Mark A. Russell. Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896-1918. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. xii + 257 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84545-369-5.
Reviewed by Mark R. Correll (Department of History, Spring Arbor University)
Published on H-German (April, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher
Creativity in a Philistine City
On the face of it, Hamburg's public art projects in the late Wilhelmine era hardly seem to challenge most historians' assumptions about German culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. Mark A. Russell's new monograph, however, offers a compelling and needed nuance to overly simplified assumptions about Wilhelmine history. He offers instead a Hamburg that used its public art both to understand its unique history and to embrace a new path for the future. At the center of this maelstrom was Aby Warburg, a leisured academic who popularized high art for the masses yet could never bridge the gap between himself and them. Put simply, this book locates the place of creativity within the very real tensions that marked Wilhelmine society and gave it its unique mixture of anxiety and optimism.
Aby Warburg, who is principally known for his trailblazing work in art and cultural history and the creation of the Warburg Institute library, is typically described by art historians as a cloistered academic living off his family's wealth who remained aloof from the public debates on art in his day. Russell, however, believes that this view is incorrect and he sets out to understand Aby Warburg as a social participant and critic. A complex image develops of Warburg as a cosmopolitan thinker, a proud and well-known citizen of both Hamburg and the German empire. The study also brings Hamburg into sharper focus as a city profoundly aware of its own unique story, but rapidly transitioning into a full participant in the German empire.
Warburg was defined by the great tensions of his day. He was both a Jew and a German nationalist. He was an intellectual academic born as the first son in a banking family. He was politically involved in public art debates as an art historian, but was unable to direct the paths of Hamburg art in the ways he believed fit. Hamburg, too, fit only awkwardly into the prevailing cultural and political tendencies of late imperial Germany. The city prided itself on its historical liberties while also trying to understand itself as the second (or third) city within the new German empire. It was driven by middle-class merchants in the militarist and Junker German empire. Like Warburg, it was proudly German, but intensely aware of its own outsider status in German history. The paths of these two misfits joined in their common embarrassment at Hamburg's reputation for artistic philistinism.
With all of these evident tensions, Russell's pairing of Warburg and Hamburg gets at the heart of an even greater paradox that is overlooked in many histories' general emphasis on Wilhelmine Berlin and Germany's great industrialists. Russell notes that the art of Hamburg suggests a defense of Geoff Eley's assertion that tradition and modernity are not mutually exclusive claims. For Warburg, and indeed for many other cultural leaders in Hamburg at the turn of the century, the historicist styles current in art were not necessarily backward-thinking. Their goals could be reasonably merged with the ideas coming out of the avant garde art movement.
Russell asserts that Warburg combined tradition and modernity in his conception of "synchronous psychic time" (p. 6). Warburg did not believe that art was evolutionary or constantly developing new vistas. Rather, in his opinion, it swung on a pendulum between humanist reason and instinctual passion. He traced the movement of synchronous psychic time to earliest civilization, so no art was truly new, but simply a novel expression of this ancient human impulse. Warburg saw these two extremes as equally valuable and essential for human nature. Therefore, he accepted modern art as being a new expression for both of these extremes, while also accepting certain forms of historicism (as found in the Bismarck memorial) as long as they truly expressed something about their subject. Bad art, for Warburg, was art that could not express anything true about its subject. For Warburg, then, one form of art was not inherently superior to any other. Russell would presumably agree with Warburg that tradition and modernity are not exclusive categories, but their tension is the place where creativity is most evidently seen.
Russell's book finds its best rhythm in the description of the development of Hamburg's three grand projects: the construction of a Bismarck memorial from 1898 to 1906, the creation of murals for Hamburg's city hall from 1898 to 1909, and finally the painting of murals in Hamburg's School of Art and Industry. Each elaborated a different image of Hamburg as a city and art as a means of ameliorating (albeit unsuccessfully) the tensions inherent in the city. Russell pursues the story of the commissioning and creation of each monument and then follows with a section on Warburg's particular attachment to the work and his impressions of it. In each case, Warburg sought to influence others and leave his own mark on the work. Interestingly, considering Warburg's position as such a highly regarded art critic, his pleas for or against an idea fell on largely deaf ears. His most successful enterprise--the murals in the Hamburg School of Art and Industry--was the least appreciated work in the long run, and has generally been ignored by histories of the city's culture.
