KLEE’S ARRAY OF ANGELS
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE, Paul Klee painted and drew angels, of every conceivable description. Some are playful, derived, say, from the metaphors of everyday language; others are esoteric, and rooted in Klee’s personal metaphysics. The lithograph Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück (An angel serves a small breakfast, 1920) is of the first kind. Here, the merely metaphoric use of the angel concept is obvious: a friendly nurse in a hospital might well be called an angel, or an efficient woman handling room service in a hotel. In fact, the figure’s headgear resembles a nurse’s cap. Her eagerness is expressed by her running step and by the tea spilling out of the pot she carries on a tray. Curved lines crossed by slight indications of Cubist scaffolding suggest her swift, light-footed motion. Also in Cubist fashion, the door through which she enters is rendered by two arches, which intersect along the line of her body. These echo the form of a diptych, underlining the picture’s mock-religious character.
With Angelus Novus (New angel, 1920) we enter a different realm, at the opposite pole from Ein Genius serviert ein kleines Frühstück. In this watercolor the angel materializes in midair, his body formed of interlocking zigzag lines, his oversized head, with its haunting, imperious eyes, haloed by the scroll or volute shapes that were integral to Klee’s vocabulary at the time. Angelus Novus stands for everything that was new in the early decades of the century, and for the desire to create a new humanity, a new social order, a new art. Yet the figure embodied nothing of that for a man who once owned the piece—Walter Benjamin, the great German critic, well-known for his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), among other works, who killed himself in 1940 while a fugitive from the Nazis. Benjamin writes,
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel 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 which 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. This 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.1
Whether or not we agree with Benjamin’s allegorical interpretation, his words are valuable in suggesting the high pathos of the work.
Before approaching the principal subject of this essay, the angels Klee depicted during the last two years of his life, it is necessary to address the artist’s very personal versions of Christian imagery, and his various ponderings on death, and on what happens to the soul after death. Klee’s images are haunting because they are haunted by the ultimate mystery—none more so, perhaps, than the work of 1934 entitled Entseelung, an untranslatable word meaning something like “de-soulment.” (The piece is known in English as “The Soul Departs.”) Entseelung is pervaded by a pale brownish twilight. It is executed through a drawing of frequently overlapping lines accompanied by crosshatching, in different colors, done with a fine brush. The technique has affinities with engraving, but the work is in fact a watercolor; the colored inks, and the alternation between “exotopic” and “endotopic” hatching (Klee’s terms either for marking outside a form along its outlines, or for marking within it), create a rich transparency, and, in the end, an irrational space in which none of the elements have a fixed position. Vaporous shapes, inner and outer space, solid and immaterial volumes all interpenetrate. Clearly, such a technique suits the subject of Entseelung. Beneath a sloping earth cover we see a dead body in the grave. A square tombstone and a pyramid to the right, and a triangular church spire to the left, are the only indications of the setting; all else is an interplay of nonreferential shapes, the multifarious contents of the dead man’s soul. For in Klee’s view at the time of Entseelung, the soul, leaving the body, did not keep the body’s shape, as the 18th-century Swedish scholar Emanuel Swedenborg taught. Instead, all its preoccupations, longings, likes, and dislikes gradually emerged and dissolved. The nonreferential shapes in Klee’s watercolor, I believe, are “thought-forms,” incorporeal concretizations of the mental energies of the deceased. They drift through the air, some eventually to dissipate without trace, others to become part of the vaster energy that is the soul of the universe.
An earlier watercolor, Irrende Seele (Erring soul, 1929), does adopt Swedenborg’s concept—here the soul drifts above the earth, an integral if insubstantial shape. Klee might also have been thinking of ghosts, which at that time were a popular subject for serious discussion in some circles. (Several decades before, the idea that for a period after death the dead, unaware that they are dead, haunt places familiar to them had been given moving expression by Stéphane Mallarmé in his unfinished poem “Un Tombeau pour Anatole” [A tomb for Anatole, 1887], written on the death of his small son.) The forms in Irrende Seek are flatter and more ethereal than those in Entseelung. The fluttering quality of their wavy outlines makes them appear to tremble. In the watercolor Pflanzlich-seltsam (Vegetal-strange, 1929) such forms convey the quivering of fine vegetal tissue; in Irrende Seele they impart the helpless drift of the “erring soul,” eyes still shut from death. Geist eines Kriegers (Ghost of a warrior), a pen-and-ink work from 1926, belongs in the same context—the head reminds me of a character in a Japanese No play, the ragged ghost of a soldier who appears at a village temple seeking to be purged of his sins, and who finally attains redemption.
