The Haunting Gaze of History: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus and the Angel of Progress

“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...”
— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Introduction: A Small Painting with an Immense Legacy

Among the countless works of 20th-century art, few have acquired the mythic status of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920). At first glance, the artwork is modest: a small monoprint measuring just over 12 by 9 inches, composed of ink, watercolor, and oil transfer on paper. The figure—an abstract, birdlike angel with spindly limbs and wide, bewildered eyes—floats against a blank background. There is no narrative, no action, no context.

Yet this seemingly simple image has inspired a century of philosophical interpretation, political reflection, and spiritual speculation. Most famously, it served as the basis for Walter Benjamin’s iconic “angel of history”, a figure that remains one of the most poignant symbols of modern disillusionment.

But Angelus Novus is not merely a footnote in the history of thought. It is a masterful visual paradox—equal parts divine and absurd, hopeful and tragic, archaic and futuristic. In this article, we’ll explore the origins, interpretations, and enduring relevance of Paul Klee’s mysterious angel, and why this strange figure still haunts the modern imagination.

1. Who Was Paul Klee? A Brief Artistic Biography

Paul Klee (1879–1940) was a Swiss-German artist and teacher associated with several major movements in modern art, including Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. He was deeply interested in color theory, music, symbols, and the metaphysical.

Born in Switzerland and raised in a musical family, Klee originally considered a career as a violinist before turning to painting. His work is notable for its playfulness, childlike simplicity, and deep intellectual undercurrents. He was also a celebrated instructor at the Bauhaus, where he developed a unique theory of artistic pedagogy that emphasized intuition and abstract form.

Klee’s output was prolific, producing over 9,000 works. Despite their variety, a consistent thread runs through them: a fascination with transformation, dream logic, and the spiritual nature of visual experience.

It’s within this context that Angelus Novus was born—not as a definitive statement, but as an enigmatic fragment, one of many visions from Klee’s deep well of symbolic imagination.

2. The Artwork: What Does Angelus Novus Look Like?

• Title: Angelus Novus (Latin for "New Angel")

• Date: 1920

• Medium: Monoprint with watercolor and ink

• Dimensions: 31.8 cm × 24.2 cm (12.5 in × 9.5 in)

• Current location: Israel Museum, Jerusalem

The figure in Angelus Novus defies conventional beauty. It has an oddly constructed face—wide-eyed, stylized, and mask-like. Its spiky, outstretched wings resemble fingers or mechanical parts. It floats or hovers, but without a defined setting or direction. The composition is flat, centralized, and frontal, giving the figure a confrontational, unsettling stillness.

Klee, as usual, provides no clear explanation. The Latin title, “New Angel,” adds to the ambiguity. Is this a prophetic figure? A fallen deity? A symbol of a new era or a new failure?

3. Walter Benjamin and the Angel of History

No discussion of Angelus Novus can ignore the towering presence of Walter Benjamin, the German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, and theorist who purchased the artwork in 1921.

Benjamin saw in Angelus Novus the perfect embodiment of his growing disillusionment with history and progress. In 1940, as he fled Nazi persecution across the Pyrenees (he would die by suicide shortly thereafter), he wrote his final and most famous work, Theses on the Philosophy of History. In the ninth thesis, he interprets Klee’s image as follows:

“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...”

Benjamin's angel of history is hurled into the future with its back turned, unable to look away from the wreckage of the past—what we call “progress” is to the angel a single, unending catastrophe.

This haunting image distills Benjamin’s critique of linear historical thinking, of Enlightenment optimism, and of Marxist inevitability. For him, history wasn’t a clean narrative of improvement—it was a pile of ruins, blown by the storm of modernity.

Thus, Angelus Novus became the visual anchor of a philosophical worldview—one shaped by exile, destruction, and a desperate hope for redemption.

4. The Angel as Archetype: More Than Just Benjamin

While Benjamin’s interpretation is the most famous, Angelus Novus has sparked many other readings, both academic and poetic.

