Wild Angels-Catalog-small-with-cover

W i l d A n g e l s Angels on Earth The Paintings of Nogah Engler Galili Shahar I In the summer of 1914, Franz Kafka recorded a short story in his diary which describes a solitary man living alone in a narrow room with nothing to hope for. As evening comes, the man realizes that a revelation is about to take place. An angel descends from the room’s ceiling, as visions and colors appear in its space; for he is about to receive a message. Soon, however, the man realizes that what he thought was an angel is merely a painted wooden figurehead with a candle in a holder, hanging from the ceiling. The man now sits alone in the dim light. This image sums up the history of angels in the modern era: They are represented as defeated, limp, with sagging wings, and bearing no message. Dürer’s engraving Melancholia 1 heralds their decline by the very posture of the angel, depicted as a winged woman, sitting silently; sad and contemplative, as it gazes indifferently at the distance – but at what? The new angel falls into melancholy and bears no tidings. Like a messenger devoid of a mission, it wanders aimlessly, roaming the land. In Reiner Maria Rilke’s poetry, the "Duino Elegies", angels are referred to, again and again, as “terrible,” because their power is endless, but they are not responsive to humans, and are not committed to the cries of mortal beings on Earth: Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel/ Ordnungen? [Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the Angelic/ Orders?] In Rilke’s poetry, the angels, who are doomed to disappear, or to remain silent in the modern era, are witnesses to annihilation; they teach the poets the ways of mourning – the sighs, whispers and lamentations over the dead. We might similarly interpret Walter Benjamin’s thesis on angels, inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus . From the past, from the ruins of history, Klee’s terrified angel heralds the end of the world. But this painting is no longer a traditional apocalyptic vision (such as that of John’s revelation, or