Behind the Angel of History: The "Angelus Novus" and Its Interleaf

Bourneuf, Annie

ISBN 10: 0226816702 / ISBN 13: 9780226816708

Published by University of Chicago Press, 2022

About this Item

Seller Inventory # 389489682

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Behind the Angel of History: The "Angelus Novus" and Its Interleaf
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication Date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226816702
• ISBN 13: 9780226816708
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

The story of artist R. H. Quaytman’s discovery of an engraving hidden behind a famous artwork by Paul Klee.
 
This book begins with artist R. H. Quaytman uncovering something startling about a picture by Paul Klee. Pasted beneath Klee’s 1920 Angelus Novus—famous for its role in the writings of its first owner, Walter Benjamin—Quaytman found that Klee had interleaved a nineteenth-century engraving of Martin Luther, leaving just enough visible to provoke questions.
 
Behind the Angel of History reveals why this hidden face matters, delving into the intertwined artistic, political, and theological issues consuming Germany in the wake of the Great War. With the Angelus Novus, Klee responded to a growing call for a new religious art. For Benjamin, Klee’s Angelus became bound up with the prospect of meaningful dialogue among religions in Germany.
 
Reflecting on Klee’s, Benjamin’s, and Quaytman’s strategies of superimposing conflicting images, Annie Bourneuf reveals new dimensions of complexity in this iconic work and the writing it inspired.
 

About the Author

Annie Bourneuf is professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible, which was also published by the University of Chicago Press and won the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award.