Klee Painting Research Articles

A suggested procedure for wearable art design from Paul Klee's paintings

This paper reveals a suggested approach that designers can emulate when choosing techniques that express the aesthetic values and concepts inherent in paintings and applied in wearable art. Some of the paintings of the abstract artist "Paul Klee" were used as an example in this research, where the main problem faced by the researcher was to find a compromise that could bring the original artwork from the walls of museums to the ground in a way that would be accepted by the ordinary public without prejudice to the artistic values that the employer wanted. Accordingly, the researcher's first task was to find a way to preserve the original message that the owner of the artwork wanted when designing a piece of wearable art.Understanding the original artwork from some publications that dealt with his criticism and then analyzing it artistically by the researcher himself, in addition to studying the advantages of some techniques used in wearable art through the works of some artists, the researcher implemented (4) Pieces of clothing that each of which expresses an original piece of art by Paul Klee, using techniques such as (edge engraving - straight hand sewing - and digital embroidery). Typography), and the results showed that appropriate artistic techniques, expressive materials and design lines can be chosen by determining the artistic value of the artwork through the method. , Emotion, story or theme in addition to analyzing paintings according to the components of the artwork (line, space, color, composition) and the artistic values of the drawing (dimension - contrast). This proposed path allows for the transformation of the artwork into clothing products acceptable to the community and thus spread cultural awareness. Among the segments of society.

Modelling and generating abstract images of Paul Klee style

This paper presents our recent work on automatically generating Paul Klee style of abstract paintings. Based on Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook and our own understanding and observation, we analyse Klee's paintings made in his final few years. The generation process is described in details and sample generated images styled on two of Paul Klee's paintings are also demonstrated. Having analysed the colour and composition of Klee's paintings, we can randomly adjust the parameters to present results with unique compositions and palettes. We also propose a workflow of generating abstract paintings. This framework helps developing a paradigm for abstract image generation process. Our approach is also highly scalable.

Modelling and generating abstract images of Paul Klee style

This paper presents our recent work on automatically generating Paul Klee style of abstract paintings. Based on Klee's Pedagogical Sketchbook and our own understanding and observation, we analyse Klee's paintings made in his final few years. The generation process is described in details and sample generated images styled on two of Paul Klee's paintings are also demonstrated. Having analysed the colour and composition of Klee's paintings, we can randomly adjust the parameters to present results with unique compositions and palettes. We also propose a workflow of generating abstract paintings. This framework helps developing a paradigm for abstract image generation process. Our approach is also highly scalable.

Introduction to Heidegger's "Notes on Klee"

