Declarations in Venice

THE SPECTATOR (WORLD EDITION), May 25, 2026

Declarations of Independence in Venice

The message behind the US pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

All art is propaganda,” wrote George Orwell, “but not all propaganda is art.” Upon this subtle distinction rests the success or failure of whatever art we see at the Venice Biennale. 

The Most Serene Republic’s exercise in art-world Olympics is propaganda by design. A garden of national pavilions – small buildings in various styles as you might find in a zoological park – presents exhibitions that compete with one another for a “Golden Lion for Best National Participation.” Here, in the murky parkland of the Giardini in the city’s eastern Castello district, nationalist and anti-nationalist passions mix with art-market imbroglio into a sordid spectacle. Just how bad will it be this year? To discover the answer is why we keep coming back.   

The 61st iteration of this Italian job, which opens May 9 and runs through November 22, is already shaping up to be a casino totale – which we might translate as “hot mess.” On April 30, days before the opening, the five-person jury behind the Golden Lion prize, led by Solange Farkas, a Brazilian curator of no repute, announced their resignation. The cause? They had previously declared that they would not consider the pavilion of any country whose leaders were being investigated by the International Criminal Court. Such a denunciation would include Putin’s Russia. But of course their real target was the Israel pavilion and its artist, Belu-Simion Fainaru. 

Having not seen them, I cannot comment on Fainaru’s drip sculptures. Rose of Nothingness, the name of his Venice installation, reportedly consists of a commercial irrigator that pours water on the pavilion floor. What we can already say is that the work has inadvertently revealed, like much else in globalized culture, the art world’s tender embrace of anti-Semitism. For the intifadists, even the river to the puddle must be free.  

It tells us something about our state of affairs that the most high-profile contretemps at this year’s Biennale does not involve Donald Trump. Nevertheless, this has not prevented the New York Times and its bigly art reporter Zachary Small from going after the American presentation. “With Trump Novices, Can the US Win the ‘Art Olympics?’” asks a headline of April 19. “After the State Department overhauled the process for choosing an artist for the Venice Biennale,” continues the subhead, “it gave control to a woman who previously owned a pet food store.”

When it comes to Venice’s dog-and-pony show, there’s something to be said for recruiting talent from the pet-care market. Reading down, we learn that this year’s US commissioner, Jenni Parido (fresh “from selling venison nuggets and dried sardines,” sneers the Times), has tapped Jeffrey Uslip (“criticized for being racially insensitive”), who has selected the sculptor Alma Allen (“an under-the-radar American sculptor based in Mexico.”)

From what I can tell of Allen’s contributions, his abstract sculptures are inoffensive. For the Times, this is certainly part of the problem. Another issue is that the US commission “never approached traditional funders… including the Ford Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” Shock horror. The expected boxes have not been checked. 

The US pavilion is historically where our Department of State and its establishment underwriters expect unchallenged hegemony. How this happened says much about American consolidation of cultural power. An American presence in Venice began in 1922, when Walter Leighton Clark organized a cooperative of artists known as the Grand Central Art Galleries to purchase land for an exhibition hall. The great Beaux-arts firm of Delano and Aldrich donated their services for the design of the Palladian-style building that still stands today. 

After World War Two, New York’s Museum of Modern Art purchased the pavilion in 1954 and began mounting exhibitions of American abstraction that were secretly underwritten by the Rockefeller brothers and the CIA. When such soft-power financing was exposed in the 1960s, the pavilion fell under the purview of the United States Information Agency. The Fulbright-Hays Act of 1961 is the public mechanism that has enabled the government to demonstrate American cultural interests, developments and achievements overseas.

In 1986, MoMA sold the building to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and its Venice-based Peggy Guggenheim Collection. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the closing of USIA, control of the pavilion finally went to the Department of State, where it remains today.

