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HART3330 Art Theory
HART3330 Art Theory Unit Coordinator: Arvi Wattel
CATHERINE COWAN
“Not until art history can show…that it sees the work of art in a few more dimensions than it has done so far will our activity again attract the interest of scholars and of the general public.”1
In 2020 the work of art historian Aby Warburg was credited, at the launch of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Virtual Exhibition, with “changing the way we see the World.”2 Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America marks the beginning of Warburg’s works translated into English. This essay examines the significance of the lecture, originally published in 1939 as Lecture on the Serpent Ritual, and its importance and his impact. The 1923 lecture is significant as this recollection of his 1896 cultural ethnographic observations of First Nations practices converges with his years of multidisciplinary research and various theories. It also illuminates his early divergence from traditional art theory and art history. The lecture is regarded as Warburg’s most specific explanation of his art theories.3 The now famous story of an early Renaissance art historian’s trip to the pioneer American West is also significant for its profound impact on his work post 1896.4 Importantly, the circumstances of the lecture were a means of Warburg’s personal salvation, and it was not intended for publication.5
In draft notes of 1923 Warburg acknowledged he envisioned his observations of the rituals of “primitives” supported “the formula for my psychological law…I have been searching since 1888.”6 The lecture, ostensibly about the Pueblo Indians, their art and ritual, engages in an early example of ethnological field work7 and comparative cultural ethnology, comparing Pueblo serpent ritual to the serpent as found in Old Testament references and images and Greek mythological sources and imagery.8 This landmark interdisciplinary work of its time and recently labelled a “cult piece,”9 is rich in the lenses that can be applied to the text – insights into the life of a renown Renaissance scholar10, personal musings on First Nations culture and the impact of American modernity, early comparative cultural studies, art historical arguments and a psychological theory of evolution of visual culture arising from the transcendence of our primordial condition.11 The subsequent products of Warburg’s early divergence from traditional art history assumptions and methodology are key.
The lecture provided Warburg with a platform to reflect on his lifelong pursuit of the analysis of paganism.12 Warburg turned indirectly to his earlier theory of conflicts and principles of polarity, set out in his 1888 thesis on Botticelli’s role of the Mimetic in the history of representation.13 In his references to classical
Aby Warburg, Kachina dancers, Hopi Indians rain maker, Shongopavi pueblo, 1900.
serpent mythology, Warburg points to the Dionysian and Apollonian conflicting elements represented in the iconographic illustrations.14 Warburg’s lecture concludes with his psychological explanation of the evolution of culture. He stated “in the process we call cultural progress…this devotion gradually loses its monstrous concreteness and…becomes a spiritualised, invisible symbol.”15 He intended his lecture to exemplify in this ‘primary pagan mode of answering the largest and most pressing questions of the Why of Things.’16 Thus the lecture moves from illustrated anthropological observations to reveal the depth of Warburg’s scholarship on ancient and medieval iconography, astrology, mythology, Biblical texts and his paradigm of the psychology of the evolution of visual imagery as a function of art. The cultural history methods employed by Warburg ignored the “optimistic progressive philosophies” of the evolution of style17 and supported broadening the scope of visual culture research.
The lecture demonstrates Warburg was an innovative early Renaissance scholar at the turn of the twentieth century, pioneering a multidisciplinary approach in the study of Quattrocento imagery. His classical and art historical education included the rigours of the earlier traditions of Giorgio Vasari, G.W.F Hegel, Jakob Burckhardt and Johann Winckelmann and the historian Karl Lamprecht.18 Despite this background and holding no academic position, Warburg was an agent for change. Warburg credits Burckhardt’s genius with devising the empirical task “of examining the individual work of art within the immediate context of its time, in order to interpret as causal factors the ideological and practical demands of real life.”19 Warburg applied this empirical approach in meeting the Pueblo, using cultural historians’ methods of collection of observations, data, drawings and the relatively new technology of photographs. This empirical approach to details of all aspects of the cultural milieu of the Antique and the early Renaissance underpinned his research and the acquisitions for his research collection, ultimately the Warburg Institute Library. Warburg collected “marginalia” in support of his view that an “image is indissolubly bound to culture” and a variety of document types to understand the cultural complexity contributing to images.20
