AND IMAGES IN PSYCHIATRY

SECTION EDITOR: JAMES C. HARRIS, MD Art does not reproduce the visible, rather it makes visible. Paul Klee’s Creative Credo, 19201(p5)

N THE SAME DAY IN MARCH 1916 THAT For literary critic and , who 36-year-old Paul Klee (1879-1940) re- purchased Angelus Novus in , it was an object for ac- ceived his red slip notifying him of his con- tive imagination and reflection. In his 1940 Theses on the scription into the German army, a telegram Philosophy of History, he wrote that Klee’s shows an arrived announcing that his close friend and fellow artist, (1880-1916), had been killed by a angel looking as though he is about to take leave of something he O is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open.... grenade at the Battle of Verdun. Klee and Marc held opposing This is what the Angel of History must look like. His face is turned views about the war; Marc actively supported it, but Klee was toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, there indifferent to Marc’s war: it did not affect him internally; the he sees a single catastrophe which ceaselessly piles rubble on top real war was already within himself. His friend’s death was a of rubble. The angel would like to remain, to awaken the dead, time for soul searching and reflecting on their differences in and make whole....ButastormisblowinginfromParadise.The personality and . Contrasting himself to Marc, he wrote: storm irresistibly propels him into the future, while the pile of rubble He is more human, he loves more warmly, is more demonstra- before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.7(p103) tive....Hewasstill a real member of the human race, not a neu- For Benjamin, historical progress was the foundation of mo- tral creature. What my art probably lacks is a kind of passionate humanity. I don’t love animals and every sort of creature with an dernity: rationalism, science, dehumanizing technology, and earthly warmth [as he did]. I tend rather to dissolve into the whole the triumph of ideologies. If Klee’s Angelus Novus represented of creation.... Iplace myself at [its] remote starting point.... a witness to the disasters of recent world history for Benjamin, Neither orthodoxies nor heresies exist there.2(p332-345) for Klee the angel was more personal, perhaps symbolizing ar- tistic freedom and the recognition that he could transform his Pursuing this artistic ground of , Klee sought the pri- past rubble of memories into evocative, dynamic art.2(p315) mal beginnings of art. He was particularly entranced by the draw- In 1933 Adolf Hitler identified Klee as a degenerate artist; ings of children but also drawn to the artistry of indigenous storm troopers took from his home personal letters he had writ- peoples and people with mental illnesses, expecting to find in ten to his wife, and he was dismissed from his professorship in their untrained eyes an openness and purity of expression. art at Du¨ sseldorf. Seventeen of his were chosen for After Marc’s death, Klee was transferred from the infantry Entartete Kunst ( exhibit); one of these was un- to home service and assigned to an air force training facility. favorably compared with that of a patient with schizophrenia. The Bavarian king had secretly made it known that other Klee painted images of angels throughout his long Munich artists should not be sent to the front. Klee painted the career.6(p350-358) In 1939 when he was suffering from systemic bodies of airplanes and worked as a paymaster’s clerk. scleroderma,8 he painted 28 angels, representatives of his mor- Klee saw a power of emotional expression in the Prinzhorn tal condition. Single and solitary, they do not announce or collection and the possibility of the intuition of a direct spiri- witness biblical miracles or console. Klee’s angels are hybrid, tual vision in the artistry of mentally ill persons, a view that human/animal/spirit. He gave them names like Forgetful, Ugly, Prinzhorn shared.3 Still, the predominant influence on his work Unfinished, Poor, Still Female; these angels with some remain- was from the spontaneity and naivete´ of children’s . ing human qualities are in the process of establishing their Klee sought an aesthetic essence, a new innocence of vision and angelic ones. The angels might have been his way of dealing a defiance of social convention.4 Unlike Klee, people with men- with his dying as he sought to enter into the creative space he tal illnesses generally were not making aesthetic choices in their aspired to, perhaps seeking to assume the stance of Angelus artistry but were compelled by inner drives, not defiant but vic- Novus—but unlike Benjamin’s regretful angel, Klee’s playfully timized by their illness, and not freely expressive. looks back to integrate his personal history, his inner world of Klee’s Angelus Novus (New Angel) (cover) has a different qual- memories, before moving on one final time. ity than Wu¨rgengel (the frontispiece to Prinzhorn’s book).3 Angelus Novus may reflect the postwar hopes for a “new James C. Harris, MD humanity, a new social order, a new art.”5(p126) Alternatively, Foster4(p6) sees in it unexpected similarities to the artistry of men- tally ill people with its “wreathes as hair and scrolls as fingers, REFERENCES large , and averted and ambiguous mouth.” To oth- ers, the hovering Angelus Novus seems more childlike, retain- 1. Klee P. The Inward Vision: Watercolors, Drawings, Writings. Guterman N, trans. ing the infantile features of both a large head and small body London, England: Thames & Hudson, 1958. (neoteny) and a “play face” whose eyes are turned and seem- 2. Klee P. The Diaries of Paul Klee: 1898-1918. Klee F, ed. Berkeley: University of 6 California Press; 1964. ingly beckon the viewer to join him. Grohmann contrasts this 3. Harris J. The Wu¨rgengel. Arch Gen Psych. 2006;63:1066-1067. angel with the distant, awe-inspiring, and terrifying angels in 4. Foster H. Blinded insights: on the modernist reception of the art of the mentally poet ’s (1875-1926) Duino Elegies that call ill. October. 2001;97:3-30. the reader into a deeper openness to an unseen world. Rilke 5. Schiff G. Klee’s array of angels. Artforum. 1987;25:126-133. 6. Grohmann W. Paul Klee. New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, Inc; 1954. emphasizes the otherness of angels, but for Klee they were “not 7. Werckmeister OK. Benjamin, Klee, and the Angel of History. Oppositions. 1982;25: the opposite to men, they are transitions and symbols of the 102-125. last mutation”6(p357) and not terrifying. 8. Wolf G. Endure!: how Paul Klee’s illness influenced his art. Lancet. 1999;353:1516.

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