There is much to be said for the role the US pavilion played in the Cold War, pitting the freedom of abstract expressionism against the diktats of Soviet realism. As early as 1950, MoMA’s Alfred Barr was bringing over John Marin, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, along with other artists of the New York School. In 1964, Robert Rauschenberg won the Gran Premio through a stunning American PR campaign and last-minute amphibious assault, ferrying his large paintings by speedboat to the Giardini (documented in the 2024 film Taking Venice).

Since its takeover by the Department of State, rather than a pro-American message, the US pavilion has increasingly promoted a self-effacing aesthetic. Awash in the mandates of DEI, the presentations have at times become downright anti-American. In 2011, during the early years of the Obama administration, I observed an exhibition by the Puerto Rican duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla that featured American athletes running on the treads of an overturned tank. In one room, a replica of the Statue of Freedom from the Capitol dome was tipped on its side. In another, a pipe organ spat out money from an ATM machine. And so on with the anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-religious dross.

Such a presentation would have made an old Soviet curator blush. According to Lisa Freiman, the organizer at the time, “I chose Allora and Calzadilla because they problematize, or put into question, the notion of American identity at a moment when immigration issues are very important and who is allowed to be a US citizen and who is not allowed to be a US citizen are big debates with the American people.” 

Such “art” was not an anomaly. It was the voice of the state. According to Freiman, the State Department’s “decision to select Allora and Calzadilla was unanimous… it was well-timed with Hillary Clinton in the State Department and Barack Obama in the White House.” Maxwell Anderson, then director of the Indianapolis Museum, the commissioning institution, added “everybody in Foggy Bottom down the line to the secretary herself” supported the work. Or as David Mees, then US cultural attaché in Rome, went on to explain: “It’s very important also to cultivate that softer image – what the Obama administration has called ‘smart power.’”

Just what was “smart” about these displays of “power?” In part the debasements of recent years were meant to appeal to the international mindset. See, went the message to those sipping their Aperols at Harry’s Bar, we hate America, too. 

But the message was also directed at us back home. No longer there to reflect American freedoms, the propaganda of the Biennale evolved to demonstrate the power of our own unaccountable bureaucracy. They were in charge. They despised us. And there was nothing we could do about it. The nature and quality of the art presented in Venice by our Department of State might have varied over recent administrations, but social justice and race-essentialism were constant themes, “taking over” (often quite literally) the Palladian-style pavilion. 

Consider Simone Leigh, the 2022 selection. Lee Satterfield, then assistant secretary of the US Department of State’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, heralded Leigh for her “historic achievement as the first Black woman to represent the United States.” Leigh described her work as paying “homage to a long history of Black femme collectivity, community and care.”

Her interventions in Venice included covering the classical pavilion in thatch to resemble a West African palace – meant to remind us of the (racist, of course) 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. Inside, Leigh presented a sculpture based on “Mammy’s Last Garment,” a 19th-century Jamaican postcard featuring “stereotypes created by the burgeoning Anglophone Caribbean tourism industry,” according to the commissioning institution ICA/Boston. Another room presented sculptures “that send up essentialist ideas of the Black femme body.” The race obsession was total. Naturally, George Soros’s Open Society Foundations provided extra support for the run.

With traditional American values overturned through symbolic acts of desecration, the riotous atmosphere of these aesthetic takeovers came to reflect the real riots that engulfed American cities – stoked by the same racialized psy-ops of supposedly warranted self-hatred. It is the loss of one of their propaganda outlets that our managerial elites now lament and will do anything to restore.

Every presentation at the Biennale is designed to send a message. Today, the Trump era is defined, in part, by its own cold war – one pitting a populist insurgency against a uniparty elite. In choosing Parido, Uslip and Allen – outsiders all – the administration has sent a Sicilian message to the Venetian lagoon: the Deep State swims with the coda di rospo. On the eve of the US semi- quincentennial, the American pavilion has declared its own independence.

Play Land

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2026

Play land

On “Noguchi’s New York” at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation & Garden Museum.

