Weird and wonderful

On December 12, 1933, the steamers Hermia and Jessica quietly left Hamburg – the German authorities had forbidden any publicity – with a precious cargo packed into the 531 boxes on board. They carried the 60,000 volumes, along with a vast stock of photographs and other archive materials, collected by the art historian Aby Warburg, then enshrined in his home city, Hamburg, as the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. A couple of weeks later this flight of a library, facilitated by a British committee and funded by the Warburg and Courtauld families, would have been impossible. Joseph Goebbels, as Nazi propaganda minister, took direct charge of such decisions in Berlin. Warburg’s library was the only such institution to escape the Third Reich intact.

Aby Warburg, the first-born son of a Jewish banking family, had begun to accumulate his book hoard after (as a famous but unauthenticated story runs) he renounced his birthright to his brother Max in exchange for an undertaking to buy every volume he ever wanted. Warburg’s growing passion for art history coincided with a rejection not just of a banking career, but of his family’s religious traditions: his grandmother had hoped that he would become a rabbi. After a thesis on Botticelli’s imagery, and a revelatory research detour among the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, he settled first in Florence, where he deepened his Renaissance studies, then in Hamburg as an arts patron, a public educator and a private scholar free to stretch the frontiers of thought, cushioned by family fortune. “God is in the detail”, he insisted; but closely observed details might build into a complete picture of an age and its key ideas. Walter Benjamin, an admirer of Aby Warburg, was upbraided by his friend Theodor Adorno for the associative method of his Parisian scrapbook, the Arcades Project. To Adorno, Benjamin stood, riskily, “at the crossroads of magic and positivism”. So, arguably, did Warburg, whose approach blended painstaking scholarship with bold intuitive leaps.

His idiosyncratic collection devoted to the history of the image, the transmission of culture and “the afterlives of antiquity” came to rest in London. It settled first in Thames House, on Millbank, then at the Imperial Institute in South Kensington. In 1944 it became associated with the University of London and since 1958 has been housed in Woburn Square, on the university’s Bloomsbury campus.

With influential directors (notably Ernst Gombrich), champions such as Kenneth Clark and pioneering disciples including Frances A. Yates, the Warburg Institute not only cast a charismatic spell over art history and the study of visual culture, but also became, as Hans C. Hönes writes in Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg (TLS, April 12, 2024), “an intellectual powerhouse that shaped the British humanities”. Hönes’s valuable biography closes with its subject’s death in 1929, but a mighty legacy remained. The Warburg spirit blew spicy breezes of the occult, the intuitive, even the surreal, through the dusty stacks of scholarship. The Institute’s library classifications adopted his “law of the good neighbour” to promote serendipitous discovery. As Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant and later director, wrote, the arrangement “meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it … and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought”.

Meanwhile, the boundary-busting scrutiny of images from high art and popular media as they migrate and mutate across space, time and culture defied, and still defies, what Warburg called the “intellectual-border-guard mentality” of much academic life. Beyond its formative contribution to Renaissance iconography, the Warburg approach fostered ways of seeing that continue to shape digital-age discourse about the circulation of memes and icons. From German physiology he took the idea of “mnemes” or “engrams”: little chunks of visual or emotional data that begin as individual memory, but grow into a collective inheritance. Every media item about a picture, a pose or a post that “goes viral” is proof that Warburgism itself did exactly that.

Not every historian of art and thought appreciated this almost mystical belief in the contagious power of image and idea. In the 2000s suspicion of the Institute’s arm’s-length distance from mainstream academia fed the university’s centralizing drive to revise the terms of the 1944 trust deed that guaranteed the Warburg’s funding and autonomy. A campaign to preserve its independence and prevent “convergence”, started by the artist-bibliophile and Warburg postgraduate student Brooke Palmieri, gathered 25,000 supporters. It led to a High Court judgment in 2014 that confirmed the Institute’s status and the university’s financial responsibility for it. The protesters had managed, as one activist headline put it, to “Keep Warburg Weird”.

