“The iconography of parrots” A visit to the Warburg Institute
- Written byJools McLean
- Published date 11 November 2024
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Post-Grad Community recently organised a visit to the Warburg Institute, where students were taken on a tour of the library and photo collections. Initially suggested as an event by postgraduate student Jools McLean (MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies, Central Saint Martins), here Jools report back on the event and the experiences of witnessing the blend of magic, science and art.
Not alphabetical, no Dewey decimals, no conventional categorisation. Instead, the art historian and cultural scholar, Aby Warburg’s library is based on a “good neighbour” system where books find their shelf-mates by joyful idiosyncratic association. Recent refurbishment created a gallery open to the public and, as the reading rooms are also available to post-graduate students, UAL Post-Grad Community organised a curator tour to see what we’ve been missing during its closure.
The tour began inside the gallery, which is currently showing “memory and migration” (2 October 2024 - 20 December 2024, 12:00PM - 6:00PM). Here, Clare - the deeply knowledgeable and enthusiastic deputy lead librarian - explained Warburg’s personal history and the history of his collection.
A man who put books before banks, since his death (in 1929) Warburg’s 60,000 strong book and 400,000 item art image collection continues to expand via the work of the institute that bears his name. After a taster of the curiosities available to read and the class marks and topics by which books are organised, Clare then routed us into the basement to meet Paul Taylor, encyclopaedic curator of the photograph collection. He introduced us to the contents of the bank of four-foot-high filing cabinets containing folders full of photographs of artworks. Iconography is the central tenet of the photograph collection; the aim of each folder to hold a photograph of every artwork of a particular subject. Finally, we looked at (the Parisian half of) the De Menil archive “the image of the black in western art”, described in the gallery by Edward George as
“…a record of projections: rooted in the archive’s mission for black affirmation, where art becomes a benign anti-racist weapon of resistance, social transformation and an aide to counter-institutional memory…”,
before becoming members of the reading room (free to all postgraduate students) and exploring the archive and exhibition as we wished.
And, of course, this traditional journalistic report of our visit tells you nothing you couldn’t Google for yourself and certainly does not convey the flavour, the atmosphere, the style, substance, or convincing magic of the place itself.
Imagine, instead, a child of a banking dynasty who, rather than engage in the family business accreting money and power, demanded nothing more of his inheritance than any book he might desire. Imagine those books, a century later having been spirited away to contemporary London, smelling of dust and time and hundreds of curious investigations. A 19th century European Jewish scholar who believed in the afterlife (nach leben) of images and created a memory atlas (bilder mnemosyne) pulsating with life and lives and the work of hands and brains. Just now, quietly resting in the shelves of an apparently conventional public building are hundreds of books holding leaves from every branch of European knowledge the hungry heart could desire. Imagine the easy comfort of each book suggesting its unexpected neighbour to the browser who can take down and read a contemporary paperback as simply as a 17th century folio. Art and science and magic the warp across which an infinite variety of threads are woven.
Consider, (might Warburg have?) the Italian renaissance as a glass pebble dropped in the centre of the silent pool of this collection. The knowledge rippling out, meeting the softly diminishing wave edges from classical marble pedestals dropped in centuries earlier. Interacting with those original oscillations from ancestral feet planting reeds at the water’s edge and the whole gently undulating body of water interacting with the tight little broadcasts from modern epistemological gravel sprinkled onto the surface. Every new interference constructive: picking up some images, some text, some connection.
Imagine realising that a book showing the precise measurements of the toes of classical Greek statues belonged in the firmament with a book on metoposcopy – reading the future from the lines on your face. That Aleister Crowley’s own watercolour Tarot cards should belong in your library because you also have a book of Catholic Sunday sermon iconographic mnemonics. Looking at your burgeoning archive and pulling together classmarks on “divination from involuntary movements”, “buried alive” and “the iconography of parrots”. The “iconography of buttocks” also has its place.
Imagine seeking out 70 photographs of the 70 (known) paintings showing St. Luke painting the Virgin Mary or collating a folder of photos of depictions of “goose-pulling” and a drawer full of slides showing “plants through to wild-men”. Imagine the contemporary scholar’s delight on finding within this drawer the entire contents of their MA thesis?
Imagine you’ve heard about the proud and lavish costumes and customs of the medieval Nuremberg artichoke festival, banned due to excessive crowd rowdiness and then in 1908 you’d like hand-painted facsimile; so, you organise a crowd-funder to make one. Imagine you have to deliver a “performance lecture” on the “snake ritual” to fellow in-patients at a Swiss hospital in order to prove sufficient recovery from psychosis induced by WW1…. What materials must you have amassed, read, learned and inwardly digested?
Eclectically – but never unrelatedly - ecumenically, comprehensively, Warburg created his atlas of knowledge and memory by looking at “the entire culture surrounding the art” and asking only:
“How do humans make sense of the universe?”
How do we make sense of the universe when, in 1933, the collection had to be rescued from Nazi Germany and has been in London ever since? By generously sharing his research materials and books with us, the institute - Warburg’s own “nach leben” - could be an answer.
Student Feedback
"Stepping into the Warburg Institute was like discovering someone had turned my own mind into a library and archive. It is hard to imagine my time at Central Saint Martins not being strongly influenced by hours spent in the Institute over the next two years."
"This is my feeling about today's visit: I was deeply surprised by the Warburg Library. I found that my interest in photography was cleverly interwoven with art history and the study of images, reflecting each other in the vast context of the study of human emotions.
I am very happy with this discovery. At the end of my trip, I got a reader card, and I am sure I will be coming to the Warburg Library many times in the future!"
"Aby Warburg's 'associative approach' was, and is, the future of journeys through knowledge and culture. The library floors' names: 'image'; 'word'; 'orientation'; 'action' do not only suggest further visits but require them. The 'Warburg renaissance' renovation opens interesting possibilities for new audiences."
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