What is New York’s greatest unrealized work of art? An argument can be made for Riverside Playground. This sprawling sculptural landscape, designed for what today remains an unremarkable hillside in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, between 101st and 105th Streets, would have occupied an indeterminate zone between art and recreation. An assembly of ramps, steps, sandpits, covered rooms, and climbing mounds, sloping from the curving heights of Riverside Drive down to the promenade, it would not have been your typical artwork or sculpture park. Nor would it have been another playground of swings and seesaws. Instead, this landscape of brick, concrete, asphalt, grass, and water was designed to pose more questions than answers. It might have seemed archaeological, temple-like, as though it were a subterranean stratum discovered below the urban surface. Its Upper West Side neighbors in their classic sixes did not know what to make of it.

Developed over four years in the early 1960s in a partnership between the architect Louis Kahn and the sculptor Isamu Noguchi, this contoured, contested ground very nearly broke ground before going broke itself. The project was officially titled the Adele Rosenwald Levy Memorial Playground, named after a founder of the Citizens Committee for Children and daughter of the philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Supporters donated $600,000 to the city in her honor for what was then a $1.1 million project. The outgoing mayor, Robert F. Wagner, even signed the initial construction contracts. Then the incoming mayor, John Lindsay, killed the playground with the help of his new parks commissioner, Thomas Hoving. While citing escalating construction costs, the savvy “Republican Kennedy” was fulfilling a pledge made to voters who opposed the plan. They feared it would attract teenagers from the housing projects to the east.

Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) thought of sculpture in a way that was often out of step with his times but that can now seem more in line with our own. “Noguchi’s New York,” an exhibition currently on view at the Noguchi Museum in Queens, New York, argues that the artist saw little distinction between object and landscape and favored what we might now call the immersive experience.1 Through his interactive work, he blurred the lines between sculpture and spectator. The environment created its own sculptural shape—in particular, for him, the forms and figures of New York. “I’m really a New Yorker,” he once said. “Not Japanese, not a citizen of the world, just a New Yorker who goes wandering around like many New Yorkers.” Such wandering meant that Noguchi was as comfortable casting portrait busts of Buckminster Fuller as he was designing stage sets for Martha Graham or carving a sunken garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza. All of these projects are now among the fifty-some works and proposals on display at the museum overseeing his legacy.

Isamu Noguchi, Riverside Playground Model, 1965, Plaster & paint, Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble.

Noguchi was nearly a native-born New Yorker himself. His American mother, Leonie Gilmour, was a committed bohemian educated at New York’s progressive Ethical Culture School (then named the Workingman’s School) and later at Bryn Mawr College and the Sorbonne. She met Isamu’s father, Yone, when the Japanese poet was living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He took out a classified ad looking for editorial help. She answered it. Following a brief affair, Yone returned to Japan. Leonie pursued him west, giving birth to Isamu in Los Angeles. Two years later, she moved to Japan with her young son, finding intermittent work as a teacher, editor, and translator. Yone had named their toddler Isamu, meaning “courage,” but by then he had taken a Japanese wife and was largely absent from the future sculptor’s upbringing. During her Japanese sojourn, Leonie also gave birth to a daughter, Ailes Gilmour. This time the father was an unknown Japanese man. Nevertheless, there must have been something about that Gilmour girl. A pioneer of the American Modern Dance movement, Ailes became a founding member of the Martha Graham Dance Company, where her half brother later created Graham’s most celebrated set designs.

In 1917, Leonie sent Isamu back to the United States—on his own—to continue his schooling. The unaccompanied minor rolled into a work-camp school in Rolling Prairie, Indiana. At the time known as Sam Gilmour, Noguchi was taken under the wing of the school’s founder, Edward Rumely. Their relationship continued after the school shut down over Rumely’s pro-German sentiment. Through a grant from Rumely, Noguchi then continued east, eventually arriving at Columbia University to study medicine.

