Aby Warburg: Metamorphosis and Memory

Aby Warburg, (1866-1929), an art historian of startling originality, came from the renowned Warburg banking family of Hamburg, Germany. Already in his teens, the first of seven children, he made a deal with his next oldest brother, to forfeit his birth right to take over the family bank in exchange for full financial support in buying all the books that he would ever want. The library he assembled would become a refuge of scholarship. In 1933, with the Nazi takeover and the deprivation of Jewish rights, 60,000 books, photographs, and papers were shipped to London to become the Warburg Library and Institute eventually housed at the University of London. This documentary on the life and work of Aby Warburg, traces the development of his ideas in their historical context. From his early studies on the early Italian Renaissance to his ventures in the American Southwest observing Hopi and Zuni ritual dances in 1895, Warburg sought the legacy of ancient Greece in the images and symbols of cultures, which he followed through iconographic studies that he pioneered. He sought connections between gesture and art in antiquity, the Renaissance and modern times. Underneath the seeming rationality of antiquity and the Renaissance, he sensed conflict and irrationality. Aby Warburg never took an academic position but pursued his interests and collection of books with passion. Recurrent depressions lead to hospitalization in a psychiatric clinic in Switzerland 1921-1924. For the last five years of his life, he gave occasional lectures and seminars, but publishing almost nothing. Most notably, he developed a picture atlas, Mnemosyne, (the personification of Memory in Greek mythology,) consisting of 60 wooden panels with some 1000 images arranged according to themes and juxtapositions, concerning memory, astrology and mythology, archeology, migration of the ancient gods, vehicles of tradition, irruption of antiquity, Dionysiac formulae of emotions, Nike and Fortuna, Durer, the baroque, the reemergence of antiquity, Manet, the classical tradition today. The principal motifs of Warburg’s scholarship are discussed by leading art historians in England, US and Germany, including Professors Michael Diers, Uwe Fleckner, David Freedberg, and Joseph Koerner. Filming took place in London and Hamburg. This film should be of interest to anyone interested in the history of ideas, art history, social and cultural history.