Aby Warburg and the Foundations of Image Studies

Abstract

“I am an image historian, not an art historian”. Claiming to have spoken these words to his son, Aby Warburg (13 June 1866–26 October 1929) recorded them in his diary on 12 February 1917. Since the beginning of the First World War, Warburg kept cautiously surveying the latest political and military developments and their reception in Germany and Europe, paying specific attention to the role of images as means of information and, more importantly, agitation (cf. Diers 1997; Schwartz, “Aby Warburgs Kriegskartothek. Vorbericht einer Rekonstruktion”. In: Korff 2007: 39–70, 2007). In order to understand the dynamics of the surrounding visual culture, he then turned to moments in history he deemed precedents for the contemporary situation and whose analysis therefore struck him as particularly revealing. This was the very moment he consciously declared his profession’s nature. Thus, it seems possible to date accurately the transition from a conventional study of the history of art to an innovative form of approaching its source materials that was finally to open out to the universal project of image studies (cf. Warnke, “Aby Warburg (1866–1929)”, in Altmeister moderner Kunstgeschichte, Heinrich Dilly, ed. Berlin 1999: 117–130. Bredekamp, “A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft”. In: Critical Inquiry. 29 (3): 418–428. Hensel, Wie aus der Kunstgeschichte eine Bildwissenschaft wurde. Aby Warburgs Graphien. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011). This, however, would mean to simplify what is indeed a complex history—with regard to Warburg’s practice, whose particular ways of accessing a history of art in the context of the wider history of civilization unfolded over the span of the scholar’s entire oeuvre, as well as to the field of image studies in general whose beginnings cannot be limited to Warburg alone. However, Warburg is undoubtedly a key figure in this history. It seems therefore critical to clarify what he might have had in mind when he not only distanced himself from the discipline of art history of his time but explicitly differentiated his own metier as that of an “image historian”.