The legacy of the art and cultural scientist Aby Warburg offers many subjects for reassessment. Almost unknown until now are the artifacts he collected on a journey through the southwest of the US in 1895/96 and donated to the Museum fur Voelkerkunde in Hamburg (today Museum am Rothenbaum). The results first unfolded in Warburg's famous lecture on the "snake ritual" of the Hopi (1923). Following Warburg's transdisciplinary approach, this publication examines his guiding principles in assembling his collection as well as his reading of Pueblo art and culture. It pays tribute to the works and their artistic significance and sheds light on the circumstances of acquisition in the sociopolitical environment of the Pueblo communities of the time. The contemporary fascination with the snake ritual is also a topic. Set against this are the previously neglected perspectives and strategies of Pueblo leaders to regain interpretive sovereignty over culturally sensitive content and imagery.

Aby Warburg in America: An Album When Aby Warburg left for the United States in September 1895, it was not foreseeable that his search for the symbolic foundations of art would become one of the most fascinating events in the history of his field. Warburg’s American journey lasted only months, and his stay in the Pueblo communities only a few weeks, but in 1923 he presented his findings in the groundbreaking lecture on the “Snake Ritual�. Using selected photographs, ethnologic drawings, and numerous documents, this story and picture book details a journey of discovery. It traverses a vast continent of research, showing Warburg’s diverse interlocutors — from chiefs to missionaries — and especially his records of dances, ritual objects, and artworks full of symbolic representations. The documents are evidence of the emerging shift in Warburg’s scholarly thinking, which would eventually lead to the cross-border cultural comparative methodology for which he is now held in worldwide esteem.

Torn Modernism illuminates an important moment in the history of the Kunstmuseum Basel's collection. In 1937 the Nazi cultural policy denounced thousands of works as "degenerate" and forcibly removed from German museums. The Third Reich's Ministry of Propaganda correctly assumed that a portion of such works would find buyers abroad, in this way certain artworks deemed "internationally exploitable" reached the art market via various channels. Georg Schmidt (1896-1966), the museum's director at the time, managed in 1939 to acquire the Painting Animal Destinies by Franz Marc (1880-1916) and twenty avant-garde masterpieces all at once. In the catalogue, renowned experts trace the events based on the seizures in German museums and explain the historical contexts. The actors of the institutions and the art market are presented, and the Nazi regime's act of cultural violence is revealed, which resulted in an artificial fragmentation of Modernism into art that was "exploitable" on the one hand, and art that had been destroyed or forgotten on the other. Contributions on the auction of the Galerie Fischer in Lucerne, on Georg Schmidt's approach, and on the classification of the acquisitions in the context of Basel's collection history bring specific Swiss aspects into focus.

An exceptional talent, master of Expressionist art, co-founder of Die Brücke group. Where Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s work is concerned, superlatives are basic. It is all the more surprising, therefore, that there has been little critical appraisal of one of the most important chapters in the painter’s life and oeuvre. Besides his Expressionist acme, his imposing later-phase work deserves special attention and recognition. In exile in Davos, Kirchner again managed to produce an outstanding cycle of pictures, before committing suicide at the age of fifty-eight. Though continuing to use his inimitable style, he nevertheless invented something entirely new. Nature appears as an intoxicating space in intense colours, where the dignity of the human figure is negotiated in a dynamic aesthetic. The scholarly publication gives readers the complete picture in the context of another Expressionist living in a self-imposed exile during those years: Danish painter J. F. Willumsen (1863–1958). The juxtaposition of Kirchner and Willumsen poses a visually persuasive and entirely new perspective on an intense, colourful and vital vision of painting from the 1910s–1930s.

Der 16. Band der Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus versammelt Beiträge, deren inhaltiches Spektrum von den Wahrnehmungsoptionen spätantiker und mittelalterlicher Mosaiken im Licht moderner Reproduktionstechniken über die "Spinnerinnen" von Diego Velázquez, das Nachleben von Théodore Géricaults "Floß der Medusa" und René Magrittes "images peintes" bis zu neuen Überlegungen zu Weiblichkeit, dem gebrochenen Blick und dem "Nachleben" der Shoah bei Boris Lurie reicht. Mit Beiträgen von Barbara Schellewald, Victor I. Stoichita, Gregor Wedekind, Wolfram Picher und Katharina Sykora.

Hildebrand Gurlitt zahlte zu jenen Kunsthandlern, die sich an dem Verkauf der 1937 in deutschen Museen als "entartet" beschlagnahmten Kunstwerke beteiligten. Rund 400 Kunstwerke aus dem Kontext der Einziehung verblieben in seinem Besitz. Sie befinden sich heute als Legat Cornelius Gurlitt im Kunstmuseum Bern. Der Band basiert auf umfangreichen Forschungen zur Entstehung des Kunstbesitzes Hildebrand Gurlitts. Die Beitrage thematisieren die Positionierung des Museumsleiters und Kurators Gurlitt zur deutschen Moderne und seine Rolle als Kunsthandler wahrend des Nationalsozialismus und in der Nachkriegszeit. Die Autor:innen analysieren Gurlitts Rolle im Kontext des Kunsthandels, der nationalsozialistischen Kunst- und Verfolgungspolitik und problematisieren die Strategien des Kunstbetriebs nach 1945. Der Katalog enthalt alle Kunstwerke im Legat Cornelius Gurlitt mit belegtem Bezug zur Aktion "Entartete Kunst" sowie Reproduktionen zentraler Dokumente.