Noguchi’s sudden upward trajectory was a remarkable reversal of fortune for a drifting, interracial child born out of wedlock, but Leonie was outraged at her son’s preprofessional turn. She encouraged him to study sculpture. Noguchi enrolled in night classes at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School on East Tenth Street, where he studied bronze casting. Eventually he dropped out of Columbia and interned with Gutzon Borglum, who said he would never amount to anything as an artist. (Noguchi soon eclipsed this sculptor of Mount Rushmore.) In 1927, a grant took Noguchi to Paris, where he apprenticed with Constantin Brancusi and learned the art of stone crafting. As an artist later known for his Eastern influences, Noguchi was almost exclusively Western trained.

Curated by the Noguchi Museum’s Kate Wiener, the exhibition picks up as Noguchi first returns stateside in 1929. Here an early selection of portrait busts from the 1930s might seem to be an odd choice to introduce a show about the sculptor’s New York. But in fact they help underscore the social quotient in much of his work. Noguchi’s art was not meant to be inert. It was designed to engage its observers. “If sculpture is the rock,” he once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” (Hayden Herrera’s excellent 2015 biography of Noguchi is appropriately titled Listening to Stone.)

From an early age, Noguchi surrounded himself with artists, mentors, patrons, and paramours. He could be part Horatio Alger and part Rudolph Valentino. One story has him jumping out of Frida Kahlo’s bed and scurrying up a tree and over a rooftop to escape Diego Rivera.

Noguchi thrived in New York’s urban tableau. Where they could not appear in person, he crafted the people around him as portrait busts. Working out of his MacDougal Street studio in Greenwich Village, Noguchi in rapid succession sculpted busts of the art dealer J. B. Neumann (1932, Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum), the dancer Michio Ito (1926, Noguchi Foundation), the journalist Clare Boothe Luce (1933, on loan from the Henry Luce Foundation), the art critic Murdock Pemberton (1931, Noguchi Foundation), the muralist José Clemente Orozco (1931, Noguchi Foundation), and the futurist Buckminster Fuller (1929, cast ca. 1965, Sharp Museum, Southern Illinois University Carbondale).

What is most remarkable in all this is Noguchi’s startling range of materials and finishes. As was reflected later in his easy movement between metal and stone, or representation and abstraction, or lampshades and playground design, Noguchi was not beholden to any particular medium or manner. Instead he found expression in the materials themselves. His bust of the comely Luce appears in classical marble; the clotted Neumann is in mottled plaster; meanwhile, the resplendent Fuller—Noguchi called him a “messiah of ideas”—radiates in polished chrome.

Isamu Noguchi, R. Buckminster Fuller, 1929. Bronze, chrome plated. 3 1/4 x 7 7/8 x 10 in. Photo: Kevin Noble. © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS)

“Noguchi’s New York” then takes us through the artist’s many city commissions. A display about his 1930–40 stainless-steel reliefs of heroic journalists, crafted for the entrance of the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, leads on to more than one gallery of his unrealized or destroyed installations: ceiling designs for the Time & Life Building and 666 Fifth Avenue, sculpture gardens for Lever House and the Museum of Modern Art, and playgrounds for the United Nations Headquarters and the Bronx Zoo. Here the city planner Robert Moses plays the role of the exhibition’s bogeyman, but, as we have seen with Riverside Playground, Moses was not Noguchi’s only antagonist.

Isamu Noguchi, News (Associated Press Building Plaque), 1938–40. Photo: Miguel de Guzmán & Rocío Romero.

Noguchi could shift scales with ease. A plan for a contoured landscape might do double duty as a bronze wall relief. Stage-set collages could inspire the forms of freestanding aluminum sculpture. A slate statue of a bird might reappear as a plexiglass chess piece. The museum matches these works with the blueprints, letters, photographs, and articles that surrounded each commission. Here the innovative playground designs come forward the most. Could there be some psychological reading of Noguchi, abandoned by his father, designing play spaces within sight of his father’s old Riverside Drive address? To envision these designs better, the museum commissioned new hand-drawn animated films, directed by Nicolas Ménard and Jack Cunningham, that feature children swinging and sliding on play equipment. (I would have liked to have seen these playful videos up front, rather than buried at the back of the exhibition, and more features in general for the museum’s younger visitors.)