Foucault claimed that relation to our century, represents what Velazquez had been able to represent in his.1 In saying this, Foucault gives one reason why Paul Klee's work-both his artistic and his theoretical works-have been so central in philosophical discussions of the present age: stands not simply as a representative of an historical moment, but his work lets us see into the truth of that moment. Few painters have attracted as widespread attention among philosophers as has. From Benjamin to Merleau-Ponty and from Gadamer to Deleuze, Klee's work has been the focus of genuine philosophical commentary and has invariably been taken as of an inspiration for philosophizing itself. Until the publication of his on Klee and a few other recently published texts, it was not just clear how deeply Heidegger too had engaged Klee's work.2We cannot be certain when Heidegger first discovered Klee's work, but these on Klee make very clear that his encounter with was a profound experience for Heidegger.3 Given Heidegger's previous remarks about modern art, which were few but nonetheless typically dismissive, this apparently sudden embrace of is a bit surprising. There is not even a mention of in the Zusatz (1956) to the Origin of the Work of Art so it seems as if we can date the turning point for Heidegger to his visit to Basel in 1957 to see the Beyeler collection of eighty-eight recently purchased paintings by Paul Klee.4 This event was a landmark event for Heidegger who would give evidence of the newfound importance of Klee's work when, shortly after seeing Klee's paintings and beginning to read his writings, he spoke to friends of the need to write a sort of supplement or appendix to Origin of the Work of Art that would take account of Klee's work. There would be more visits to Basel and eventually, Heidegger would write to the art historian Heinrich Petzet that something which we all have not yet even glimpsed is to be found in [Klee's work]5Whenever and for whatever reasons it began, it is clear that during this period was a figure of real importance for Heidegger's own work and philosophical project. Other painters-Braque, Picasso, Cezanne, and Zen painting-would win Heidegger's attention from time to time, but no artist came close to summoning the same kind of response that we find in Heidegger's fascination with and expressed in these on Klee.6 In Klee, Heidegger recognizes a vision that resonates with many of Heidegger's own deepest concerns.What is perhaps most striking about these notes is their sense of promise that Heidegger sees in Klee. There is a sense that new, tinged with hope, some way out of the impasses of modern forms of production and technicity, is opening up as he looks at these paintings. Engaging Klee, Heidegger finds being made visible in the peculiar legibility of painting as well as in the intelligibility of Klee's own words that echoes Heidegger's own deepest concerns. One finds Heidegger seamlessly mingling his own language-words like Ereignis, Sage, Kehre, Werke, Geviert-with his remarks on Klee's paintings and in his citations of Klee's written texts. The enthusiasm, excitement, and energy of these notes are clear.However, these notes present immense hermeneutical problems and do not easily-if ever-really make sense. Notes always present interpretive problems for a reader insofar as they make no effort to be complete or even to be coherent. Notes belong to a moment that their author is attempting to preserve without interrupting. One makes notes in order to leave traces of thoughts, insights, and questions that can be awakened later. They are hieroglyphs of a language that are rooted in the workings of an individual mind speaking with itself. For the most part, one never intends notes for others, but only for oneself. One does not worry about completing thoughts, about style or syntax, grammar can be optional, dashes make connections without explanation, exclamation points and question marks abound. …

Life and Art

Dennis Schmidt's book, Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), is an intense and extraordinarily rich work that moves across history of aesthetics from Kant to Gadamer. It traces with extraordinary insight movement of thinking that responds to artwork and to what painting lets shine forth in of appearance. It also offers to us a genuinely original understanding of aesthetic life and of space of painting that has opened up for our times. The fact that first line of text is about what gave birth to and shaped is no accident. This is all about birth and genesis and new forms of life and about movement that shapes and belongs to this life. I say this without forgetting that it is a about painting. I am tempted to suggest playfully a new title for this book. If I did, it would be something like: Life and Art: Toward an Ethics of Generation and Creativity. But author would no doubt respond that title he did choose, Between Word and Image, says exactly this. Everything hinges on that is so prominently announced in his title. This is about movement and enlivening that occurs between word and image and between image and word, about a doubling of word and image, about possibility of a translation between word and image.As I have already suggested, for me central theme of is relationship of art and life and therefore about how art has capacity to intensify human life and thereby revitalize our experience of life in general. If Schmidt is correct and if his insights take hold, and if modern art has impact on us that it has had on him, then there is hope for us in a increasingly dominated by our desensitization toward and objectification of life-world in which we dwell. This is a theme from Heidegger that Schmidt takes very seriously. Schmidt comments on Heidegger's brief encounter with Klee's artworks and writings and highlights possibilities Heidegger glimpsed for a rekindling of deep connection between techne and phusis, between art and life, that for Heidegger flashed up in Klee's work. He elaborates on what Heidegger sees as difficulty of our times that inhibits any genuine engagement with painting. Schmidt identifies this obstacle to engagement as the still-unthought essence of technicity, essence of production in age. think that essence, one needs to begin by thinking destitution, abandonment, of being in historical present (80). Heidegger saw a renewed possibility for this kind of thinking, that is, for thinking abandonment, in works of Paul Klee, but he never followed up on this insight. Schmidt declares: To pursue possibilities [in Klee's paintings] that Heidegger so abruptly abandons, is intention of this book (80). For Schmidt, works of Klee are, for reasons he shows, exemplary artworks through which we can learn something about modern art in general that may provide an opening in these destitute times for a non-objectifying, life-affirming sense of production. They have potential to break through closure of our times and rekindle our love for and wonder in face of of world (142). Heidegger worries about age of machination that threatens to close us off to possibility of art, and, despite exceptional art of Klee, he is concerned that it is precisely non-objective, abstract art that announces and inscribes this collapse. In contrast, Schmidt sees non-objectivity of modern art as a site for optimism about appearance because it refuses any claim to capture and objectify what cannot be grasped and comprehended. It is for this reason, for example, that Schmidt asserts as a basic conviction of his that nothing less than work of art will suffice 'after Auschwitz' (11). I wonder what Schmidt would say in this regard about Blanchot's work, and whether he shares with him sense that art has to enter into this devastation and stay with it in order to address depth of absence and loss that is indicated by word Auschwitz. …

