Following a protracted wartime delay, the institution has finally unveiled the 1920 monoprint, allowing audiences to gaze upon a startled avian sketch and pretend they are confronting the catastrophic accumulation of human progress.
NEW YORK — Following a protracted wartime delay that successfully maximized the piece’s aura of existential dread, the Jewish Museum has finally unveiled Paul Klee’s “Angelus Novus,” an exhibition latecomer that graciously allows modern audiences to gaze upon a frantic, wide-eyed little doodle of a bird and pretend they are confronting the catastrophic accumulation of human history. The 1920 monoprint, famously purchased by the philosopher Walter Benjamin and subsequently burdened with an entire century of critical theory, arrived in Manhattan this week after being held up in Jerusalem by literal geopolitical violence; a logistical hurdle that serves as a rather heavy-handed, if effective, curatorial prologue for an artwork whose primary function is to stare helplessly at the wreckage of the past.
To observe the angel’s panicked, statically suspended posture in the museum’s hushed gallery is to inevitably recall the claustrophobic terror embedded within Francisco Goya’s *The Third of May 1808*; though, for the more discerning viewer—a category in which one hopes, against all available evidence, to include the general gallery-going public—the drawing operates on the same frequency of esoteric despair as the unfinished, water-damaged gouache cosmologies of the 17th-century hermeticist Robert Fludd. The delay in transit merely amplifies this historical resonance, transforming a standard customs dispute into a sweeping metaphor for the inescapable brutality of time, assuming one is willing to project the sum total of Western civilization's failures onto a piece of paper that objectively resembles an owl that has just been struck by a mild electrical current.
We originally hoped to display the angel at the beginning of the survey, but we quickly realized that trapping a fragile portrait of historical catastrophe in an active warzone for several months was exactly the sort of visceral, multi-disciplinary performance art this exhibition required.
Much in the same manner that the 2006 cinematic triumph *The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift* forces the uninitiated spectator to grapple with the violent dissolution of geographical and narrative continuity, Klee’s trembling figure demands that we acknowledge our collective velocity toward ruin; a thematic thrust that remains entirely legible even if the artist himself likely spent no more than twenty minutes scratching it out. It is, perhaps, the ultimate triumph of the twentieth century’s critical apparatus that we can stand before this minor, jagged sketch of a startled creature and, without a trace of irony, feel the relentless, crushing storm of progress blowing from Paradise.