Aby Warburg: Essays and Lectures

Continuing project, initiated October 2011 thanks to a 3-year grant from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Objective: preparation of an edition of Aby Warburg’s Kleine Schriften und Vorträge (“Essays and Lectures”), for publication as Band III.1 of the De Gruyter series Aby Warburg, Gesammelte Schriften - Studienausgabe (“Collected Writings”), edited by Ulrich Pfisterer, Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, Uwe Fleckner, Michael Thimann and Claudia Wedepohl.

Subdivided into two or three volumes, the edition will contain more than 40 texts by Aby Warburg, the majority hitherto unpublished and based on new transcriptions from the source texts in the Warburg Institute Archive. The volumes will include selected seminar papers from Warburg’s time as a student, scripts of his major lectures and lecture series on Italian Renaissance art, astrology and other subjects, as well as extensive fragments, such as an article that was abandoned at proof stage. Other, more occasional texts include a play, memoranda on cultural-political issues relevant to the University of Hamburg and its predecessors, newspaper articles relating to WWI as well as speeches addressed to academic audiences at the Kultur­wissen­schaft­liche Bibliothek Warburg and elsewhere. The texts are organised in chronological order as to reveal the development and re-occurrence of topics throughout Warburg’s scholarly life. Thus for the first time, the reader will be able to access and assess the full breadth of Warburg’s intellectual achievement and the wide range of textual genres he used to engage with his diverse audiences.

This project is led by Dr Claudia Wedepohl (Warburg Institute) and Professor Michael Diers (Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt Universität Berlin), as editors, with Dr Eckart Marchand (Warburg Institute; now Bilder­fahrzeuge Project) as academic assistant. Following completion of the funded stage of the project in 2013, the editors’ work on the edition continues.