Paralelos entre el arte y la naturaleza desde Klee al Independent Group

Structural similarities between natural and artistic forms could be easily justified: art, as it was defined in ancient times, is “ imitation of nature”. Not an imitation of what today we think is nature: forests, mountains, rivers, animals, etc, but imitation of the essential or ideal nature of things. After the microscope revealed the existence of structures different from the immediately visible forms, but as real as them, the arts could imitate them. Nevertheless, some artists thought that there might not be causal similarities, but significant, between natural and artificial ( or artistic) forms. This possibility led to Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson and architects Alison and Peter Smithson to assemble the Parallel of Life and Art photo-exhibition. His intention was to discover, from analogies and parallels between different images, a “new landscape” where art meet again nature and technology. They wished expand the human field of vision beyond the limits imposed by previous generations. Common laws existence in nature and art shows that human being creations are also nature recreations. Surrealism and structuralism confirmed it. Apart from possible influences, parallels between Klee paintings and schemes made by the Smithsons are equally significant.

The angel of history

This article explores the way in which art can illuminate war, in particular the Great War. It focuses on Paul Klee's painting, Angelus novus (1920), and the interpretation of that painting by Walter Benjamin, who owned it, in his celebrated theses �On the concept of history� (1940). Benjamin's interpretation was a kind of parable: he called it the angel of history. Some have taken inspiration from that characterization; others have offered striking alternatives, including Kaiser Wilhelm II and even Adolf Hitler. The article traces the evolution of these identifications; it also considers the continuing artistic response, in historical perspective�notably Anselm Kiefer's The angel of history: poppy and memory (1989). It argues that our conception of the war, and of all wars, is profoundly affected by artistic imagination, and re-imagination.

The Semiotic Engine: Notes on the History of Algorithmic Images in Europe

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 in 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 …1

Mourning Emmett: "One Long Expansive Moment"