Isamu Noguchi, Stage Set Collage, ca. 1946, Chalk & colored paper on paper, Noguchi Museum. Photo: Kevin Noble.

There is much to be said for reviving some of Noguchi’s unexecuted urban proposals, particularly Riverside Playground. After all, Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms State Park, which Louis Kahn designed for the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in New York’s East River in the early 1970s, was only built five decades later, opening in 2012.

Even if Noguchi’s playgrounds are never realized, his influence has nevertheless set the standard for successful public design, though it is largely unacknowledged. After all, just a few years after thwarting his plans in Riverside Park, John Lindsay and Thomas Hoving promoted their own open-ended play space—featuring ziggurats, tunnels, and water courses—for Central Park’s Adventure Playground. That innovative precinct on West Sixty-seventh Street, underwritten by the Estée Lauder Foundation, was designed in 1966 by Richard Dattner, but it might as well have been a smaller, toddler-sized version of Noguchi’s Riverside Playground.

Half a century on, the Diller–von Furstenberg Family Foundation funded Little Island, on tulip-shaped piers above the Hudson River. For this artificial landscape of undulating hills and surprise assembly spots, Heatherwick Studio closely followed Noguchi’s urban sensibility.

Two years ago, after the institution banned employees from wearing keffiyehs and other political paraphernalia, Palestinian agitators attempted to disrupt the Noguchi Museum. Activists defaced the walls. Staff members resigned. The museum refused to back down. It is noteworthy that Noguchi in life worked with the state of Israel. Between 1960 and 1965, he created his first realized earthwork for the Billy Rose Sculpture Garden at Jerusalem’s Israel Museum.

Through its permanent collection, with its indoor and outdoor spaces and parts in between, the Noguchi Museum continues to be an uncompromising memorial to the artist. One of his rock-garden sculptures contains the artist’s ashes. The sale of Noguchi’s Akari lanterns, which still generates millions of dollars annually, helps keep the lights on for the small institution. This museum Noguchi opened across the street from his studio in 1985 remains an oasis of calm in a bustling corner of Long Island City—a living testament to Noguchi’s New York.

1. “Noguchi’s New York” opened at the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, Queens, New York, on February 4 and remains on view through September 13, 2026. 

Escape Artist

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2026

Escape artist

On “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds,” at the Jewish Museum, New York.

The Nazis wasted no time in denouncing the artist Paul Klee (1879–1940). On February 1, 1933, less than a month after Hilter’s ascendance, the periodical Die Rote Erde (The Red Earth) published a hit piece on the Düsseldorf Academy and its fifty-three-year-old instructor:

Then the great Klee makes his entrance, already famous as a teacher at the Bauhaus. . . . He tells everybody he has pedigree Arabian blood in his veins, but is actually a typical Galician Jew. He paints in a crazier and crazier way, he bluffs and baffles, his students goggle and gape, a new, unheard-of art makes its appearance in the Rhineland.

Born in Switzerland to a German father and Swiss mother, both musicians, Klee was not Jewish, Galician or otherwise. It made no difference. Within the year, Klee lost his academic post. The Gestapo raided his apartment in Dessau and seized six baskets of papers. Finally Klee was forced to relocate to Bern, the city of his birth. He lived out his final decade in Swiss exile.

Elusive, idiosyncratic, and wide-ranging, Klee’s work today might seem decorative and anodyne. Clement Greenberg was right to observe in 1957 that “almost everybody, whether aware or not, was learning from Klee.” The artist’s inventive and experimental mode, occupying a liminal space between depiction and description, became part of the post-war visual vocabulary. You can see his influence in artists from Jackson Pollock to Keith Haring.

