image for illustration: Aby Warburg by the Aby Warburg Institut, London, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The World Architecture Festival (6-8 November) has published ‘The history of the Warburg Institute’ as a narrative for our times, by Jeremy Melvin.
Jeremy Melvin writes for World Architecture Festival:
The history of the Warburg Institute is narrative for our times, writes Jeremy Melvin. Its story is one where intellectual endeavour mixes with creative research, struggle against poor mental health, migration, exile, the power of images and more than a hint of plutocracy in a veritable smorgasbord of contemporary concerns. Above all, the Warburg proposes an imaginative conceptual framework for investigating the history and condition of cultures across the world. The core strength of its ‘renaissance’ – a reference to the period which most engaged its founder Aby Warburg – is the way Haworth Tompkins, capably aided by Warburg Director Bill Sherman and his staff, have understood Aby’s perceptive and original intellectual agenda, folding it into the framework of Charles Holden’s building. It’s the last part of his masterplan for the university and has been the Warburg’s home since 1958. The result is space which invites the public to engage with that Warburg agenda, and gives the institute a face to the future – as he always intended.
Born in 1866, the oldest of five brothers and two sisters in the prominent eponymous banking family of Hamburg, Aby diverted from finance and the family’s Jewish roots to pursue his interest in art and cultural history. His diversions, though, never strayed very far. Access to great wealth funded his travels, studies and purchases for his library. The second brother, Max, who became one of the richest and most prominent kaiserjude in Wilhelminian Germany, recalled after Aby’s death in 1929, that as boys they made a pact. Aby would leave running the bank to his brothers, in return for them buying any book he ever wanted: ‘It involved a very large blank cheque’.
Two other brothers (Felix and Paul) married daughters of partners in the bank Kuhn, Loeb, the only real Wall Street rival to JP Morgan in the early 20th century. They also supported him through episodes of mental instability. And although Aby married outside the faith to the artist Mary Hertz, daughter of a Hamburg senator, his relations overcame their initial reservations to welcome her. Certain aspects of Jewish mysticism informed his research interests, and one of his most prominent English disciples, Frances Yates, showed how inter-related was classical, Jewish and Christian thought.
A sophisticated intellectual conception of culture (perhaps better captured in the German kultur) underlay Aby’s thought. His original name for the institute when it was located in Hamburg was the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliotek (the library for the science of culture). Fascinated by the Italian Renaissance, he explored its many aspects from painting and sculpture to its philosophy and the occult. All were manifested, he believed, in images which led to one of his most famous works, the bildnisatlas or picture atlas, where he selected iconic images to represent cultural themes whose proximities and adjacencies allowed observers to perceive connections between them for themselves.
He more or less introduced iconography to art history, which his disciples Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich developed. His grasp of the significance and power of images went some way beyond that of his contemporary Bernard Berenson, who used image to account for attribution of artworks to individual artists. Warburg saw each work as part of a continuum in dialogue with many others, whether by the same artist or another.
Nor did Renaissance art provide his only inspiration. He consulted Albert Einstein on the trajectory of planetary orbits (itself arising from his interest in the astronomy of Johannes Kepler and its connections to Renaissance mysticism), and through that the form of the ellipse became itself a resonant symbol, inscribed in the ceiling of the original reading room in Hamburg and the ceiling of the new lecture room. Cosmology and kultur sit together.
Other interests included rituals as precursors to cultural forms, which led him to travel in the south western United States to investigate ritual dances and beliefs among native Americans. Kuhn, Loeb financed the local railway, and their connections facilitated his travel. Supplementing this unusually broad view of world culture for the time, John and Dominique de Menil (founders of the eponymous Renzo Piano-designed gallery in Houston and supporters the civil rights movement) gave part of their collection of photographs showing images of ‘the black’ in western art to the Warburg.
One of the most noted features of the institute’s library is its cataloguing system, which defies all conventions of bibliophilia and most new users find confusing (I certainly did: when unable to locate a book I asked librarian to help. ‘The title has two nouns in apposition to each other’ she admonished me (conjuring up nightmarish visions of chapter 17 of my prep school Latin textbook explaining ‘apposition’) before directing me to the correct location. Once mastered, though, the cataloguing system is wonderful, fulfilling its aim that the book you really need is the one on the shelf next to the book you are looking for.
In this sense the catalogue is a parallel to the images of the bildnisatlas. Like the images, the books are linked in an unseen, silent, implicit dialogue whose connections as much as their nodal points contain the essence of kultur which can be uncovered through diligent research. All are linked by memory, and the only word Warburg would allow to appear on the actual fabric of the Hamburg building was Mnemosyne, the name of the classical goddess of memory and mother of the nine muses.