Mourning Emmett:"One Long Expansive Moment" Rebecca Mark (bio) However the image enters its force remains within my eyes —Audre Lorde, "Afterimages" 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 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 in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a 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. —Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History If you do not know—and you should know, as Americans we should know—Emmett Louis Till, a fourteen-year-old African American boy from Chicago, died when at least two (but we now know, more than two) murderers, J.W. Milam and Roy Bryant, dragged him from his uncle Mose Wright's house in Money, Mississippi at 2:00 a.m. the morning [End Page 121] of August 28, 1955, took him to a shed, pistol-whipped him and beat him with tire irons (he was screaming an awful piercing wailing cry that everyone nearby heard), shot him or drilled a hole in his head, (no one should ever have to write this sentence, read this sentence, or live this sentence), then took his body in the back of a pick-up truck and tied a heavy gin fan around his neck and dumped him off a cliff into the Tallahatchie River. After being tried and exonerated in the greatest travesty of justice, the worst farce of a trial in American history (Milam and Bryant and their wives sat in the courtroom drinking Cokes with their toddler sons and laughing no more than twenty feet from Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Bradley, later Mamie Till-Mobley), the two men confessed to William Bradford Huie, a southern journalist (who paid them for their confession) that they had killed Emmett Till—didn't want to, hadn't meant to, but had to, because Emmett had whistled at Carolyn Bryant, who was married to Roy, the owner of a small grocery store out in the middle of cotton fields in the Delta of Money, Mississippi. Milam and Bryant and the others claimed they had to kill Emmett Till because he was too uppity and kept bragging that he had slept with a white woman in Chicago. They claimed he had a picture of his white girlfriend in his wallet. Emmett was only fourteen. What fourteen year old, what human, dragged out of bed at two in the morning in the loneliness of the Mississippi Delta by two white men with guns, pistol-whipped and beaten, would be talking about anything, let alone boasting. He was screaming in pain. He was dying. Bryant and Milam died years later. No one has ever paid for this crime. There is evidence that there were as many as seven, maybe more people involved, including Carolyn Bryant, and several African American men. As Toni Morrison writes in Beloved : this is not a story to pass on. Because I cannot bear that this narrative takes up space on this page, and because my heart dies a little each time I think about it, I swore off writing about Emmett Till after two years of collecting fragments—quotes and impressions, teaching a yearly course on the rhetoric of violence in the South that included many of the most important literary texts on Emmett Till, and co-directing the civil rights conference Unsettling Memories, which included the panel on Emmett Till that contributed to the birth of the comprehensive new book by Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress: Emmett Till in the Literary...

The Nation‐Form

It has been said time and again that the paradigm of Third World nationalism is the Hegelian narrative of lordship and bondage – the struggle for recognition. As the hegemonic petty‐bourgeois elite...

Mourning, the Messianic, and the Specter

The question of Jacques Derrida's appropriation of Benjamin in Specters of Marx revolves around the issue of messianicity-how each conceives of the messianic. Indeed, the relationships between Walter Benjamin's "weak messianic power" and Jacques Derrida's "messianic without messianism" have been intensely debated. Often overlooked in this debate, however, is Derrida's notion of mourning. The following discussion will explore mourning's pivotal role in Derrida's critical adoption of Benjamin. In light of this exploration, I will attend to two basic arguments in the debate. The first asserts that Benjamin generally lacks a concept of "future," which I will address primarily with a discussion of Benjamin's "On the Concept of History.'" In engaging the second kind of argument, which focuses on the differences between Derrida's and Benjamin's uses of the word "messianic," I will probe Jacques Derrida's treatment of Benjamin's ideas in Specters of Marx.2 Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of the specter, which is a hallmark of Specters of Marx and a restatement of messianic justice that interprets Benjamin's influence on mourning, messianicity, and time in a new light.3 The first kind of argument, then, asserts that while Derrida focuses on the future, Benjamin critiques the future and instead focuses only on the past. I would suggest, however, that while Benjamin shuns the Ideological future of linear progress as a Derridean future-present which he elsewhere associates with Bergson's duree* he does have a non-linear, non-predictable sense of time. This time, often called messianic or convoluted time, does not preclude an openness to the future along the lines of Derrida's future-to-come [l'a-venir]. Thus, Benjamin's messianic time, like Derrida's disjointed time, does more than merely disrupt linear time; it keeps the present structurally open to both the past and future. Benjamin uses two images to illustrate possible orientations to the past. One is Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus and the other is the prophet. The haunting image of the angel in the painting has its back turned toward the future, wings outstretched: It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at 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 and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can no longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.5 Though he wants to stay and attend to the dead at his feet who have been reduced to rubble by historicism in the name of "progress," the angel is powerless to save the dead and is thrust into the future. The historical materialist, on the other hand, is the "prophet." He also wants to attend to the trampled dead, so he "has turned away from the future: he perceives the contours of the future in the fading light of the past as it sinks before him into the night of times."6 Benjamin's concern in presenting these two images is with the duty that present generations have to past ones. Yet both figures turn toward the past out of a concern for the future. The historical materialism which Benjamin champions in this essay represents a way of telling and writing history that attends to the largely overlooked dead in the past who were sacrificed on the Hegelian "slaughterbench" of history while history marched on in the name of "progress." "We" of the present generation are Benjamin's messianic figures who have this duty to the dead. We are always already contracted to them, and they have been expecting us: "There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one [unserem], Then our coming was expected on earth. …