The Nazis well understood his subversive encoding. Klee connected his art to child-like design, primitive symbolism, and parodic marginalia. He advocated for the sort of free-form line the Nazis looked to flatten. Identifying himself with the social outcast—at times the Harlequin, at others the Jew—Klee faced down the scourge of anti-Semitism by association. Occasionally he even made this association explicit. He deployed symbols such as the Star of David in his compositions. More than a decade before his persecution by the Nazis, as the artist went up for a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, Stuttgart, in October 1919, the press denounced him as “Paul Zion Klee.”

This history helps explain why the Swiss German artist now appears in “Other Possible Worlds,” a major retrospective at the Jewish Museum of a hundred works that focuses on Klee’s final decade.1 “He was not Jewish,” writes Mason Klein, the museum’s senior curator emeritus and the organizer of this exhibition, “but he might as well have been, given his particular denunciation by the National Socialists in 1933 in Germany.”

Paul Klee, Revolution of the Viaduct, 1937, Oil on cotton, Hamburger Kunsthalle. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

At the center of this presentation, and an impetus for the exhibition, is a selection of drawings from a rarely seen cycle of some two hundred works that Klee produced in 1933—a furious assembly created in response to what he called the “Nazi Socialist revolution.” Lost for decades, the works on paper were only rediscovered in 1984 by the Klee cataloguer Jürgen Glaesemer at Bern’s Paul Klee Foundation. In 2003, the art historian Pamela Kort presented them for the first time through four exhibitions in Germany and Switzerland.

Composed in wild scribbles of pencil and chalk, these drawings are expressive and explicit. In title and substance they take dead aim at the false verities of the Nazi regime: “He” a Dictator Too! (Auch “ER” Dictator!) features a man pointing down at an exclamation point; Child Murder (Kindermord), an attack on a domestic scene; Crawling Man (Kriechender), a quivering figure on all fours; Accusation in the Street (Anklage auf der Straße), a man directing a crowd’s attention; and Violence (Gewalt), a laughing stick-figure who shoots scribbles into a screaming, crouching victim.

The drawings, here on loan from the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, are different from the reserved and finely wrought designs we might expect from an artist who otherwise spun his compositions like intricate spiderwebs. Klee showed the series over dinner in the summer of 1933 to the sculptor Alexander Zschokke and the art historian Walter Kaesbach, both Düsseldorf colleagues, and Zschokke later recalled he thought the cycle missed its mark:

The start of the cycle was a drawing with a few pencil strokes, not very straight, that looked like a child’s drawing, helpless. I must confess that this beginning . . . had a somewhat comic effect and appeared not to remotely match the seriousness of the situation in which the artist found himself.

At the Jewish Museum, with a selection of work extending as far back as 1903, “Other Possible Worlds” reveals how, in the 1933 cycle, Klee was revisiting his graphic origins in illustration and satire. A selection of etchings from his series Inventions (Inventionen), of 1903 and 1905, here on loan from New York’s Museum of Modern Art, hints at his admiration for the caricatures of William Hogarth and Honoré Daumier. Virgin in the Tree (Jungfrau im Baum) presents an aging female nude sprawled out across dead branches. The Hero with the Wing (Der Held mit dem Flügel) features a figure with broken wings and heavy feet rooted in the earth. Two Men Meet, Each Believing the Other to Be of Higher Rank (Zwei Männer, Einander in Höherer Stellung Vermutend, Begegnen Sich) depicts Wilhelm II and Franz Joseph groveling down to one another. An example from another series, this one an illustration from 1911 for a chapter of Candide, dispenses with the modeled, sculptural effects of these early prints in favor of a simpler, more scribbled style later echoed in the 1933 cycle. “Satire must not be a kind of superfluous ill will,” Klee once said, “but ill will from a higher point of view. Ridiculous man, divine God.”