Sie sinkt ins Grab zurück! (She is sinking back into her grave!, in pen-and-ink over watercolor, 1926) seems to describe the unwilling return of a dead beloved to the grave after a brief conjugal visit. The scene has its painful side, but Klee was able to touch on a variety of moods simultaneously in his art, and this is one of many works in which he humorously parodied hackneyed motifs from the stage, as well as any kind of sentiment or wishful thinking at the expense of intelligence. It is interesting to note, however, that he shaped the work’s disconsolate husband and departing spouse through one of his favorite devices, the interlaced bands of lines that Jürgen Glaesemer has compared to wickerwork, or to anatomic drawings of muscle tissue.2 Klee often used curved bands of this type for the depiction of flying figures, or generally of figures in motion. If the bands are straight, whether vertical, horizontal, or diagonal, they mostly form crystalline architecture or abstract gardens. Here, they underline the figure’s sinking movement and the fluttering of the shroud.
Der Schöpfer (The creator, 1930–34) throws another light on the issue of the humorous approach of a number of Klee’s works that handle Christian imagery. The picture, in pink and white, seems amusing when compared with the figures by Michelangelo that are among its prototypes—I think particularly of God Separating Earth from Water, in the Sistine Chapel. Again, it features skeins of those interlaced bands, which now make the somewhat plump and unmajestic figure look as if it were all woven out of the strands of the Creator’s beard. Yet the work is not parodic in the same sense as Sie sinht ins Grab zurück!. More and more as he grew older, Klee clothed his sensitive responses to his subjects, whether elevated or arcane, in what may seem a near-caricatural language of affectionate mockery, but such terms as “caricature” and “mockery” apply only imprecisely here. Klee, in his own words, lived “as much with the dead as with the unborn.”3 We talk of the humor of his art because we have no better word to describe his stance, but we are really talking of a new language, the language of a realm beyond both skepticism and reverence.
A comparison of Klee’s Christus (Christ, 1926) with his Ecce of 1940, the year of his death, shows him reaching the core of his drawing style.4 The earlier piece seems remote, formalized, and, thanks to the device of the bands, more depersonalized than even the most abstract Byzantine icon. It betrays more indifference toward its subject than emotional involvement. In sharp contrast, Ecce is a harrowing depiction of suffering. The artist, facing his own death, seems to have derived from his awareness a deep intensification of his expressive means. The tortuous lines no longer correspond to the structure of the face; as is often the case in these late drawings, they entrap the eye like a labyrinth. This experience of visually running up against an impasse is an effective means of conveying hopelessness. The honed-down depiction of the crown of thorns shows how Klee at this point made do with a minimum of description, yet the contrast between the minuteness of the thorns and the sharp pain we know they inflict is powerful and touching.
Versuch einer Verspottung (Attempt at a mocking, 1940) is another Christ image, and while it is as moving as Ecce (and for related reasons), it moves into an additional art-historical dimension in its similarity to Hieronymus Bosch’s Crowning with Thorns, 1510, in the Escorial. Somewhat reshuffled, we recognize Bosch’s hook-nosed man, his staring man, his tight-lipped man in a broad-brimmed hat.
I doubt that Klee set out to make a drawing of Bosch’s painting. However, his “pictorial unconscious” did store memories of things he’d seen, particularly observations of nature, of plant and animal life, and such images became amalgamated with his abstract imagination and eventually reemerged, in different shapes, in his own visual universe, “parallel” to nature. In the same way, he may have incorporated stored memories of pictures. More often than not, he began a drawing or painting without knowing exactly where he was going with it. As he worked on Versuch einer Verspottung, the lines may have suggested figures, and these in turn may have evoked the memory of Bosch. Klee’s thoughts during his last years were in any case turning increasingly toward the story of the Passion of Christ.