Debris and Remembrance: Anna Seghers's “Ausflug” and Walter Benjamin's “Engel der Geschichte”

In contemporary Germany, the visual remains of Trummer are interspersed throughout the landscape. Bronze and Stone Age vestiges, castle ruins, and old cityscapes reveal former government and urban structures. Other more recent images of ruins and piles of debris-especially the rubble of destroyed cities and surreal piles of dead bodies of two World Wars-are still freshly imprinted on our collective memory. The historical wreckage scattered through present-day life is a reminder of earlier periods and former life experience that adds to our desire to understand more about the past. While historical remnants cannot reveal the past in its former entirety, they nevertheless guide our collective understanding of who we were and who we are today. The conceptual framework of historical debris figures prominently in Anna Seghers's novella Der Ausflug der toten Madchen (1943-44)1 and Walter Benjamin's 1940 interpretation of Paul Klee's painting Angelus Novus.2 Unsettled by memories of World War I and persecuted by the Nazis in World War II, the Jewish intellectuals Anna Seghers (1900-1983) and Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) not only experienced the deterioration of their world, but also engaged in a related literary, social, and political discourse about the Trummer of their time. In Seghers's novella and Benjamin's interpretation, imagery of rampant physical destruction and merciless death challenge readers to recognize the past in present experience. At the core of each text one finds the desire to identify some type of spatial or temporal continuity that links past and present generations. Embodied in the protagonist Netty and the representation of the Angel, both texts favor the figure of a collector. Although the past is lost and inaccessible to present experience, both figures wish to peruse-if only in an imaginative fashion-its scattered remains. Unlike the postwar Trummerfrauen working through the rubble of the Third Reich, neither author aims to clear the waste and remove history in order to create space for a new existence. Rather, Benjamin and Seghers each acknowledge the existence of historical debris and seek to preserve it. By locating former wreckage in the midst of their own culture, they raise awareness of lost and hidden moments of a vanished past. There is a remarkable confluence of thought in these two texts from the 1940s. Seghers and Benjamin share not only a similar Weimar Marxist sensibility for social justice but also a fascination with aspects of Jewish mysticism. In these texts both authors reflect a belief in the continuity of human experience in which Splitter of Messianic premonition are passed from generation to generation. After a short introduction to both works, this essay offers a close reading of Seghers's Der Ausflug der toten Madchen and Benjamin's interpretation of the Angel of History. By concentrating on the treatment of space, time, and recovery in both texts, the article examines how each author utilizes the trope of debris to engage in a related discourse of history. Moreover this discussion reveals how, in light of the quickly accumulating ruins of their time, both writers develop concepts of remembrance derived from a dialectic of debris and recovery. The novella Der Ausflug der toten Madchen is the mournful narrative of a survivor who has lost family members and friends to the Nazi regime. At the center of the novella one finds Netty who, like Seghers herself, has fled Germany for exile in Mexico. Sparked by her memory of a sunny and idyllic school excursion down the Rhine river, Netty recalls multiple moments involving her former classmates and teachers that revolve around real historical events extending from before World War I to 1943. The story is compactly structured in inner and outer narrative. The Rahmenerzahlung establishes the current time and place, Mexico, from which Netty recollects stories of her Heimat. The description of the hot afternoon sun gives the landscape of the cyclic frame an eerie and desolate atmosphere. …

In Sierra Leone (review)