Other Possible Worlds” lays out a wide sampling of Klee’s circuitous output. At times it feels too wide. The exhibition attempts to be both a focused display and a retrospective survey and never quite delivers enough of either. A through line is not always apparent in the offerings. The exhibition also gives short shrift to Klee’s many formal innovations as it pursues his symbolic meanings. Klee’s creative processes of monoprinting and oil transfers, for example, freed his line from the artist’s controlling hand as he avoided a grand manner in favor of rhythmic ramblings. Coming from a musical background, Klee created visual sonorities that could be contrapuntal—semiautonomous points and counterpoints. One abstract watercolor here, from 1922, is titled Overture (Ouvertüre) (1922, collection of Alexander Berggruen). By never quite connecting the dots, Klee took a “line for a walk,” as he famously called his compositional style.

There are, nevertheless, some peripatetic highlights here. One is Chosen Boy (Auserwählter Knabe) (1918, anonymous loan, courtesy of the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum), of a child surrounded by a halo of dreamlike geometrical forms. In its selection, the Jewish Museum has also sought out works with explicit Jewish references. Harlequin on the Bridge (Arlequin auf der Brücke) (1920, Museum Berggruen, Neue Nationalgalerie, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin) is a symbolic self-portrait in which the artist-figure straddles a river beneath a Jewish star.

Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920, Oil transfer & watercolor on paper, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. © 2026 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Angelus Novus (1920), on loan from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, is a mothlike apparition that has taken flight through its afterlife as something of a cultural icon. Purchased by Walter Benjamin in 1921, the work inspired the German Jewish philosopher of the Frankfurt School to call it the “Angel of History.” In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” of 1940, Benjamin writes of this figure,

His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

Months after writing these lines, Benjamin was himself caught in the whirlwind. As he attempted to flee over the Pyrenees from Vichy France to Spain, he committed suicide after his arrest at Port Bo. Before his failed escape, Benjamin entrusted this drawing to Georges Bataille by hiding it in Paris’s Bibliothèque nationale, where Bataille was employed. When he was able to retrieve it, Bataille passed it to Theodor W. Adorno, who sent it on to Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem per Benjamin’s wishes.

As a postscript to these fraught iterations, the arrival of this work in New York for the current exhibition was delayed by Iran’s bombardment of Israel. At the time of the exhibition opening, the work could not travel to the airport for transport, at least to the satisfaction of its insurers. So it has been represented here at first by facsimile. What was meant to be the highlight loan of this exhibition took on additional meaning for the Jewish Museum and its director James S. Snyder—who, from 1997 through 2018, was the head of the Israel Museum.

Klee’s art aligned him at times with Dadaism, Expressionism, and Surrealism. Still, he was not an obvious adherent to any one group. “The Munich expressionists laid claim to him, the Zürich Dadaists hailed him, and to the French surrealists, he was a kindred spirit,” writes Klein.

In 1921, Klee joined the Bauhaus as an instructor. He taught there for ten years, following the school through its 1925 move from Weimar to Dessau. During his demonstration lectures, it is said he painted with his left hand while writing with his right. That same decade his art toured the United States along with work by Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, and Alexej von Jawlensky as part of Die Blaue Vier (The Blue Four). As moma’s Alfred Barr noted in 1930: “Nothing is so astonishing to the student of Klee as his infinite variety.”

By the early 1930s, Klee had left his Bauhaus post, was facing down Nazis, and had begun to show the degenerative effects of fatal scleroderma. In his work, his gossamer line became thicker and murkier. His output intensified and his symbolism became more explicit as he painted through the catastrophe. Mask: Red Jew (Maske Roter Jude) and Your Ancestor? (Dein Ayn?), both 1933 works on paper from private collections, leave little doubt as to the state of affairs. Revolution of the Viaduct (Revolution des Viadukts) (1937, Hamburger Kunsthalle), the painting that appears on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, turns Nazi marches into jackbooted abstractions. Meanwhile Struck from the List (Von der Liste Gestrichen) (1933, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern), with a black X slashed across a face, becomes his latest self-portrait as Klee dedicated himself to “serve Beauty by drawing her enemies.”

Still, he found time to take flight. A series of angels, from 1939 and 1940, make up the final series in the exhibition—here, transformed into the avenging angels of war.

1. “Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds” opened at the Jewish Museum, New York, on March 20 and remains on view through July 26, 2026.