As far as is known, Klee never drew the Crucifixion directly, but there does exist a series of eight drawings called “Detaillierte Passion” (Detailed Passion, 1940). In the literature these have been discussed as dealing with human suffering in merely general terms. I’d like to propose a more specific reading, for I believe that like Versuch einer Verspottung they feed, in a loose way, on 15th- and 16th-century imagery, and also that they echo some of those already depicted as present at the Crucifixion. The first drawing, subtitled Will dabei sein (Wants to be there), shows a young girl eagerly rushing forward. Such children, motivated, one imagines, simply by sheer curiosity, are included in many scenes of the Passion, for example Martin Schongauer’s engraving Bearing of the Cross, n.d. (ca. 1475–1485?), Dürer’s Ecce Homo, ca. 1497–98, from the Large Passion, and the Jünteler altarpiece, by an Upper Rhenish master of ca. 1449. Furthermore, the gazing figure in the third drawing, Einer aus der fünften Reihe (One in the fifth row), recalls similar poses among men staring at Christ on the cross, for example in Hans Pleydenwurffs well-known Crucifixion of the mid 15th century, in Munich, and in Mary at the Foot of the Cross, by the same Upper Rhenish master.
The fifth drawing is entitled Auch Dürers Mutter (Dürer’s mother also)—which can only mean that she too was present at the Crucifixion. Like Der Schöpfer, Klee’s version of Dürer’s Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, 1514, could be mistaken as caricature. It makes no attempt at emulating Dürer’s near-clinical rendition of a body ravaged by terminal illness. Yet it does capture some of the inner light that transfigures the torn features of Dürer’s mother, a light residing in her eyes, which express her acceptance of her impending death. In the terms of Darer’s own time, one might comprehend her expression as one of Christian humility; in modern terms, it appears as a total absence of self-pity. The face in Klee’s work is perhaps humbler, the face of a woman less spiritual, less ennobled by suffering. But that makes the acceptance concentrated in her eyes only the more moving.
The sixth drawing depicts an Altere Jungfer, an elderly spinster, a somewhat unkind appellation for a face so visibly torn by grief and compassion. Yet the cliché it recalls describes the withered features both of the woman in Klee’s drawing and of the Magdalen in Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece, who may be her distant prototype. The face in the seventh drawing belongs to one Central betroffen, touched to the core, and the sharply inclined head parallels Dürer’s depictions of Saint John, particularly in the Lamentation from the Large Passion. That leaves three drawings for which I could find no specific prototypes, but as a teacher of mine used to say, if you have an answer for everything, it’s wrong. In the second drawing, Auch ein Ruderknecht (An oarsman also), was Klee thinking of those of the 12 disciples who were fishermen, like Peter and Andrew? Is the fourth drawing, Trennt sich schwer (One who finds it hard to leave), about a criminal fascinated with the scene of his crime—a Judas, perhaps? Finally, the eighth drawing is Ein Gestalter, which means “an artistic creator,” one who gives shape and form to the chaos of visual appearances. In fact, the hand movement of the figure in this drawing expresses very well the struggle of giving form. If I may venture one more guess, he may be a portrait of an artist, for it did happen, if rarely, that painters included their own likeness among the bystanders in a Crucifixion scene. An example would be the late-15th-century Crucifixion by Gerard David in the Thyssen collection in Lugano.
Looking at Klee’s works about the Passion brings us on to the Resurrection, or to resurrection in general, and to the realm of angels. In Schwierige Auferstehung (Difficult resurrection, 1939) a female corpse stirs, not without effort, for her limbs have stiffened during her long sleep. Her hollow eyes stare amazed at her decayed body. The mood of the drawing is lighthearted parody of graveyard romanticism. The dead man in Trägheit am jüngsten Tag (Laziness on Doomsday, 1939), far from betraying any eagerness to rise and, perhaps, attain angelic status, only wraps his shroud more tightly around his body, as if the wind of the Last Trumpet had made him shiver. Four more drawings belong to a long series from 1940, “Eidola,” a Greek word that Klee used in the sense of “ghosts.” All of them show men and women in a shadowy realm between life and death; their earthly occupations and attributes are still very much with them. A weiland Harfner (erstwhile harpist) still plucks the strings of his invisible instrument, while a weiland Pianist (erstwhile pianist) carries his keyboard as a part of his body. Knaueros, weiland Pauher (Knaueros, erstwhile timpanist) shows a musician whose impassioned playing Klee had often admired in the orchestra of the Dresden opera; his ghost beats the air in an ecstatic drumroll. And a weiland Feldherr (erstwhile general), a pocket-size Napoleon, moves among his fellow ghosts as if he were still inspecting the ranks of his guards.
