An office with no canonical rank

No scheme of the nine orders contains an angel of death. The figure is a personification assembled from usage — an event given a body, and given wings because wings were the available vocabulary for anything that arrives from outside. Two of the 224 titles in this catalogue name death, and both are late. The absence of a rank here is not a gap in the record; there was never a rank to record.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1923 and gives Oleksa Novakivskyi, a Ukrainian painter, with Art Nouveau Modern and Post-Impressionism as the style term. No dimensions are recorded. The measured colour family is neutral. No location is recorded.

A twentieth-century entry

The record files this under Abstract Art and Colors, with Art Nouveau Modern and Post-Impressionism as the style terms, and the painter is the catalogue's only Ukrainian hand. Neither dimensions nor a location is on file, so the entry reports a title, a date and a set of classifications. That is thin, and saying so is better than dressing it up: by this date the angelic vocabulary was being used without the system that once made its terms mean different things.