Walter Benjamin and Important Artists and Artworks - “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Walter Benjamin and Important Artists and Artworks - “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”

Paul Klee: Angelus Novus (1920)

Angelus Novus (1920)

Artist: Paul Klee

This work depicts a whimsical figure, part bird, part human, part angel with its hair made of floating scrolls, wings with fingers like tiny cathedral spires, and bird-like feet. Surrounded by a white space, as if inhabiting some other realm, the angel's prominent eyes, conveying both melancholy and astonishment, turn to the right while his torso turns slightly to the left, creating a sense of conflicted movement. Klee's child-like depiction, contrasting with the architectural composition of the whole (as if its body were formed out of various planes of brown, yellow, and orange) conveys the strange newness of its singular presence.

A friend described Benjamin as overwhelmed with gratitude when the philosopher was able to buy this work in 1921; his most treasured possession. In the same year, Benjamin launched a magazine Angelus Novus with the intention of drawing "a connection between the artistic avant-garde of the period and the Talmudic legend about the angels who are being constantly created and find an abode in the fragments of the present." Though the magazine was short-lived, Klee's painting remained a continued source of inspiration. For instance, in his 1931 essay on the Austrian writer Karl Kraus, Benjamin wrote that Angelus Novus allowed one "to understand a humanity that proves itself by destruction," while in "Agesilaus Santander" (1933), an autobiographical essay written by Benjamin following his flight from Nazi Germany, he wrote, "The angel [...] resembles all from which I had to part: persons and above all things."

But Benjamin's near obsession with the painting reached full fruition in his philosophical preoccupation with written history. Indeed, Klee's image had a most profound influence of Benjamin's final work, "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). Using the painting as a poetic analogy for mankind's inability to learn from the past, and its blind faith in progress, he wrote the following: "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. 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."

Gisèle Freund: Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1935)

Newcastle-upon-Tyne (1935)

Artist: Gisèle Freund

Freund's photograph depicts a group of children, walking toward the viewer along a rainy stone pathway. Its surface acts as a kind of dark mirror; almost iridescent with reflections and shadows. Looming brick walls and steep buildings rise up in the background as they frame the pathway and the gathered children: the only living presence in the dingy stone environment that is the domain of the urban poor. While the image evokes Benjamin's statement that, "The camera introduces us to unconscious optics," it is also capable of capturing a poignant moment, as Freund acknowledged when she wrote: "It is not my intention to create works of art or to invent new forms. I merely want to show what is close to my heart - man, his joys and sorrows, hopes and fears." This image was part of Freund's photo essay "Northern England," documenting the effects of the Great Depression, which, having been published in a 1936 issue of Life magazine, made her internationally famous.

Freund studied art history and sociology in 1932 with Theodor W. Adorno, Karl Manneheim, and Norbert Elias, known collectively as the Frankfurt School. It was here that she made the acquaintance of Benjamin; by now a close associate of the group. Sharing a Jewish heritage, and a commitment to socialist activism, the two became lifelong friends. Following Hitler's rise to power in 1933, Benjamin and Freund fled to Paris where they both studied and conducted independent research at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Benjamin - who felt "The illiterates of the future will be the people who know nothing of photography rather than those who are ignorant of the art of writing" - actively encouraged Freund's joint pursuit of photography and art history. Following Benjamin's advice, Freund became celebrated for her color photography, her documentary work, and her candid portraiture which featured regularly in Life magazine. In 1974 she published her most famous book, Photographie et Société. Three years later she was elected President of the French Association of Photographers and in 1983 her career was recognized when she was awarded the Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, France's highest decoration.

Timm Ulrichs: Walter Benjamin: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility) (1967)

Walter Benjamin: Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility) (1967)

Artist: Timm Ulrichs

Subtitled "Interpretation: The photocopy of the photocopy of the photocopy or the photocopy," this photomontage comprises a hundred photocopies of the original cover of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936). As each photocopy becomes more faded, the images take on a kind of spectral presence; semblances of the original that exert a kind of mysterious force within the context of the montage as a whole. At the time Ulrichs completed this work, the contents of Benjamin's essay had become widely absorbed and artists began to question assumptions about authenticity and originality. As art critic Cat Moir noted, Ulrichs's work "recalls Andy Warhol's series of screen-printed Campbell's Soup Cans (1962). Yet whereas Warhol's piece set the dialectics of individual and copy at work in a single temporal frame, Ulrichs's highlights transience and fragility as the image fades [...] The work stages the question of whether endless reproduction ultimately depletes meaning over time."

This work was included in the 2017 exhibition "The Time is Now: Reflections on the Arcades: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin". Ulrichs's piece was thus seen from a gallery perspective. As art critic David Graham Sheene wrote, the "sequence of black-and-white photocopies reproduce the cover [...] again and again to debunk the essay's central theory - that the infinite reproduction of an image robs it of its almost mystical powers - by showing how a practical image is imbued with mystery through reproduction." A similar counter-argument to Benjamin was put by art historian Norbert Lynton when discussing a touring exhibition that featured the Mona Lisa. The Da Vinci masterpiece was seen by millions of Japanese spectators who filed past the painting at an estimated rate of six per minute (ten seconds per spectator). Lynton argued that, through mass reproduction, the Mona Lisa had in fact acquired "another sort of status, relating not to the quality of the work or its meaning but to the sheer weight of its fame - its stardom." In other words, mechanical reproduction had, in this instance at least, brought about the very thing Benjamin had railed against.

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Introduction and Historical Information

Background

Summary - I

Summary - II

Summary - III

Analysis - I

Analysis - II

Quotes

Character List

Themes 

Walter Benjamin and Important Artists and Artworks

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