Warburg Institute and Its Library
Road Map to Cultural Exchange Routes
Aby Warburg, (1866 – 1929) was a German art historian and cultural theorist who founded the Library for Cultural Studies (Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg-KBW) in Hamburg, Germany,1 a private library, which was later moved to the Warburg Institute, London. Warburg’s family was in banking. At the heart of his research was the legacy of the classical world, and the transmission of classical representation, in the most varied areas of Western culture through to the Renaissance.2
The history of the library until its move to London is documented on the Warburg Institute website. By the time it moved from Warburg’s home into the new library building in 1926 the number of books had reached 44,000. When the library left Hamburg on 12 December 1933 it consisted of nearly 60,000 books and 25,000 photographs. Warburg also acquired entire collections. In 1924, for example, he received the library of the recently deceased classicist and expert in ancient astrology, Franz Boll (1867–1924). 3
Warburg was the spirit behind the "iconographic studies" that dominated art history for most of the second half of the twentieth century--the man who reoriented the scholarly study of art from a discipline devoted essentially to saying who had painted what pictures when to one asking what all the little weird bits and pieces within the pictures might have meant in their time.4
With the onset of Nazism, enemy to learning and to Jewish bankers both, the library, still staffed by Warburg's disciples, looked elsewhere for a home. In 1933, it found one in London, where, after much last-minute maneuvering, the books, documents, furniture, and staff, including Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing, who had been Warburg's most important collaborators, were all sent.5 Toward the end of the World War II the Warburg family, in a succinct document, deeded the collection permanently to the University of London, on condition that it be housed in a "suitable building in close proximity to the University" and kept intact.6
The University of London attempted to break the deed but ultimately in 2015 the Warburg Institute was judged to continue.7
The Warburg Institute and Library
The Warburg Institute is one of the world’s leading centers for studying the interaction of ideas, images and society. It is dedicated to the history of ideas, the dissemination and transformations of images in society, and the relationship between images, art and their texts and subtexts, of all epochs and across the globe, concerning both memory and material culture.8
The Institute provides postgraduate courses, hosts research projects and offers a range of public programs. It houses an open-stack library of more than 380,000 rare and modern volumes still organized using Warburg’s original classifications,9 as well as a Photographic Collection with more than 400,000 images and one of the most complete archives of any research center in the humanities.10
An introduction to the classification used at the Warburg Library is available here: Introduction - Classification System - Research Guides at The Warburg Institute, University of London (libguides.com)
The best way to understand Warburg's vision is to study his Bilderatlas: The Road Map to Cultural Exchange Routes. It was on exhibit in Berlin in 2020.
Bilderatlas: The Road Map to Cultural Exchange Routes
The Bilderatlas is a series of 63 panels that feature 971 images comprising photographic reproductions of artworks stretching from Antiquity to the Renaissance, mixed in with newspaper cuttings and advertisements, stamps, images of coins and astrological charts. Warburg had begun the project of assembling his visual archive in 1924, tracking its references, evolutions and recombinations using a card index as he moved his vast undertaking towards a planned book form. A version of the project, on which the 2020 exhibition was based (also available for online study)11 is a meticulous reconstruction (first exhibited in 1929) not long before Warburg, died. The planned three-volume book unrealized.
The Bilderatlas, despite its idiosyncrasies, its evident flaws and blindspots, remains an intriguing example of one man’s attempt to create some sort of coherent world-view at a time when the world, interwar and on the point of economic collapse, seemed disparate and fractured.12
Warburg’s Bilderatlas (picture atlas), begun in the final years of his life and incomplete at his death, in 1929, represents the origins of modern (Western) art history, when disciplines such as iconography, sociology, ethnography and psychology were introduced into a history of Western art that had until then been dominated by aesthetics alone…For Warburg himself it was part of ‘a laboratory of the study of civilization’. As long as you accept, according to a map that opens the presentation, that civilisation is the property of a geography that stretches from Bagdad to Coruña and from Hamburg to Aswan. Prepared according to Warburg’s instructions, it is titled ‘The Road Map to Cultural Exchange Routes.”13
The Warburg Institute Programs
Programs can be searched here: Events | The Warburg Institute (sas.ac.uk) Many are on You Tube.
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. Based originally in Hamburg, Germany, in 1933 the collection was moved to London, where it became incorporated into the University of London in 1944.
Gombrich, E. H. (1970). Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography: with a memoir on the history of the library of F. Saxl. London: Warburg Institute.
Gopnik A. In the memory ward. (The World’s Weirdest Library ) The New Yorker. 2015;91(4):34
McEwan, Dorothea. Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing. Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2023. Print.
Ibid. (Gopnik)
Ibid. (Gopnik)
The Warburg Institute (sas.ac.uk) . The Institute publishes a journal: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes.
Only as the visitor begins to study the collections does the oddity of the place appear. In the range-finder plates mounted on the shelves, where in a normal library one would expect to see “Spanish Literature, Sixteenth Century” or “Biography, American: E663-664,” there are, instead, signs pointing toward “Magic Mirrors” and “Amulets” and “The Evil Eye.” (Ibid., Gopnik).
Raymond Klibansky and the Warburg Library Network: Intellectual Peregrinations from Hamburg to London and Montreal edited by Philippe Despoix and Jillian Tomm with the collaboration of Eric Mechoulan and Georges Leroux. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018. See also: McEwan, Dorothea. Studies on Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing. Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2023. Print.
Rappolt, Mark (March 16, 2021). How Art Historian Aby Warburg Changed the Way We See. Art Review.
Ibid. (Rappolt).
I'm puzzled by the comments on this very interesting post. Is Warburg's work to be dismissed simply because he was a rich individual from a family of (Jewish) bankers? I prefer to consider his efforts in the context of his time: against the background of the growing Nazi intolerance and iconoclasm. At least he used his wealth to fund a scholarly passion, and he left a body of theoretical work and a collection that reflects his research and the intellectual environment of his time. It is there for us to engage with critically. Dismissing it because it came from a privileged bourgeois background seems to me to be too simplistic.
One has to laugh at the empowered circle of society declaring what is culture, noble and good. What else can you do? If all do not have equal access to such opportunity then by definition this is perceptual palsy. Money loves money and little else, making one feel sorry for the wealthy, its over arching power so often all-deceiving. Better to be humble and poor than arrogant and rich.