Boten of the intermediate world: About the importance of angel figures in the work of Paul Klee

Angels are not part of the inventory of modern art. The now time lacks the theological foundation on which angels could take their place. And yet angels play an important role in the oeuvre of one of the most important, but above all most popular artists in modernity. It is Paul Klee. In his artistic career, he created around 70 representations of angels to his last works from 1940, the “Death Angel” and the “still life”, in which he quoted his own sheet – with an angel.

The “angel of death”, created immediately before his own death, which has been annoying for years due to serious illness, suggests that the angels in Klee’s work are very personal angels, did not offer heaven so much as an intermediate world. Klee was strange to uniqueness, as he once said, “what was in between as the right meeting”.

Cuddly or arrogant

In this way, the angels can reflect all kinds of conditions at Klee, they can be good or perhaps also a little clever, cuddly or arrogant. Above all, they can take on a wide variety of forms and among them with which the viewer does not associate anything angry. This applies especially to the works of 1939, which surprisingly makes up the most productive in Klees, work with no less than 1253.

The wings are mostly only indicated, just as triangles; And when a leaf is titled “An old musician does angry”, it is clear that there is no angel presentation, but the reflection on the angelic, something that was still anchored in general language in Klee’s time.

In the beginning, the angels at Klee were definitely beings from another world. “Angel brings the desired” is the name of the earliest representation from 1913, where the angel actually drives down from above and gives something to the kneeling earth man; Only what, it becomes not recognizable. The “desired” one is clearly in the completely earthly representation seven years later, “a genius serves a small breakfast”. Customized twice, then said genius – which is probably as female – a red heart, literally “in the right place”.

It is the same year in which Klee also emphasizes one of his most famous works, the “Angelus Novus”, initially in the oil -conveyoring process that he tried and later again as a pencil drawing. He is currently-a rare opportunity-to be visited as a loan from the Israel Museum in the Bode Museum. There he forms the core of the cabinet exhibition “The Angel of History”.

What distinguishes the “Angelus Novus” from all later angels of Klees is the carefully executed face. However, it can be shared whether it has wings, because what the angel raises, in the gesture of frightening or blessing, are his arms, which turn out into five fingers.

This figure has become Klee’s most famous angel, which means that he has become a Benjamin angel, detached from Klee and his work, about the circumstance of Walter Benjamin’s profound interpretation by Walter Benjamin in his theses. But nothing of what Benjamin attributes to the angel is unmistakably understandable.

Benjamin’s figure of thinking

Benjamin’s figure of thinking is completely the “angel of history”: “But a storm blows from the paradise that has caught in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no longer close it. This storm drives him unstoppably into the future he turns his back while the ruin in front of him grows to the sky. What we call progress is this storm.”

Klee has never commented in such a direction. A clear reading was strange to him, who loved the ambiguous; who was aware of the precarious situation of human existence, the more after the outbreak of his own, invaluable disease. However, the fact that Benjamin acquired the “Angelus” in the year of origin and then preserved as a precious symbol and as a memorian for throughout his life – and long before he formulated the late history -philosophical interpretation – speaks for one, if you will, speaks soul mate of thinker and artist.

Incidentally, the angels are not isolated in Klees oeuvre. Again and again he depicted artists and geniuses and always reflects his own artist existence in these figures, in which the figure of the angel has its share. So if it is expressed by connoisseurs of the work that in the years of his illness he had created the angels for a dialogue, it means: to talk. In the angel comes to a view of what the artist can give beyond everything that can be explained, that he is that he is a messenger from another, the immediate hardness of the creative world.

Or not: because some angels are literally falling out of the sky. And can be questioned, such as the “Angelus dubiosus”, which can be considered “more doubtful” and as “more dubious”. Such a doubt, such an openness of the interpretation is Klee’s work. “I am not at all tangible on this side,” is the well -known, famous self -science. And what suited better than the intangible, ghost -like angels!