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The Warburg Institute, 1933-1944 A precarious experiment in international collaboration

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 June 2016

Elizabeth Sears
Elizabeth Sears*
Affiliation:
Department of History of Art, University of Michigan, 110 Tappan Hall, 855 S. University Ave., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1357, USA
*
Email: esears@umich.edu
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Abstract

Rarely does a research library travel. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power, the Warburg family in Hamburg negotiated with British sponsors to enable the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Study) to find safe haven in London. An initial three-year agreement was followed by a seven-year arrangement and, at the end of 1944, with Europe still at war, the Warburg Institute was incorporated into the University of London. The story of the first eleven years in London – highly productive years in which the staff sought to pursue their original mission while assimilating into British academe – reveals the working of complex politics and shows the degree to which, early on, the fate of the Warburg Institute was linked to that of the newly founded Courtauld Institute of Art.

Type
Research Article
Information
Art Libraries Journal , Volume 38 , Issue 4 , 2013 , pp. 7 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © The Art Libraries Society 2013

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References

1. Saxl, in a memorandum of 1935, notes that the library received RM 300,000 in 1929, RM 100,000 in 1933 (Warburg Institute Archive [WIA], Ia.2.3.8). See also, Saxl, , “The history of Warburg’s library (1886-1944)”, appendix to Gombrich, E. H., Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography (London: Warburg Institute, 1970);Google Scholar
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