and its number in Klee’s catalogue, whether the inscription on the mount is in his hand, whether chalk or ink are also present, the year of the gift to the museum, where in Paris the sheet was kept in 1940, how often and for how long it is shown, and the years of Scholem’s poem and of Müller’s.