🧠 The Angel as Modernity’s Witness

Some see the angel as a metaphor for the artist or intellectual in times of crisis: helpless, observant, burdened with understanding but unable to intervene. Klee himself lived through the collapse of the German Empire, the trauma of WWI, the rise of fascism, and personal exile due to the Nazis’ branding of his work as “degenerate art.”

🌌 The Angel as Cosmic Messenger

Others interpret the work in spiritual or mystical terms. In traditional Christian iconography, angels are messengers of God, but Klee’s angel appears lost, ambiguous, even dazed. Is this an angel of a new age, uncertain of its role? Or a fallen one, detached from divine purpose?

🤖 The Angel as Machine

Klee’s mechanical style—angular, robotic, stylized—also suggests a techno-spiritual fusion. Some critics have argued that Angelus Novus anticipates the posthuman or cybernetic angel: an artificial creature built by a world losing its soul to machinery.

5. Art as Resistance: Klee, Degenerate Art, and Exile

Klee’s own life resonates painfully with the themes Angelus Novus would come to represent.

In 1933, after the Nazis rose to power, Klee was dismissed from his teaching post in Düsseldorf. His art was labeled “degenerate” alongside works by Kandinsky, Chagall, and others. He returned to Switzerland, where his health deteriorated, and he died in 1940.

The Nazis’ campaign against modern art was not just aesthetic—it was ideological. Artworks like Angelus Novus were seen as subversive, foreign, and un-German, embodying everything fascism sought to erase: ambiguity, introspection, spiritual questioning, and critique of power.

In this light, Angelus Novus becomes more than a personal symbol. It becomes a quiet act of resistance—a visual refusal to conform to authoritarian narratives of purity and destiny.

6. Why Angelus Novus Still Matters in the 21st Century

In our own age of technological upheaval, social fragmentation, climate anxiety, and political extremism, the figure of the angel of history continues to resonate.

⚖️ Facing the Past

We live in a time when history is being revisited, rewritten, and often weaponized. The angel reminds us that unprocessed trauma becomes cumulative catastrophe. What we refuse to face in the past returns as a crisis in the present.

🚀 Questioning Progress

The ideology of constant progress—technological, economic, social—is being questioned. Is newer always better? Are we moving forward or accelerating into deeper instability? The angel's backward gaze cautions us: don’t mistake motion for direction.

🎨 Art as Witness

Klee’s angel suggests the enduring role of art in bearing witness, resisting simplification, and creating spaces for reflection. In a world flooded with images, a silent, haunting figure still has power.

7. A Contemporary Afterlife: Influence and Homage

The legacy of Angelus Novus has extended far beyond art history. Writers, filmmakers, and philosophers have invoked the image again and again.

Notable Influences:

• Susan Buck-Morss and Giorgio Agamben have written extensively on the angel’s political symbolism.

• The artist Anselm Kiefer has created installations that reference Benjamin’s thesis and Klee’s aesthetic.

• In music, composer Brian Ferneyhough wrote a chamber piece titled Angelus Novus.

• John Berger, the art critic, described the painting as a metaphor for “the stilled, explosive heart of suffering.”

Even tech and AI ethicists reference Benjamin’s angel as a way to think about unintended consequences of innovation—how our digital progress may be creating new ruins we barely understand.

Conclusion: The Angel’s Gaze Is Ours

Angelus Novus endures because it asks a question we haven’t yet answered:

What happens when the future rushes forward faster than our ability to process the past?

In its strange, abstract, unsettling form, Klee’s angel becomes a mirror—not of God, but of ourselves. It is the witness we refuse to be, the silence we try to fill, the face we avoid meeting.

It reminds us that art is not escape, but confrontation. And perhaps, in seeing the world through the angel’s eyes—dazed, haunted, and wide open—we begin to understand our own place in the ruins of history.