TAITMAIL The unsuspected magical mystery of the Warburg
It’s hard to define the Warburg Institute, a part of the University of London alongside the likes of the Slade and SOAS, that most people – even UoL students - have never heard of. The artist Cornelia Parker, a devotee, puts it well: “I always think of the Warburg Institute as a perfect, quiet place to absorb culture”.
Reopening this week after a two year £15.8m Renaissance, a keyword in its story, the Warburg is a post graduate faculty, a small body of eight scholars and 15 curators with 42 MA students and maybe 25 PhDs. “What we’re doing” says its director, Professor Bill Sherman, as the general public are welcomed in for the first time since the institute was founded in 1909, “is opening it up but keeping it special. It’s an unintentional secret that had to come out”.
It is the unique centre for the study of global cultural history and the role of images in it, what Sherman describes as “a creative crucible for scholars, curators and all those whose work sits outside traditional academic structure”. Above the inner door, in Greek, is spelled out “Mnemosyne”, the goddess of memory and the mother of the nine muses, and also the inspiration for the founder, Aby Warburg. In the enlarged newly welcoming lobby is a donated plaster copy of a sculpture taken from a Roman sarcophagus, of Mnemosyne’s children, the Muses.
Warburg was a scion of the Hamburg banking family who turned his back on the family business he was destined to head to study art history after being beguiled by the Renaissance art he saw in Italy. He made a deal with his younger brother Max: he would hand over the bank if Max would buy him whatever book he wanted whenever he asked. Max, who developed Warburgs to what it has become, said it was the worst deal he ever made.
Aby was interested in the influence of antiquity on modern culture, and set up a library in his Hamburg home to study it. He invented iconology, the analysis of a subject’s symbolism through visual imagery and its interpretation in social and political terms (as distinct from iconography which is more simply the study of subject matter in the visual arts). His unfinished magnum opus is Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a visual odyssey through world history involving hundreds of thousands of images.
The library was established in 1909 and became a research institute in 1926, three years before Aby’s death at 65. In 1933 the Warburg was secretly evacuated to London – the only cultural institution to have escaped Nazi Germany intact - and in 1944 it was signed over to the University of London in a deed of trust "to maintain and preserve the collection 'in perpetuity' as 'an independent unit'". The collection that came to London numbered about 10,000 images and is now about half a million with 350,000 books.
With the architects Howarth Tompkins Sherman’s mission has been to reveal the Warburg to a 21st century public but also to keep faith with Aby’s founding inspiration and the building designed for it by Charles Holden into which it moved in 1957, and reaffirm Holden’s styling in his 1931 masterplan. Holden, best known for designing Tube stations, was commissioned to create an academic corridor across Bloomsbury, starting with Senate House at one end and the British Museum – and then the British Library - at the other’. The Warburg was the last piece in the Holden jigsaw puzzle, but money ran out and only half the building was ever completed – hence the rather chaotic internal architectural lay-out including a central courtyard with no apparent purpose, now rationalised.
The relationship with the university hasn’t always been smooth, though. In 2011 the UoL senate questioned the 1944 deed of trust and its obligation to the collection but after a fractious three years, which included some court action, differences were resolved and now they’re good to the extent that the university has contributed the core £9.5m.
The rest of the money has been raised from the sale of donations of art by the likes of Parker, Gerhardt Richter and Anselm Kieffer, but chiefly through individuals and family trusts, many of them based in Germany and especially Hamburg with which Sherman has been at pains to establish connections.
One gift that is not for sale is a stunningly detailed wall-size drawing by the artist Deanna Petherbridge of the remains of the Syrian city of Palmyra, given by the artist before her death earlier this year. Ernst Gombrich, director between 1959 and 1976 and author of the seminal The Story of Art, was married to the pianist Ilse Heller, and smuggled her piano out of Austria when they escaped to Britain after the Anschluss in 1936. Given to the Warburg by the Gombrich family it has been restored and now has pride of place.
When Brexit hove into view Sherman was afraid it would blight his fundraising campaign, and while it has led to a struggle to attract foreign students since 2020, he found that for a number of German sources the wish to confirm and define German-Anglo cultural connections in spite of Brexit was a new motive for giving.
The Renaissance plan devised by Howarth Tompkins expands on the original mix of discovery, display and debate that Aby Warburg designed in his “library for kulturwissenschaft” - the science of culture. Aby didn’t collect art, he would rather have copies so that he could work on them and even destroy them in his analysis, so there was no art gallery.
The new gallery is one of the, literally, brilliant new spaces full of natural light, with at one end Edmund de Waal’s library of exile, shown at the 2019 Venice Biennale and then at the British Museum in 2020, but without most of the books. Instead the gleaming white shelves are filled with extra material relating to each of the changing exhibitions. De Waal, whose family are related to the Warburgs, has made a gift of it to the institute. “People are already coming off the street having seen the interesting activity as the gallery takes shape” Sherman says. “The opening has already started”.
The auditorium is another of the new spaces, filling the former courtyard, for lectures, conferences, performances and even concerts – the first event in it was the launch of a forthcoming Serpentine exhibition (“without a headcount I can guarantee 90% of attendees had never been here before” Sherman says.
Aby’s library had a reading room where he would invite fellow scholars to compare research, but there was not room for an equivalent in the curtailed Holden building. It’s there now, with special collections, access to the image collection, rare books, manuscripts and archives. The former lecture theatre, which could only hold 70, has been expanded and converted into two seminar rooms.
The first exhibition, Memory & Migration: The Warburg Institute 1926-2024 tells the extraordinary story of this extortionary institution, including images, documents, the contents of Aby Warburg’s trunk, and a diagram by Einstein for Warburg showing the importance of the architectural ellipse which Aby incorporated and which has been recreated in the ceiling of the new auditorium. The next exhibition will be about tarot – the Warburg has the tarot cards belonging to then notorious occultist Aleister Crowley.
The Warburg Renaissance is a personal triumph for American-born Sherman, himself an eminent authority on the art of the book which he still teaches. He sees this as the beginning of a new era of scholarly co-operation between museums, specialist libraries and universities. Sherman was the V&A’s director of research, reinstating the museum’s travelling exhibition programme, when his appointment to the Warburg was announced in 2017 with one over-riding task: opening its secrets.
“We’ve strengthened our ties both with our founder and the designer of our building, and opened out a new future the Warburg could never have had without this development, a true Renaissance” he says.