Aby Warburg

Aby Moritz Warburg (1866 with Hamburg, Germany - 1929) is a historian of art. Its work was used to provide the foundations of the Iconographie.

Resulting from a Banking rich person family of S Jewish S, Aby Warburg between with the University of Bonn in 1886 studying there the history of the art to which it will devote its life (the legend wants that it gave up the family heritage with the profit of his brother in exchange of the engagement of this one to provide him all the works which would be necessary for him). Opened with many approaches (Philosophy, Anthropology, History of art, Psychology,…), it is held for founder of the Iconographie, a new method of analysis which consists, according to the author, “to operate a decomposition the work which will reveal some clearly material or essential heterogeneity”.

Its interest for the history of art attracts the lightnings of its family to him which intended it for another career, the more so as this discipline was not particularly affectionate by the judaïque religion and that it will push the opposition until declaring with his father that it cannot take time to eat Casher because of the timetable of its studies. Consequently, its relationship to the religion will not cease being ambiguous (it declared even Christian “ at the bottom of âme ”) and, in 1892, he will marry against the opinion of his father with not-Jewish, Mary Hertz.

Its work leads it to become a specialist in the Renaissance and finds in the study of this period this same idea that Nietzsche had developed as for the Greek Antique art in the Birth of the tragedy , which sees there appearing a civilization taken between a reason symbolized by Apollon and a passion represented by Dionysos.

In 1895-1896, during a voyage in the United States, Aby Warburg goes in South-west in the Pueblos, where resident the Indians Hopi S. He discovers the pottery, then the headstocks Kashina S and witnesses dances finally. It brings back this forwarding only some stereotypes which it will present in clubs of photography and which will not have a great repercussion. During the year 1918, Warburg gathers documents in order to include/understand the conflict which proceeds under its eyes and, with leaving the First World War, ends up believing the person in charge of its release. Consequently begin a period of madness which will last until 1923; qualified “acute psychosis”, this one appears by anguishes, a feeling of persecution and passages delirious (he hears the cries of its family under torture, believes that the meat which is been useful to him is the flesh of his/her children). After internbeing interned during three years in a private clinic of Hamburg, it integrates the Bellevue private clinic located in Switzerland, where it will be followed by Ludwig Binswanger, a disciple of Sigmund Freud.

Binswanger estimates at the time although Warburg preserved all its intellectual faculties, this last is not ready any more to undertake its research because of the difficulties only it tests to concentrate lengthily on a precise subject. In 1923, Warburg proposes an incredible market with the therapeutic team: if he manages to produce a scientific work, those will have to authorize it to put a term at its stay in the establishment. April 21st, it presents to a public made up as many looking after as patients of the private clinic, a conference on the ritual ones of the Hopis Indians, that it will put in relation to the sacrifice, the debate on civilization but also still with the art of the Quattrocento. Its talk insists in particular on the high degree of the civilization hopi whose rites proceed of a practical need (example, to make come rain) and are at the level symbolic system (the snake really is not sacrificed, but “is not integrated” by the gesture to take it in its mouth and is slackened in nature to go “to carry the message”).

The result convinces the therapeutists and Warburg leaves this one. It continues its research while working on an unfinished work called Mnemosyne , until its death due to an heart attack which has occurred in 1929.

It leaves behind him an important heritage, in spite of the modesty of its publications, as well as a vast library which it constituted throughout its life including/understanding 80.000 works and located in 2006 at the Institut Warburg in London.

Sources

Warburg Aby, the Venus Birth and the Spring of Sandro Botticelli , translated by Laure Cahen-Maurel, Editions Combined, Paris, 2007.
Warburg Aby, the Ritual of the snake: Account of a voyage in country Pueblo , Paris, Mackled, 2003.
Warburg Aby, Essais florentins , Klincksieck, Paris, 1990.
Warburg Electronic Library
with Ludwig Binswanger: " Infinite cure. Clinical history of Aby Warburg" , ED.: Shores, 2007, ISBN 2743616121

Study of the person and her work

Didi-Huberman, Georges, the surviving Image: history of art and time of the phantoms according to Aby Warburg , Paris: the ED. midnight, 2002.
Gombrich Ernst Hans Josef, Aby Warburg: Year intellectual biography , Warburg Institute the University off London, London, 1970.
Michaud Philippe-Alain, Aby Warburg and the image moving , Mackled, Paris, 1998.
Giorgio Agamben, Image and memory , Hoëbeke, Paris, 1998.

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