What realm is this, in which the dead behave as if they were still alive? It had been described by Swedenborg, who in his youth made important discoveries in geology, physics, mechanics, physiology, and neurology, and in his middle years began to have visions and to talk almost daily with angels and spirits. He left the world a detailed account of the life beyond, both in heaven and in hell. According to Swedenborg, “A person’s first state after death is like his state in the world, since at that point he is similarly involved in outward matters. He has much the same face, speech, and spirit. . . . this is why he is then quite unaware that he is not still in the world. . . . ”5 Klee, as we have seen, moved now closer to, now farther from Swedenborg’s concepts of the soul, but many of his depictions of the afterlife show the influence of the Swedish visionary. Swedenborg wrote that the dead “are examined as to their quality by good spirits,”6 and then, gradually, are “brought into an involvement in the more inward things that belong to [their] mind[s] . . . , while the more outward things . . . go to sleep.”7 This gradual purification, or spiritualization, Klee depicts in many of his angels. For he is much more concerned with those good souls who, after their resurrection, actually become angels than with the heavenly hosts created by God long before the creation of the world.
Klee imagined in some detail the transformation of the human shape into the angelic one. Unfertiger Engel (Unfinished angel, 1939) explores the growth of wings: it seems an experience both rapturous and painful. Another drawing shows that what was meant to become an angel might occasionally end up as Mehr Vogel (Rather a bird, 1939). A different aspect of the process appears in Engel, noch weiblich (Angel, still female, 1939), a work whose transparency of color comes from one of those unusual combinations of materials whose invention was one of the artist’s fortes. (It is drawn in colored lithographic crayons over blue paste on paper, and the effect is a peculiarly immaterial glow.) As Glaesemer writes, “With one eye the angel gazes upward in the direction of heaven; with the other it gazes suspiciously at what is left of its breasts, all that remains of its former sexual existence on earth. . . . ”8 The notion that the angel will eventually lose the attributes of its femininity has a long theological history in the numerous speculations about the sex, sex change, or sexlessness of angels contained in the Bible, in the Gnostic Gospels, in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and in more recent theology.
Jesus said to the Sadducees, “For in the resurrection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are as the angels of God in heaven.”9 This may imply that the angels retain their sexes but cease to interact amorously, yet it could also mean that they attain a spiritual state beyond sexual differentiation. Saint Paul taught that the resurrected would be “conformed to the image” or “shaped into the likeness” of the Son of God, and from this the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas concluded that in order to be admitted in heaven, women would have to change sex. Augustine, on the other hand, decided “that there will be both sexes at the Resurrection. . . . For . . . the sex of woman is not a vice, but nature. And in the Resurrection it will be free of the necessity of carnal intercourse and childbearing.”10 It need hardly be emphasized that in Christian art at least since the 15th century there occur both male and female angels, not to speak of those who are children. The same holds for Klee’s work. Hence one can only conclude that what is “still female” in the present angel is merely its carnality. This will have to vanish, not its female sex as such. In the same year, Klee drew a Miss-engel (Mis-angel), a spirit whose sexuality seems resistant to such transformation: in one of the artist’s many puns, the name Miss-engel denotes not only a “mis-angel,” a failed angel, but also, with recourse to English, an angel who is still a miss.
Whenever Klee is happily oblivious of theology his angels mirror the concerns and afflictions, regrets and vanities of common mortals—or, more accurately, perhaps, he uses experiences and states of mind indigenous to life on earth as metaphors for the process of spiritualization that transforms risen souls into angels. Engel-Anwärter (Angel applicant, 1939) and Im Vorzimmer der Engelschaft (In the anteroom of angelhood, 1939) make it clear that certain procedures, or even bureaucratic formalities, must be honored before one becomes an angel proper. But for the otherworldly light of Engel-Anwärter, which is painted in gouache on black paper and features a tiny crescent moon, one could take the applicant, despite his wings, for a retired sexton presenting his petition to the pension fund. And the whole attitude of the man in the anteroom of angelhood expresses the excruciating waits that are inseparable from any large bureaucracy. It must be cold in the waiting room, for he wraps his newly received wings around his body.