With the construction of the Bismarck memorial, the city's senators sought to create an unmatched memorial that surpassed even that of Berlin. The Hamburg city council opened up the largest competition for an exhibition of its kind and settled on an unorthodox depiction of the empire's leading figure. While it was not wholly avant garde, it did not try to depict Bismarck as he was, but rather as he was remembered by the populace. As a result, the monument is a towering figure of Bismarck dressed in medieval armor, a modern-day Roland protecting the empire from invaders. Warburg appreciated the monument and followed its development with interest from afar, as he lived for most of this period in Florence. He was able to justify it as a depiction of truth, even if the figure was fantastical. Furthermore, he was impressed by the fact that it was immediately evident to observers, educated and uneducated alike, how important Bismarck was to the founding of the empire.
The decoration of the new city hall, however, was a catastrophe in Warburg's mind. After failing to find an appropriate candidate in a competition, the city's senate selected artist Hugo Vogel, who created murals that depicted generic images from Hamburg's history. Where Warburg found the idealized sculpture of Bismarck praiseworthy, he saw Vogel's generic Hamburg histories as uninspired and meaningless. They failed to find anything truly heroic in Hamburg's past, thus failing as either reasonable artwork or some sort of creation flowing from humanity's natural instincts. While Warburg was unable to stop Vogel's commissioning and the initial celebration of his work by the Hamburg Senate, he was perhaps significant in their ultimate choice not to commission prints of these works for Hamburg's public schools. Warburg believed they would compromise the aesthetic sense of Hamburg's youth.
Finally, Warburg was instrumental in the creation of the murals for Hamburg's School of Art and Industry, painted by his friend Willy Beckerath. These paintings formed a cycle depicting the waves of artistic expression. Each new wave of art in history was represented here by a singular, prophetic genius whose work was eventually taken up by other disciples and spread through the country and beyond. Warburg saw truth in Beckerath's art and believed the greatest art of the past came through such genius. The art of the Renaissance was spread in just such a way. He personally favored and taught about Albrecht Dürer as the genius who brought the Renaissance aesthetic to the Germanic mind. Warburg believed that Beckerath, like Dürer, was enlightening the Hamburg public about an eternal truth. Despite the great importance Warburg attached to Beckerath's murals, their timing proved unfortunate, for they were not unveiled until after the 1918 revolution. Warburg himself may have been receptive to the revolution, but the stylistic language of the murals spoke of an earlier time. Certainly by 1945, the original liberal ideals of Beckerath's paintings were all but lost, since they bore such a close formal resemblance to the depictions favored by National Socialist artists.
Using extensive unpublished sources from England's Warburg Institute, Russell reconstructs Warburg's personal take on the larger debates on public art in Hamburg after 1896. However, the book's frontispiece and title are something of a misnomer. Russell's work does not place Warburg front and center; rather, Hamburg's core of cultural elite (of whom Warburg was but one) are the protagonists in this work. Russell quickly sketches Warburg's life, but his broader cultural impact and influence on the city are merely implied without much explanation. Instead of using the debates of the era to define Warburg, Russell uses Warburg's biography as an entry point into the bigger debates of the era. Some readers may be disappointed that a more comprehensive picture of Warburg never appears. The result, however, is that Hamburg's debates and inner workings in each episode come into greater focus.
Russell's writing is clear and readable. His formal analyses of the art are comprehensible to non-experts. The book provides helpful images of each of the monuments. Even though Russell is careful to avoid making grand claims about Wilhelmine Germany in his work, with it he is able to add a significant contribution to the scholarship on Hamburg by moving beyond its role as a commercial hub within the empire and adding to its credence as a center of shaping the definition of a Kulturstadt.
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Citation:
Mark R. Correll. Review of Russell, Mark A., Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896-1918.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2009.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24075
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