This Storm Is What We Call Progress

Once you know Paul Klee was spoofing Il Duce--who already had consolidated his control over Italy--and the fascist fondness for erecting monuments in this work, it's hard not to flash on our fearless leader doing the same thing right now with his imperial building spree in the nation's capital.

"Monument in Progress" (1929)

Klee's arches, here equipped with humanizing feet, aren't as grand as Trump's and serve another purpose entirely: their diverse hues defy the conformity of the Nazi's Brownshirt color palette.

"Revolution of the Viaduct" (1937)

Despite his Christian heritage, the Nazis smeared the Swiss-born artist, who had taught at the Bauhaus for a decade, as a "Galician Jew," precipitating his return to his native country in 1933, the year Hitler came to power. 

Klee in his Bauhaus Studio (Weimar, Germany, 1924)

Trained as a musician, his mostly abstract work soon became a prime example of "degenerate art," as well as a chilling document of his final year in Germany when he created more than 500 paintings and drawings.  More than a few of their titles ring a contemporary bell.

"Outbreak of Fear" (1933)

Emigrating (1933)

After Klee returned to Switzerland, an autoimmune disease made it difficult for him to swallow, greatly reducing his productivity to just 25 works in 1936.  But as the situation in Europe worsened, Klee picked up the pace again with encouragement from Wassily Kandinsky, his former colleague at the Bauhaus, and Pablo Picasso.  This painting alludes to Hitler's infamous bombing of Guernica's civilians in northern Spain, which the latter artist depicted even more famously, if less colorfully.

"God of War" (1937)

Here, a drooling young member of the SS listens spellbound to Nazi propaganda on radio.  It might just as well be a podcast from the manosphere

"Voice from the Ether:
'And you will eat your fill!'" (1939)

. . . or fake news from another era.  As Johnny Rotten once sang, "anger is an energy." Klee finished more than 1,500 works in 1939, an annual record.  Most of the paintings and drawings on view in Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum are drawn from the late '30s, and have been little seen in the United States.  

"Oh! These Rumors!" (1939)

Klee's final burst of creativity included 29 angels, although they appear to be more avenging than guardian.

Angel Applicant (1939)

"Angelus Militans" (1940)

Thanks to Walter Benjamin, an early Klee angel became one of the artist's most iconic works.  The German Jewish philosopher bought "Angelus Novus" in 1921 and took the cherished print with him when, like Klee, he fled the Third Reich in 1933.  In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Benjamin described "Angelus Novus" as 

looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. 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.

Angelus Novus (1920)

In 1940, shortly after those words appeared in print, Benjamin committed suicide rather than face the likelihood of deportation to a concentration camp.  Klee had died three months earlier.  No doubt the forces of evil never looked more powerful to both men than in their final days. I know the feeling.

At the Jewish Museum, the Holocaust is always just around the corner, or maybe it just seems that way after a refresh of the works exhibited from the permanent collection.  By the time Alice Neel painted this protest organized by the Artist's Union to increase awareness of state-sanctioned anti-Semitic violence in Germany, both Klee and Benjamin already had scrammed.  Years after a critic blithely commented, "An interesting picture, but the sign is too obvious," Neel rebutted his myopic cluelessness:  "If they [the Roosevelt Administration] had noticed that sign, thousands of Jews might have been saved."

"Nazis Murder Jews" (1936)

Prior to dying in a Polish concentration camp at the age of 40, Czech artist Gertrud Kauders squirreled away the contents of her studio in the walls and ceiling of a friend's home not far from Prague.  Nearly 700 paintings and drawings were recovered during a 2018 renovation of the then abandoned property.  Her survivors donated her life's work to Jewish museums around the world, including this ahead-of-its-time homage to the female gaze painted sometime before 1939. 

This charm bracelet, fashioned in by a woman imprisoned in Theresienstadt, is a wonderful example of Jewish resilience as well as a quirky evocation of life in the camp.  Can you find the commode?

Israeli artist Mordecai Ardon studied architecture at the Bauhaus when Klee, a decade older, taught there.  He fled Germany in 1933, too, immigrating to Jerusalem when Palestine was under the administrative control of the British.  His work became more religious and figurative after the full horrors of the Holocaust became known.  This painting, which presumably references Berger-Belsen (where Anne Frank and her older sister died), is a collective portrait; according to exhibit label, "the number tattooed on the woman's forearm was assigned to multiple people in different camps."  I'm guessing that Ardon wasn't aware that the Nazis tattooed only prisoners at Auschwitz/Birkenau, something I learned for the first time after a visit in 2024. 

"Girl No. 109336" (1950)

(detail)

Reuven Rubin headed for Palestine even earlier than Ardon. The landscape probably reminded him of Old Testament stories he had heard in his native Romania, rendered here with hope and a modernist slant. Rubin eventually became Israel's first official representative to his former European homeland.

"Old Sycamore Trees" (1927)

Other galleries exhibit more contemporary works unrelated to the Holocaust, including a fascinating installation that juxtaposes Andy Warhol's work with two Jewish artists. Jonathan Horowitz supplemented "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century" with 92 additional Jews (yes, kids, both Marilyn and Liz converted!) silkscreened by Warhol to fashion digital wall paper of the tribe reaping the benefits of their 15 minutes.  Candice Breitz, who represented South Africa at the Vienna Biennale in 2017, shot "Profile," a video that captures the difficulty in pinning down an individual's identity.

Case in point: Oded Halahmy was born in Bhagdad, airlifted to Jerusalem with his orthodox Jewish family at the age of 13 because of increasing Iraqi anti-Semitism, and moved to Soho in 1971 where he has sculpted ever since.  

 

Despite having lived in France and Germany as a child--as well as studying both countries' languages in high school and college--I'm definitely more fluent in Yiddish!

"The Joys of Yiddish" by Mel Bochner (2012)

Andi LaVine Arnovitz put her grandmother's handmade wedding dress to good use with some help from the Jewish Women's Archive in 2023 and a laser cutter.

"What We Bring" (2023)

Her sculpture pays tribute to the material and intellectual assets wives bring to their marriages, protected by the Talmud protects even after divorce.  Sometimes my gaydar is like a heat-seeking missle: without searching or even knowing it at the time, I photographed Joan Rivers' name among the more than 2,600 that comprise the train.

The menorah display on an upper floor is not to be missed.  I bought a tiny one at Dachau shortly before I learned what had happened in Israel on October 7, 2023.