Two works both called “doubting angel,” one titled in Latin, one in German, describe a sphere of religious torment that seems strangely incompatible with what we imagine of angelic existence. The labyrinthine design of the watercolor Angelus Dubiosus, 1939, is colored in with pale purple, lilac, blue, and beige in such a way that the parts of face and body lose their distinctness: a wing becomes an elbow, the face is a mask, a cheek trails down to the hem of the garment. The figure is doubtful, then, as well as doubting—its identity is unstable. Zweifelnder Engel, 1940, was drawn only a few days before Klee entered the sanatorium where he died. It is one of the last works his illness allowed him to complete. The drawing conveys with utmost clarity that state when everything is in question, a frame of mind not usual for the image of an angel dwelling in the divine light. In his Byzantinisches Christentum (Byzantine Christianity, 1923), one of the most beautiful books written by a 20th-century Catholic, the former Dadaist Hugo Ball summarizes the Celestial Hierarchy of the Pseudo-Dionysius: in this context,
Dionysius calls the monks . . . those who are still feeble and can be intimidated by hostile phantoms . . . they are subject to temptations and anxieties, personal contradictions and their after-effects. . . . Dionysius sees in the monk the type of the religious candidate . . . striving for his acceptance into a firmly founded, sacred order . . . a mystically gifted character.11
The monk takes infinite pains to penetrate the secrets of his order, yet remains exposed to the influences of his environment. I think these sentences link Klee’s “doubting angel,” who wears a monk’s hood, with his “angel candidates” mentioned before. The higher ranks of angels must surely be impervious to such doubt, but we have seen that many of Klee’s angels are still largely human.
According to Catholic angelology, angels are “spiritual intelligences . . . who assist man in the attainment of his salvation.”12 It was part of the imagination of the earliest Christians that everyone has a guardian angel. Swedenborg, always explicit, listed among angelic occupations the “care of infants . . . teaching and training them. . . . There are others who instruct good, simple folks from Christendom and lead them into the path to heaven. There are some which do the same for various non-Christian peoples.”13 Klee depicted a guardian angel in the drawing Unter grossem Schutz (Under great custody, 1939), and an angel engaged in the conversion of pagans in In Mission, 1939. The angel of Vergesslicher Engel (Forgetful angel, 1939) must have erred in some such task: the slightly oblique shape of his head, and his downcast eyes, positioned with both great precision and great simplicity of means, convey his mixture of infinite goodwill, shyness, and guilty awareness of his own incompetence—an inimitable expression, all the more endearing as it makes one smile. In Es weint (It weeps, 1939) the helpless sorrow of an angel who has failed in an important mission likewise hits a comic note, yet evokes the whole tragedy of existence.
By no means all the angels among Klee’s last drawings struggle for spirituality yet remain burdened with their human fallibilities. His concern with the state of the world, with war and fascism, also impelled him to depict angels of justice and of judgment. In the gouache Erzengel (Archangel, 1938) a stem face materializes out of rising and falling lines, as befits a weigher of souls. Wachsamer Engel (Vigilant angel, 1939) uses the same linear language as the drawings already discussed, but here the figure is drawn in white on black paper, lending him a somber monumentality. He is an awesome guardian of humanity’s integrity in those dark years. or perhaps a recorder of its lack of it. The figure in Engel des alten Testamentes (Angel of the Old Testament, 1939) must be a warrior of God. His face is among the few here drawn almost in accordance with the order of the human face—a necessary tactic in depicting his expression of furor divinus, of divine wrath. This is an angel of judgment.
Finally, there is the Todesengel, the angel of death. Many ages have shared a belief in an angel or spirit who reveals to the dying that their time has come. Klee, as brave as he was honest, drew intimations of his own death often during the last two years of his life. In Todesengel, 1940, a drawing in colored chalk on paper, he depicted the harbinger of his end as a majestic figure, neither terrifying nor evil. He set this figure in a landscape still pervaded by an autumnal glow, however dimmed. The forms are undefined, but a comparison with Friedhof (Cemetery, 1939) suggests that the black pentagon at the bottom of the picture is to be read as a grave or coffin.