Warburg proffered an alternative to the linear and pure vision interpretive system of the art object by the influential works of Winckelmann and Heinrich Wolfflin.21 Warburg rejected formal analysis, he did not search for the Zeitgeist, he believed that artwork is an image bound up in culture.22 Warburg’s fragmented output was “emphatically devoted to cultural historical research.”23Warburg was interested in empathy theory as espoused by Robert Vischer and its active use in images.24 Warburg asserted that general evolutionary categories obstructed art history and pleaded in 1912 to “extend methodological” borders in writing “historical psychology of human expression.”25 Warburg’s few published texts provide a resource to interpret the appropriation of classical antiquity by Renaissance artists and also support his conflict theory and that this appropriation was indicative of transcending from the primitive to the modern.26 In this he challenged Wolfflin’s favouring the idealised Apollonian classical staid grandeur.27 These ideas of conflicting elements in the Antique were influenced by the philosopher Friedrich Neitzsche.28 It is these elements of Warburg’s critique of art historical tradition that feminists hail as anticipating “critiques of science and Phallogocentric ideas.”29
Warburg’s enduring impact was the creation of his library, ultimately part of the Warburg Institute, an outstanding research collection acquired to support his research, often collecting outside his narrower interests.30 Today the Warburg Institute embraces visual culture, labelling itself a “leading centre for studying the interaction of ideas, images and society.”31 In 1924, Warburg commenced his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, using photographs of images he collected, arranged
on large panels, using his Pathos Formula to trace the “after-life” of classical postures and gestures in Renaissance images.32 Images were frequently rearranged creating an inventory of the “Psychic and corporeal States embodied in the works of figurative culture.”33 He did not finish it. The Mnemosyne Atlas has inspired non-hierarchical atlas creative projects that embody a period of cultural history, an artist’s career and “the universal as it operates in the process of portraying history.34 Indicative of the burgeoning interest in Warburg’s thinking in 2020 an exhibition of 63 panels Bilderatlas Mnemosyne opened.35
What followed after Warburg challenged the academic boundaries of “easy optimism of progressive philosophies without surrendering the right to evaluate and criticise human culture past and present”?36 Decades passed before Warburg was ultimately heralded as a cultural historian who created a new Cultural Science.37 Beyond his art historical scholarship, his work on the memory and the function of images has influenced the disciplines of art history and cultural studies. Warburg’s ideas gained new impact on the art historical discipline in the 1960s, linked to interest of Walter Benjamin and a new critical approach to art theory.38 Interest converged with the publication in English of Ernest Gombrich’s biography of Warburg.39 Warburg’s interest in psychological issues had become more acceptable in a post Freudian era.40 One view is that engagement with Benjamin’s art theories restored Warburg’s place in the discipline of art history.41 Another view credits German art historians for vitalising interest in Warburg in the 1970s to assist in reorienting cultural history.42 Warburg’s legacy also includes his work on symbols and iconological method,43 collections of mythological and religious images and his influence on subsequent iconographers.44 The ongoing research and publications of the Warburg Institute are another legacy.
Warburg’s disgust of “aestheticising art history”45 is recognised for opening new avenues for cultural studies, for art historical research, especially the role of patrons, the Pathos Formula emphasising artistic borrowings, the theory of the social memory and focusing on cultural influences on the individual artist outside the High Art canon46 rather than the Zeitgeist.47 Pathos Formula is used as a practical method for exploring the usage and life of gesture, emotion and expression48 as well as a Wargburgian Method of “highly critical historical practice” problem solving in relation to the functions of an image.49
Recent scholarly examinations of previously unpublished texts and notebooks, such as the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne and Warburg’s notes on Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur L’herbe, 50 suggest we are the midst of Warburg’s ongoing impact. Interest also generates criticism, of note from an ethnographic perspective the lecture omitted a discourse on cultural identity of the Hopi First Nation and branded them as primitives.51 In conclusion, Warburg expanded on the notion of art and gave birth to cultural history/science.52
Endnotes 1. Aby Warburg, [Notes]18 August 1927 quoted in Ernst
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: an Intellectual Biography (London:
Warburg Institute, 1970): 322. 2. Bill Sherman, [in commentary to] Aby Warburg Bilderatlas
Mnemosyne Virtual Exhibition Launch, 26 November 2020.
Accessed 2 September, 2021. https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/podcasts/ aby-warburg-bilderatlas-mnemosyne-virtual-exhibition-launch. Note
Sherman is the Director of the Warburg Institute. 3. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 216. 4. Michael Steinburg,”Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture: A
Reading”, in Aby Warburg and Michael P. Steinberg. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2016., doi:10.1353/book.82048. 5. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 226. Although not intended for publication Gombrich notes by 1970 more had been written in
English on Warburg’s formative American experience than on any Warburg topic. 6. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 90-91. Gombrich notes “He saw what he hoped to see.” 7. Ibid. 89.
