Artistic heist, Walter Benjamin steals from Paul Klee, wireless grabs at Ravel - shock horror

On a rainy day in Manchester, last week, (August 2010) my partner showed me a copy of Angelus Novus, a picture by the artist Paul Klee. She had just read me an account of it by the German Philosopher, Walter Benjamin, in which he describes it as being of a figure rushing backwards into the future while witnessing the inevitable trail of utter devastation left behind - like being dragged through a hedge backward, I thought, and seeing a trail of broken twigs and torn leaves, but on a cosmic scale. It seems that Benjamin felt so convinced by his own reading of the picture that he felt he had the right to re-name it as The Angel of History. W.G Sebald refers to Benjamin’s account at the end of his second Zurich lecture in the volume On the Natural History of Destruction.

Although I knew something of Klee’s fragile work, I expected nonetheless to see a work of art as powerful as Benjamin’s description. Even so, I was surprised by Klee’s delicate, formalised image. Decked out in dots, dashes and all washed over in tired Champagne it remained firmly within the artist’s deceptively childlike, and gossamer creations. In taking his tremulous lines for little walks over the paper, he has given me a nimble depiction of a slightly tipsy flapper. She wears a lion’s mask and is decked out in a costume of a fabulous bird stepping out on the tiles doing the Charleston. What looks to be the mane, a masculine attribute, reminds me how, before the introduction of spongy rubber rollers, women used twisted pieces of paper to give shape to their hair while they slept. Her left eye looks straight out of the picture at me, but the right slews off centre further to the right, and tells of her having consumed too much of that Champagne.

Certainly it is possible to see it as being a symbol of a need to escape the memories of the carnage of World War I. But then I can see everything from that period as a messenger from that era. And this for me is a good thing, because it helps to diminish Benjamin’s take over of this single febrile image.

In general terms, my thoughts on this began with my first memory of Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro For Harp, Flute, Clarinet and String Quartet. This was when I was in my teens. As an accompaniment to a dramatic adaptation for radio of A. V. Morton’s retelling of the story of Jesus, In the Steps of the Master, it could hardly have been bettered. But for a long time after the music was spoilt for me by it having been reduced to a mere trigger to the memory of the radio play, which though good, was definitely the lesser of the two art forms. Today, by describing how I see Klee’s picture, I am trying to claim it back on behalf of the rest of us who want to look at it afresh and not as Benjamin would have us believe it to be. As with any picture it can be seen in as many ways as there are viewers to view it.