An angel of the Last Judgement

An angel, not the angel

The indefinite article is the whole claim. An angel of the Last Judgment is one of a class — a member of the trumpeting cohort that the tradition assembles at the end, unnamed and unranked. The catalogue holds a second entry by the same painter with the same date and the same recorded dimensions, whose title uses the definite article instead, and which is recorded at a museum in Munich.

What the record holds

The catalogue dates the work to 1911 and gives Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian painter, with Abstract Art as the style term. The recorded dimensions are 64 x 50 cm. The measured colour family is yellow. The location on record is Merzbacher Collection, Zürich, Switzerland.

A pair the record can compare

Two nearly identical records with one grammatical difference is a rare gift for a catalogue, because it isolates something that is usually invisible: whether a title treats an angel as an individual or as an instance. Three of the 224 titles here name the Last Judgment. The style term on file is Abstract Art, and the subject tags are Abstract Art and Colors — no religious tag at all, on a picture whose title comes straight out of the apocalyptic tradition.