The Angel of History

I have registered with a locum agency . My hiatus from work will end in February .

I am contemplating going to an exhibition at Tate Modern. It is pricey but it is Paul Klee and I admire his work . Klee was a German-Swiss painter who produced art in the years between the world wars of the 20th century.His work was expressionistic, sometimes childlike and funny. He said that drawing is taking a line for a walk.

A Klee painting from 1920 is called the Angel of History. It was acquired by the cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Benjamin was known for literary criticism and the book " The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" .

Every historian and politician involved in education should look at the painting and read Benjamin's commentary.He said the following in his essay " On the Concept of History" :

"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 hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before 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 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."

The government minister Mr Gove seems to view British history as a narrative of a largely benign empire. Progress indeed.

Walter Benjamin took his own life in 1940 on the French-Spanish border trying to escape the Nazis.The photo is from the Jewish memorial in Berlin.