I’ll admit that I wanted to see Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum primarily because the show, a survey of the late work of one of the least discussed but most important artists of the modern era, contained a single work of great personal and historical interest to me. And I meant to write about it sooner, but the calendar got in the way. Now the show has fewer than 12 days to run, but I still wanted to tell you about it—and suggest that, if you’re in New York through July 26, you go see it.

I was surprised, as I often am with the very good exhibits at the Jewish Museum, that there had been little advance notice of the show. Indeed, I learned about it only from a stray Instagram video that focused on the show’s inclusion of a small, faint, and finely drawn work on paper made in 1920 that depicts a figure Klee called the Angelus Novus. In Klee’s eclectic body of work, the Angelus Novus is a minor object. Even though it was made at a pivotal moment in his career, as he was about to become a celebrated teacher at the famed Bauhaus, the work would not have deserved a room of its own in the exhibition had it not become famous—very famous to anyone who studied what we used to call “critical theory,” which emerged from the Frankfurt School in the 1930s.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus (1920). Photo: ARS/Courtesy of the Jewish Museum

A generation of students in the 1960s and ’70s who were then trying to understand, from a distance, the attraction of authoritarianism—the same force that has overwhelmed our political institutions these past 10 years—read the work of the Frankfurt scholars, who had lived through the threat in the most direct way. But they also read one of the Frankfurt School’s intellectual godfathers, the indefinable literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.

Unlike his Frankfurt School peers, Benjamin dithered about leaving Europe as Hitler consolidated power and launched his attacks. When he finally did flee France, in September 1940, he was halted at the Spanish border by guards who threatened to turn him and his party back to occupied France. Panicked, the 48-year-old Benjamin took his own life by overdosing on morphine, an act that proved more hysterical than rational when his traveling party was allowed to transit into Spain the next day.

Before leaving Paris, Benjamin had entrusted his most important possessions to his fellow intellectual Georges Bataille. Among those objects were Klee’s Angelus Novus, a cherished work that Benjamin had acquired in 1921. In the end, the Angelus Novus would become the inspiration for one of his most important essays and ideas.

Paul Klee is a difficult artist to categorize. Born in Switzerland to a German music teacher and his Swiss singer wife, Klee seemed destined to be a musician. But he eventually emerged as a graphic artist and achieved some level of prominence as an illustrator and artist. A friend of Wassily Kandinsky, August Macke, and Franz Marc, all of whom were central figures in the expressionist group the Blue Rider, Klee would serve in the German army during the First World War and come away with a profound commitment to modern art’s revolutionary potential. In 1920 he joined the staff of the Bauhaus in Weimar, eventually moving with the school to Dessau but leaving in 1931 under growing pressure from the increasingly conservative German government. According to Mason Klein, the curator of the show, Klee’s commonality with several important modernist art movements is one reason to argue for his central importance in art history. “The Munich expressionists laid claim to him,” Klein writes in the catalogue for Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds. “The Zurich Dadaists hailed him, and to the French surrealists, he was a kindred spirit.”

The Jewish Museum’s show is a rare opportunity to see the sweep of Klee’s varied, inventive, and nearly indescribable output as an artist, even though the exhibition focuses on the artist’s late work as he struggled with increasing persecution. The Nazi regime, which tried to claim Klee was Jewish, eventually included his work in its infamous exhibition of degenerate art and seized works by the artist that were owned by German museums. Despite the overwhelming force of the German government to quash Klee, the artist never bowed or compromised.

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum, New York. Photo: Kris Graves Projects/Julian Calero

Central to the show is a rarely seen suite of drawings that Klee made in direct response to the rise of the Nazis in German life. The stark, delicate, and vulnerable drawings lack the colorful ingenuity and coded criticism of Klee’s best work—but they are, in many ways, the reason for the show. The Jewish Museum isn’t pulling punches here: The show wants you to see how artists deal with the rise of anti-intellectual populism. One clear subtext of the show is the gnawing question of why we have not seen any artists produce images that adequately deal with our own descent into cultural and intellectual vulgarism. Or maybe, like with Klee, whose output increased dramatically in the final years of his life, ending in 1940, we just haven’t seen it yet.

The inclusion of Klee’s Angelus Novus in the show—in its own room, isolated even from the other angels that the artist made throughout his lifetime—is another reminder of the Jewish Museum’s objective. Walter Benjamin is mostly remembered for his essays about the late 19th century emergence of consumer culture and his meditation on the role of the work of art in an age of mass media. Those ideas, once radical, have become almost commonplace (when you’re casually referencing Baudelaire’s flâneur, you’re actually quoting Benjamin) and oddly accepted even as the digital world amplifies everything that first intrigued Benjamin. The “aura” of an original artwork or event has only become greater in the era of frictionless digital replication.

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum, New York. Photo: Kris Graves Projects/Julian Calero

Benjamin’s other great intellectual contribution was to the philosophy of history. The last thing he wrote was a series of “theses” on history that argued with the mechanical optimism of Marx’s historical materialism and Hegel’s idea that historical understanding comes only long after the ability to act has passed. “The owl of Minerva,” Hegel tells us, “takes flight only at dusk.” Using the image of the Angelus Novus, Benjamin offered a different but no less depressing metaphor for historical understanding. Benjamin’s angel of history faces backward, toward the past, but is blown into the future by the force of a great calamity. All the angel can see is the destruction and damage wrought by the forces of modern life amplified into an extreme political movement. Sound familiar?

We should be grateful to the Jewish Museum for having the courage to present this important show and draw from it something like hope. Our modern world has survived previous calamities and gone on to renew itself in positive ways. The show demonstrates that Klee’s legacy is a persistence, defiance, and determination to carry on in the face of an overwhelming and depressing threat.

That’s it for today. I’ll be back tomorrow with the Inner Circle.

M