There is little even in Klee’s own magical oeuvre to prepare us for the magic and mystery of his last painting, an untitled still life. In the foreground, on an orange tabletop strewn with flowers, stand a green coffeepot and a lilac-colored statuette, a sort of barbarian Venus. Four vases in purple, brown, olive, and siena, on a narrow red table, are squeezed into the top left corner. At the bottom we see a sheet with one of Klee’s own images, a slightly revised version of a drawing from the same year—Engel, noch hässlich (Angel, still ugly, 1940). All of this is set against a ground of sumptuous black, and lit by the orange disk of the moon.
This last painting is a still life of a curiously animated kind. Will Grohmann wrote of it, “All of a sudden, the flowers on the table look as though strewn upon a grave”;14 I don’t accept the graveyard association—in my reading, the picture does not deal with Klee’s anticipation of his own death—but Grohmann’s phrase “all of a sudden” is helpful in its implicit perception that the picture’s elements are capable of rapid transformation. None of them has a fixed position in this undefined space. The two tabletops seem to float in black infinity. The dancing forms of the coffeepot and the statuette look ready to take off in flight. Flowers in the top-left vase almost jump out of it. And a strange rose-colored object, its shape echoing both the raised arm of the statuette and the spout of the coffeepot, drifts against the purple vase as if everything were indeed flying toward a faraway horizon. It doesn’t take much imagination to read the dark ground as a cosmic night, and the objects as things seen in the sky.
Formal adjustments apart, the angel on the playing card differs from the drawing that preceded it in only one respect, but that is an important one: a straight line in the lower body has now become a cross. In the drawing, it stood for the female sex. Its new shape helps us to realize that the angel, in the drawing still earthly, carnal, caught in the process of change, has now become thoroughly spiritual. Its struggling hands, in both versions, tell eloquently of the pain of parting with the vestiges of femininity. Yet the figure is not tragic. One might even notice that its struggle gives way to a smile. Thus this last work repeats a process that Klee himself had evoked in the title of an early etching: the triumph of wit over suffering.
Gert Schiff is Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. He is working on an anthology of art-historical writings from Johann Joachim Winckelmann to Erwin Panofsky.
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NOTES
1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 1940, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, New York: Schocken Books, 1969. p. 257.
2. Jürgen Glaesemer, Paul Klee: The Colored Works in the Kunstmuseum Bern trans. Renate Franciscono, Bern: Kornfeld, 1979, p. 300. First published as Paul Klee: Die faringen Werke in, Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern: Kornfeld 1976.
3. Paul Klee, holograph text first published in Der Ararat, Munich: Galerie 1920, p. 20 The second special issue of a journal published by the gallery on the occasion of a Klee exhibition. Reprinted in Carolyn Lanchner, ed. Paul Klee, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987, exhibition catalogue. p 66
4. The drawings of Klee’s last years are reproduced in Glaesemer, Paul Klee: Handzenhnungen III, 1937–1940, Bern, Kunstmuseum Bern, 1979.
5. Emanuel Swedenborg, Heaven and Hell, 1758, trans. George F. Dole, New York: Swedenborg Foundation, Inc., 1979, p. 415.
6. Ibid, p 418.
7. Ibid, p 420.
8. Glaesemer, “Klee and German Romanticism,” in Lanchner, Paul Klee, p. 69.
9. Matt. 22:30. I am grateful to David Rattray for this reference.
10. This material is quoted and discussed in Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, New York: Pantheon/October, 1983, p. 131.
11. Hugo Ball, Bycantinisches Chnstentum, Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1923, pp. 214–15.
12. A. A. Bolas, “Angelology,” in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1967, vol. I, p. 505.
13. Swedenborg, p. 315.
14. Will Grohmann, Paul Klee, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1954, p. 360.
This article is a version of a talk given by the author at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on the occasion of the exhibition “Paul Klee.” The show will close there on May 5, and will travel to the Cleveland Museum of Art, from June 24 to August 16, and the Kunstmuseum Bern from September 25 to January 3 1988.
