THE WARBURG INSTITUTE, LIBRARY AND READING ROOM - The Warburg Institute, London (1933-present)
The Warburg Institute
After Warburg’s death the library, housing 60 000 books, was run by Fritz Saxl. Ernst Cassirer, his colleague at the University of Hamburg, described the Warburg Library as a “library of problems”. Moreover, in the face of the Nazi threat in 1933, the library relocated from Hamburg to the United Kingdom. Between 1933 and 1944, it moved from Thames House to the Mines of Buckinghamshire (during the Blitz) and to the Imperial Institute Buildings until it became incorporated in the University of London.
Begun by Aby Warburg in the late 1880s, the photocollection and archives were produced apart from the library in the 1940s. Following Erwin Panofsky’s introduction of iconography in his writings published in the early 1930s, the photocollection was based on the idea that iconography could be a “metascheme” to categorize and structure images.
Under Gertrude Bing’s directorship the Institute moved into its permanent home in a new building on the University site in 1958.
Today the Warburg Institute is associated with the University of London in central London. Now, with its current location near the SOAS, the Warburg remains focused on historical aspects of “Kulturwissenschaften”. Its Library is still organized according to the Warburg classification system and includes duplicate books in its collection. Although the classification system has been reconsidered several times and new sections such as ‘the Body’ have been added in the 1990s, African culture and literature are still classified under primitive arts rather than anthropology. ( some sections stayed as conceived, some are in need of revision such as subject of negroes, and some have been changed already) All subjects of Africa were categorized under “primitivism”, the ones on India under “religion”. Each floor shows a plan of the shelves and their categories according to which visitors can orientate themselves. In addition, the website (http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/home/) allows users to explore the library, digitized books, resources, links and Iconographic database and archive database. The librarians also introduced new guiding themes such as ‘laughter’, ‘color’, ‘planetary gods’ and ‘self’. (http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/guides/laughter/) to explore the library on four floors.
One of the key sections of the Warburg Library is the Orientation – Divination, Games, Prophecy section (http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library/links/orientation/divination/) which deals with the core concern of the Institute as well as every human being: the fear of the future.