Morgan Meis at Close Reading:
I haven’t even gotten to the embarrassing part as regards my own history with the painting. The thing is, I’d only ever read about the painting in the works of [Walter] Benjamin and others. I’d never seen it. Definitely not in person and actually not even in reproduction. This was the early nineties, so I couldn’t just look it up online. So what I did instead was to form my own picture, my own mental fantasy of what it must have looked like. And then, sometime later, maybe a year or so later, I finally found a book that had a photo of the Angelus Novus. And I was very upset.
It’s a terrible painting, I thought. It’s not what I wanted it to be at all. It didn’t look like the image in my head. And I couldn’t stand the sort of curlicue hair and hands. It seemed too childlike as a drawing. Here’s the thing. I don’t actually remember anymore what I wanted the painting to look like. I just remember being in a state of shock when I looked at the photo and realized I had been writing about and fantasizing about this.
More here.
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