8. Aby Warburg and Michael P. Steinberg. Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians of North America, 38-48. 9. Claire Farago, “Silent Moves: On Excluding the Ethnographic
Subject from the Discourse of Art History.” 195-214 in Preziosi,
Donald. Art of Art History : A Critical Anthology (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2009). Accessed September 2, 2021.
ProQuest Ebook Central. 10. Steinberg,”Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture.” 11. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, 53. 12. Steinberg, “Aby Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture.” Note
Gombrich, Aby Warburg at 310 asserts” By paganism, as we know, Warburg meant a psychological state, the state of surrender to impulses of frenzy and of fear.” 13. Mathew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s
Theory of Art,” The Art Bulletin 79(1)1997: 41-55. Accessed
August 10, 2021. doi:10.2307/3046229, 46. Also Gombrich, Aby
Warburg notes not all Warburg’s ideas, such as the principles of polarity, are made explicit in the Lecture, 224. 14. Warburg, Images from the Region of the Pueblo Indians, 39 -47. 15. Ibid. 48-49. 16. Ibid. 17. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 225, 308. 18. Michael Diers, Thomas Girst, and Dorothea Von Moltke.
“Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History,” New
German Critique, no. 65 (1995):65. Accessed September 2, 2021. doi:10.2307/488533. 64. 19. Warburg, Aby. “The art of portraiture and the Florentine
Bourgeoisie: Domenico Ghirlandaio in Santa Trinita: The Portraits of Lorenzo de’ Medici and His Household (1902),” in The renewal of pagan antiquity: contributions to the cultural history of the European Renaissance. Intro Kurt W. Forster, trans. by David
Britt. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999: 186. 20. Edgar Wind, “Warburg’s concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its meaning for aesthetics” (1930):189 -195, in Art History: Making the Visible Legible in the Art of Art History: a Critical Anthology. 2nd ed. (Oxford: OUP, 2009): 192. 21. Ibid. 191. Wolfflin’s scholarship, particularly The Principles of Art
History, 1915 remained prevalent up until the 1970s. I note a
Symposium held in 2015 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of
The Principles of Art History. 22. Wind, “Warburg’s concept of Kulturwissenschaft and its meaning for aesthetics,” 192. 23. Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural
History,”59. 24. Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory,” 42 ft 17 with reference to
On the Optical Sense of Form, 1873. 25. Aby Warburg, “Italian Art and International Astrology in the
Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara (1912),” in Idem, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, translated by David Britt, 563-591, Los
Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute, 1999, 285. 26. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 223. 27. Mathew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory,”47. 28. Ibid. 46 with reference to Neitzsche’s The Birth Of Tragedy. 29. Margaret Iversen, “Retrieving Warburg’s Tradition,” Art History 16 (4): 541. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8365.1993.tb00545.x, 541. 30. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 18. 31. The Warburg Institute, https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/. 32. Dan Adler, Hanne Darboven: Cultural History, 1880-1983, (London: Afterall Books, St Martins College, 2009):42. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 4. 35. Warburg Institute. Aby Warburg Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Virtual
Exhibition Launch. 36. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 225. 37. Becker, Colleen. “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as
Methodological Paradigm.” Journal of Art Historiography no. 9 (12, 2013): CB1-CB25. https://www.proquest.com/scholarlyjournals/aby-warburgs-pathosformel-as-methodological/ docview/1503676679/se-2?accountid=14681. Accessed 28
August 2021, ft21. 38. Latsis, Dimitrios. “The Afterlife of Antiquity and Modern Art: Aby
Warburg on Manet.” Journal of Art Historiography no. 13 (12, 2015): 1-28. https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/afterlifeantiquity-modern-art-aby-warburg-on/docview/1772449400/ se-2?accountid=14681 and Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian
Tradition of Cultural History,” 60 -61. 39. Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural
History,”65. 40. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 322. 41. Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural
History,” 64. 42. Ibid. 61,63, 65. 43. Mathew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory: Aby Warburg’s
Theory of Art,” 42. 44. Gombrich, Aby Warburg ,315-17 and Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition of Cultural History”, 59-73, both raise issues with this legacy. 45. Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 88. 46. Becker, Colleen. “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as
Methodological Paradigm.” 47. Ibid. 48. Colleen Becker, “Aby Warburg’s Pathosformel as
Methodological Paradigm.” 49. Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition,”67. 50. Latsis, Dimitrios. “The Afterlife of Antiquity and Modern
Art.” Latsis notes there are 44 typed pages of notes titled
“Manet”recently translated. 51. Farago, Claire. “Silent Moves: On Excluding the Ethnographic
Subject from the Discourse of Art History.” 52. Diers, “Warburg and the Warburgian Tradition,” 60, 66.