'He stands slack-jawed, his four front teeth protruding from his open mouth like uneven stalactites. His head is topped by a mess of curls, which look more like sheets of parchment than strands of hair, and his jug ears stick so far out from his cylindrical face that they’re almost flush with his jiggly eyes. His dainty chicken feet, joined to spindly legs, are complemented by large, grand wings – spread open, but tangled and ungainly. Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, a 1920 oil transfer drawing with watercolour, is a fearsome but fragile seraph: afloat, aghast, going who knows where. “This,” wrote Walter Benjamin, the philosopher who first owned the monoprint, “is how one pictures the Angel of History.”
'“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus,” Benjamin wrote in the ninth thesis, “shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating.” (It is in fact not a painting at all: Klee’s oil transfer technique, a method of his own invention, involved slathering a piece of tracing paper with printer’s ink, then placing a drawing paper underneath and scratching the top paper with a needle to make an impression on the one below.) Benjamin went on: “His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet.” Then Benjamin takes a turn for the clouds: “A storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”'
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