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The Dialogues podcast episode examines Walter Benjamin’s relationship with Paul Klee’s 1920 drawing Angelus Novus and traces how both the artwork and Benjamin’s seminal “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” survived the Nazi onslaught. Benjamin purchased the drawing in Munich a year after its exhibition, financing it through a loan from fellow Jewish philosopher Ernst. After fleeing Berlin in 1933, he carried the work to Paris, where he endured internment, statelessness, and relentless attempts to secure visas while drafting his historic essay. In the essay’s famous ninth stanza Benjamin describes the Angel of History as an angel thrust forward by a storm he calls progress, eyes fixed on a pile of wreckage. The episode highlights the dense correspondence network—Adorno, Arendt, Georges Bataille—and Bataille’s crucial role in hiding the drawing and Benjamin’s manuscripts. The survival of Angelus Novus and the thesis underscores how personal objects can shape intellectual theory and how exile networks preserved critical thought, offering contemporary scholars a vivid case study of memory, trauma, and the politics of cultural preservation.
The video features a conversation between artist Luc Tuymans and curator Helen Molesworth about their project "The Fruit Basket," which employs three‑dimensional figurines rendered in a muted gray gesso. By deliberately dulling the surface, the creators strip the objects of...
The Dialogues podcast episode features Rachel Hunter‑Himes discussing her recent Triple Canopy essay “Black Block,” which interrogates the persistent tendency to read Black art primarily through a political lens and to substitute artist identity for substantive critique. She argues that...
The video chronicles a little‑known chapter of Joan Mitchell’s career—her summers and falls in the early 1960s spent living aboard a sailboat that roamed the Mediterranean from the Côte d’Azur to Corsica, Italy and Greece. While navigating coastal ports, she...
