Michael Maggen, The Israel Museum Jerusalem

The mysterious drawing Angelus Novus by Paul Klee

During the twenties of the previous century, Paul Klee refined his new visual symbolic language and began concentrating on images of angels. Klee investigated the concept of angels as an idea; this led him to create hundreds of symbolic angel images, many of them describing in a very pictorial way the human condition. The most important and famous image of that quest became known as Angelus Novus, which means The New Angel. This oil transfer & watercolor drawing is a unique enigmatic creation that shows Klee's sensitivities with beautiful artistic gestures. The drawing is part of the Israel Museum's Prints & Drawings Collection.

Apart from the mysterious image in the drawing, there was another mystery to solve. Klee had pasted his Angelus Novus art on top of a print as a secondary support, and only its margins could be seen.

The Israel Museum received a request to research the image beneath Angelus Novus from Rebecca Quitman, a well-known American contemporary artist, who wished to create an art project based on the hidden image under the Klee watercolor. Conventional infrared reflectography did not prove successful in revealing the hidden print. A mockup of the Angelus Novus was created and sent to Department Industrial Engineering at the University of Tor of Vergata in Rome for analysis. There, a new infrared methodology – namely, Infrared Thermography – was used, and the results were very encouraging. Based on the results with the mockup, the original Angelus Novus with the hidden print was sent from Jerusalem to undergo the thermographic analysis. Unfortunately, the new methodology did not yield any significant results. The discovery of the hidden print, a late 19th century print after Lucas Cranach, was achieved by the artist Quitman herself, who invested many hours searching by computer hundreds of Cranach prints and comparing the print edges. Her final creation, based on the hidden print under Angelus Novus, was recently revealed to the public in an exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and the painting was then contributed by the artist to the Israel Museum's collection.