Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus has finally joined a major New York exhibition after a war-related delay tied to Iran kept the fragile work from arriving in time for the opening of Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds at the Jewish Museum.

The 1920 work, an oil transfer and watercolor on paper owned by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, is now installed at the museum’s exhibition on Fifth Avenue, according to ARTnews, which reported the arrival on May 11. The show opened March 20 and remains on view through July 26, giving visitors a shortened but still substantial window to see the original work in the context of a broader survey of Klee’s late career.

For weeks, the exhibition had displayed an authorized facsimile of Angelus Novus, accompanied by explanatory text noting that the original had been delayed. The substitution was significant because the work is not simply one item among about 100 paintings and drawings in the exhibition. It is one of Klee’s most discussed images and one of the key historical objects connecting the show’s formal art history to the political and philosophical crises of the 20th century.

The Jewish Museum describes Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds as the first American museum exhibition to focus on the Swiss-German artist’s final decade, a period shaped by political upheaval, exile, illness and the rise of fascism in Europe. The museum says the exhibition includes roughly 100 paintings and drawings, with select earlier works including Angelus Novus, and is organized in collaboration with the Zentrum Paul Klee and the Kunstmuseum Bern.

The belated arrival of Angelus Novus changes the visitor experience because the work anchors one of the exhibition’s central interpretive threads. The Jewish Museum’s own exhibition materials identify the piece as a rarely exhibited and iconic work from Klee’s earlier practice. Its importance rests partly on its visual force, but even more on its subsequent history: Walter Benjamin acquired the work in 1921 and later made it central to his writing on history, catastrophe and progress.

Benjamin’s association with the image has made Angelus Novus unusually influential beyond art history. In his 1940 “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin described Klee’s angel as a figure looking toward the accumulating wreckage of the past while being driven into the future. That reading helped turn the image into a shorthand for the trauma of modern history, especially in discussions of exile, fascism and the failures of linear progress.

The Jewish Museum’s press materials say the exhibition spotlights Angelus Novus in a section devoted to one of Klee’s most impactful works. The museum notes that Benjamin hid the drawing in the stacks of the Bibliothèque Nationale when he attempted to flee Nazi persecution in France. Benjamin died in 1940; the work later entered the orbit of Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism, and eventually the collection of the Israel Museum.

The physical object is modest in scale. The Jewish Museum’s program listing for a June 4 lecture on the work identifies Angelus Novus as measuring 12.5 by 9.5 inches. Its small size, paper support and light sensitivity help explain why any loan involves heightened conservation scrutiny. Works on paper can be particularly vulnerable to light exposure, environmental shifts and transport stress, making international loans more complicated than for sturdier objects.

The delay also illustrates how geopolitical instability can reshape museum programming in the United States even when the exhibition itself is not about current events. International loan shows depend on shipping routes, couriers, insurance, security reviews, customs coordination and the risk tolerance of lending institutions. When conflict disrupts those systems, curators may face the choice of opening with substitutions, delaying galleries or changing interpretive plans.

In this case, the Jewish Museum opened the exhibition while acknowledging the absence of the original Angelus Novus. That decision allowed the broader show to proceed while preserving the possibility that the loan could be completed later. The arrival of the work now gives the museum a renewed news peg and gives visitors who saw the exhibition early a reason to return before the July closing date.

Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds is curated by Mason Klein, the Jewish Museum’s senior curator emeritus. The museum’s February press release framed the exhibition as a reassessment of Klee’s response to fascism, persecution and political violence in 1930s Europe. It traces Klee’s departure from the Bauhaus, his dismissal from the Düsseldorf Academy after the Nazis labeled his work degenerate, and his return to Switzerland, where he confronted both exile and illness before his death in 1940.

The exhibition’s late-career focus matters because Klee is often remembered in popular culture for whimsical color, delicate abstraction and pedagogical links to the Bauhaus. The Jewish Museum’s presentation argues for a darker and more politically charged reading, emphasizing works made under pressure from authoritarianism and personal decline. The arrival of Angelus Novus reinforces that argument by placing one of the artist’s most historically burdened images back into the gallery.

The show’s chronology also gives the work a wider frame. Klee made Angelus Novus in 1920, before the final decade that dominates the exhibition. But its afterlife through Benjamin and its later association with catastrophe make it a bridge between Klee’s experimental modernism and the 1930s crisis that the Jewish Museum foregrounds. Seen in that setting, the work is not only a famous image but also a lens through which the exhibition asks viewers to reconsider Klee’s political consciousness.

The museum is also building public programming around the work. Its schedule lists a June 4 lecture, Of Angels and Doubles: Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus from Berlin to Jerusalem, by Annie Bourneuf, a professor of art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The timing now gives that program added relevance, because the original work is on view rather than represented only by a facsimile.

For New York’s museum audience, the arrival marks a rare encounter with a work that is widely reproduced but seldom seen in person in the United States. For cultural institutions, it is a reminder that major exhibitions are increasingly exposed to forces beyond curatorial planning: war, diplomacy, transport restrictions, lender caution and the conservation requirements of fragile works. In the case of Angelus Novus, those pressures delayed but did not prevent the work’s New York presentation.

The result is a materially different exhibition from the one visitors saw in its first weeks. The facsimile could explain the image’s role, but it could not substitute for the presence of the original sheet, with its scale, surface and physical history. With Angelus Novus now installed, Paul Klee: Other Possible Worlds more fully delivers on its promise to connect Klee’s art to the political wreckage and imaginative resistance that shaped his final years.