This month the Warburg Institute opens new public spaces after a £14.5m renovation. Its library and research facilities have also had a comprehensive, stage-by-stage makeover without any period of complete closure. Two-thirds of the cost for this “Warburg Renaissance” came from the University of London, now more protective uncle than predatory overlord; the rest from private donations, including a generous gift from the Hermann Reemtsma Foundation in Hamburg. The architects Haworth Tompkins have left Charles Holden’s austerely handsome 1950s building, a monument to his trademark civic modernism, largely unchanged. Some of the interior refit restores earlier layouts that had been altered, so stacks holding the (now) 360,000 library volumes again stand perpendicular to the outside walls. The floor-by-floor divisions conceived by Warburg survive: books on “Image” are housed below “Word”, with “Orientation” – ie religion, philosophy and science – and “Action” (social and political history) above. His category-flouting class marks still defy librarians’ logic. Art, science and esoterica rub shoulders; astrology still occupies neighbouring terrain to astronomy.

The refurbished building, which now houses both the new Kythera Gallery for special exhibitions and a 140-seat auditorium to host events, aims to preserve Warburg’s offbeat tradition. As in its Hamburg ancestor, architecture gives form to ideas. In the auditorium (looking down on Gombrich’s Viennese family piano), a sculptural ellipse in the ceiling alludes to the roof light of the original Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg. For the symbol-hunting Warburg, the ellipse – explained to him by Einstein in a note – represented the oscillating tension between mind and material, imagination and evidence. The feature is structural, not decorative, homage but not replica. History, in Warburg fashion, keeps the building up.

Even when Warburg’s book stash became part of the new Hamburg University in the 1920s, the curators fretted over how to convert private obsession into civic amenity. Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s collaborator and then London director, noted his patron’s “supreme lack of interest in library technicalities” and weighed the challenge of transforming an “intensely personal creation” into a “public institution”. Warburg’s hunch that enlightenment would strike not from the volume sought, but from its “unknown neighbour on the shelf”, had to be embodied in brick, timber and card. It was, and is. Bill Sherman, the current director, writes of the Institute’s special role in connecting “the textual and the visual, the intellectual and the social, the scientific and the magical”, and affirms that history and mystery, reason and imagination, will continue to cross-breed there: “This is a place devoted to putting that dialectic in context”. A residency programme for artists and scholars will forge Warburgian links between creative and critical practice. Mindful of its refugee origins, the Institute will, in its welcome for displaced researchers, serve as (in Sherman’s words) “a safe haven for people from different cultures forced into movement for whatever reason”.

Still a citadel of oddball erudition, the Warburg has survived to witness cutting-edge technological culture catching up with an eccentric, and prophetic, mind. Its founder’s quest for visual sets, matches and patterns across epochs and cultures finds a reflection in the super-fast digitized image-shuffling that now presents the visible world to us. Warburg suffered from severe depression that, at times, loosened his grip on reality. Gombrich, both follower and sceptic, came to see this pattern-seeking mania as, Sherman says, “a schizophrenic art history”. On the other hand, “You could equally argue that it’s so far ahead of its time that it’s waiting for algorithmic thinking to come along”. In some respects, he adds, Warburgian image banks still outgun their digital successors in functionality. Ideas-led internet searches yield suboptimal results; internet metadata remain “inadequate for complex image clusters”; besides, search engines can only map the mental and visual landscape of now. In contrast, the Warburg layout will always “force you into the past”.

The Kythera Gallery, a well-lit rectangular hall where moveable panels can hang from a steel ceiling grid, launches with Warburg-centred displays on Memory and Migration. The gallery also houses Edmund de Waal’s “library of exile” installation: a porcelain-covered shelter for books from, and about, the émigré experience. Elsewhere stands a panel devoted to the image of the nymph, taken from Warburg’s final project before his death: the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. It mounted images on sixty-three fabric screens to illustrate the transit of visual motifs from antiquity to the present day. Also part of Memory and Migration, eerie photographs of the renovation works by Teresa Červeňová remind us that this remains a place of ghosts, of spectral presences and half-glimpsed visitations – like the Warburgian nymphs that blow from antiquity into Renaissance art.

Although easier to enter and enjoy, the Institute will surely stay weird. In 1923 Warburg lectured on Hopi ritual at the sanatorium where he recovered after an acute depressive episode: a sort of “graduation” back to social normality. But he used the event to defend the integrity, and sanity, of Hopi beliefs against “the culture of the machine age”. Ancient lore and mystery, though seemingly irrational, might open “the space for contemplation that turned into a space for reflection”. In Bloomsbury, that space beckons again.

Boyd Tonkin was awarded the 2020 Benson Medal of the Royal Society of Literature

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