As an everyday fact and an object of artistic design, landscape is a central category of human experience. Political, social, cartographic, and economic, but also philosophical and aesthetic references define historically changing concepts of landscape, which are considered here from both a Western and Asian perspective. Nature is staged as a space of experience in artworks, and the "memorial landscapes" thus created are examined based on examples of Asian, European, and American painting from the Middle Ages to the modern age. A look is thus taken at aspects of the formation of national and cultural identity, the transnational transfer of concepts of landscape, and political, religious, and legal, as well as medical references.

The fifteenth volume of lectures from the Warburg House brings together contributions whose spectrum of content ranges from the dispute over the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome in the mid-18th century to Aby Warburg's scientific and popular educational commitment to the Hamburg Planetarium and the aesthetic treatment of machine and technology. With contributions by Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, Emmanuel Alloa, Alexander Honold, Birgit Recki, and Gertrud Koch.

Magische Bilder werden gemeinhin fruhen Epochen oder "primitiven" Kulturstufen der Menschheit zugewiesen. Seit der Antike sind Bildbestrafungen bekannt, bei denen die magische Prasenz des Menschen im Kunstwerk angenommen wird. Doch die historischen Bildersturme haben selbst in unserer aufgeklarten Gegenwart ein faszinierendes Nachleben, etwa in den Attacken auf Denkmaler oder Wahlplakate. Das afrikanische Kultobjekt, das wundertatige Madonnenbild und der Talisman, aber auch das bildliche Substitut eines Rock- oder Filmstars, der im Bild verehrt wird - sie alle stellen die Forschung vor vergleichbare Herausforderungen. Der vorliegende Band untersucht magische Bilder in anthropologischer sowie medialer Perspektive und kommt so der Frage naher zu, was ein Kunstwerk zum magischen Bild macht.

Der dreizehnte Band der Vortrage aus dem Warburg-Haus versammelt Beitrage, deren inhaltliches Spektrum von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart reichen: von Caesar als Monarch uber E.T.A. Hoffmanns selbst entworfene Umschlagzeichnungen zu seinem Kater Murr, uber die Auseinandersetzungen zwischen Franz Marc und Max Beckmann zur "neuen Malerei" bis hin zur Genese und zu den Folgen des Kreativitatsdispositivs fur die Kunst der Gegenwart. Mischa Meier, Caesar und das Problem der Monarchie in Rom. Diskurs und Handlungsrahmen Eva Schurmann, Homo depictor. Vom Darstellen als Lebensform (mit einer Perspektive auf "Las Meninas") Werner Busch, E.T.A. Hoffmanns "Kater Murr". Zitat und Arabeske Uwe M. Schneede, Kunstler im Konflikt. Max Beckmann und Franz Marc: 1914-1916 Wolfgang Ullrich, Der Kunstler als Muse. Genese und Folgen des Kreativitatsdispositivs

The portrait has been characterized as an art-form of contradictions since its very beginnings to the art of today. The genre is faced with the challenge of recording an individual and his or her character as a strictly specified object and, at the same time, of creating a work of art in its own right. Hence, various forms of portraiture are faced with an aesthetic conflict of solutions that oscillate between similarity to the subject and greatly abstracted works of invention. This volume collects the contributions of the homonymous "International Warburg College" of the University of Hamburg and is dedicated to the genre of portraiture across various media as well as its entire thematic range. Case studies by international authors examine the broad range of issues involved in this genre: from the exploration of the individual in the portrait, to the political function of the genre; from the stylization of the individual to mask, role, and type; and to the artists' strategies of presentation in the self-portrait.

Die inneren Widerspruche nationalsozialistischer Kunstpolitik aussern sich besonders bei der Rezeption des Expressionismus, dessen Werke einerseits im Brennpunkt der Verfemung standen, andererseits fur ideologische Richtungskampfe innerhalb der NSDAP in Anspruch genommen wurden. Die kommentierte Quellenedition widmet sich der historischen Analyse dieser Widerspruche: Von der Rezeption des Expressionismus als internationale Avantgarde seit dem Kaiserreich und den Debatten uber einen "nordischen" Expressionismus im Ersten Weltkrieg, in der Weimarer Republik und im "Dritten Reich" bis zu den Kontroversen uber sein Erbe nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg werden Wertschatzung und Verachtung dieser Kunst durch die konfliktreiche deutsche Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts verfolgt.