The painting I find most annoying in the world is Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus (1920)
Because there’s this incredibly badass description of it by Walter Benjamin:
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 before
him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
which sounds absolutely amazing, but then I go look at the actual painting and it’s like
