Of Angels and Doubles: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus from Berlin to Jerusalem
Lecture
The James L. Weinberg Distinguished Lecture
Dr. Annie Bourneuf, Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will discuss Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920) and its doubles—from the pencil drawing of the bird-footed creature that Klee kept when he sent the watercolor to his first big solo show, to the exhibition facsimiles that the watercolor’s present owner, the Israel Museum, often has displayed in its stead to guard against light damage. Since this work owes its fame to the writings of its first owner, German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin, whose most cited text, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” explores what the circulation of copies does to their originals, it seems to Bourneuf like the right time to address how this particular angel has been reproduced.
About the speaker:
Annie Bourneuf is professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of Behind the Angel of History: The Angelus Novus and Its Interleaf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022) and of Paul Klee: The Visible and the Legible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), which won the 2016 Robert Motherwell Book Award.
Tickets: $24 General; $16 Seniors and Students; $14 Members; Includes Museum admission.
The James L. Weinberg Distinguished Lecture is made possible by the Marshall M. Weinberg Fund, with additional support from Marshall M. Weinberg.
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, 32. Oil transfer and watercolor on paper, 12.5 in × 9.5 in (31.8 cm × 24.2 cm). The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem, Jerusalem; John Herring, Marlene and Paul Herring, Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder, New York, B87.0994. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