Michael Jackson. Sierra Leone. Durham and London: Duke University Press., 2004. 232 pp. More than a generation ago, the late French philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, wrote a highly provocative essay called Eye and Mind. this groundbreaking work, Merleau-Ponty wrote about how paintings enable us to know nature on the inside, for, as he wrote, the quality, light, color and depth which are there before us are there only because they awaken an echo in our body and because the body welcomes them (1964:22). Merleau-Ponty believed that much is lost in operational thinking in which scholars define rather than experience the reality of things-in-the-world. the essay, he suggests that painters sense the life that resides in objects and recognize forces that create sensuous reverberations in the eye and mind of a person who experiences the world. Merleau-Ponty says that the painter...sees what keep the world from being a painting...and sees painting as an answer to all these inadequacies (1964:25). Painting, then, is a metaphor for seeing and thinking in the world-a seeing-thinking from the depths of one's being. As the painter Paul Klee put it: In the forest I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me. I was there, listening...! thinkthe painter must be penetrated by the universe and not penetrate it...I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps to break out (Charbonnier 1959, cited by Merleau-Ponty 1964:31). Given his fine-tuned phenomenological sensibilities, it is not surprising that at the beginning of Michael Jackson's extraordinary new book, Sierra Leone, the author's epigraph is a passage from Walter Benjamin, writing about Paul Klee, the painter, lest we forget, who sometimes felt that the trees in the forest were looking at him. 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. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (Frontispiece). Does this complex image capture the contradictory dynamics of the angel of history in West Africa, Sierra Leone? Can the angel awaken the dead Sierra Leone and make whole what the atrocities of civil war have torn asunder? Are human beings resilient enough to use the flotsam and jetsam of a horrific past to reconstruct their lives? Jackson's answer to these existential questions is a resounding, yes! His book is, in fact, a powerful reaffirmation of Sierra Leonean social resilience. But there is more, for Jackson's lyrical passages also speak to the complex resilience of the human spirit. The storm winds evoked by Klee's painting-and through Jackson's narratives-carry us forward to the future and yet, like the angel in the painting, the force of the storm immobilizes us. Careened toward the future, but not knowing what to expect, we look to the past for reassurance and find little solace. Thus propelled, we are not fully prepared for the horrors of the present; and yet, somehow, someway, we find the strength to live through the sometimes painful, sometimes tragic experiences of change in the here and now. Jackson's Sierra Leone, this turbulent matrix of existential themes is embodied in the persona of Jackson's old friend, S. …

The poem in the painting: Roman Jakobson and the pictorial language of Paul Klee

The Swiss-born painter Paul Klee wrote, ‘I know that fundamentally I am a poet; this knowledge should not be a hindrance in art’. His paintings are poems, small pages of a book, illuminated manuscripts in which he reads correspondences between shapes and hues as rhymes and rhythms. Perhaps inspired by medieval practices of reading the Book of Nature, whereby the world is a book and a book may be the world, Klee infuses his figural poetry with colour. Creating dynamic images, he notices how ‘light lends movement to forms, bends straight lines, ovalizes parallels and draws circles between them’. Like the Symbolist poets, he sees the world as a forêt de symboles open to his personal interpretation. Through paint and pen, realities unfold, in a language potentially shared with the viewer. These works do not depict what the artist sees; they describe how human beings may see or make meaning from a world written in ciphers. Klee's paintings and drawings document the pursuit of visual form as a powerful signifier, the crystallization of moments in motion.

The Road to Karbala

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.

The colour of sound and the soundness of colour

Reflections upon a new RNIB publication on the work of six visually impaired artists, upon a BBC radio documentary programme on the relationship between sound and colour, and upon a visit to the Hayward Gallery to see an exhibition of Paul Klee's paintings. The paper sets out the writer's own aesthetic responses to visual works of art, and presents an argument that the visual arts should have a much higher profile in the education of visually impaired children.

On History, History of Education, and History of Colonial Education

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. (Walter Benjamin, 1940)

The Messiah Complex: The Angel of History Looks Back at Walter Benjamin from its Perch on the Ruins of “Socialism as it Existed in Reality”

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 towards 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.