David Freedberg: “the days of scholarship for its own sake are over”

Will the Warburg Institute be the the greatest centre for the study of cultural history, images and art in the world again? According to Professor David Freedberg, who was appointed director of the prestigious London institution last Spring, that would be possible only by recovering the full sense of the work of Aby Warburg and promoting the extraordinary library he and his followers – including personalities such as Fritz Saxl, Rudolf Wittkower, Otto Kurtz, Jean Seznec, Edgar Wind and Ernst Gombrich – had been developing for more than 100 years. “In order to reach this goal – asserts Freedman – we have to make the Institute more anthropological and much more multidisciplinary, by working hand in hand with the scientists. The Institute has to make clear again the relevance of the theories of Aby Warburg for the present time, and the sense of the promise of his work for the future of the humanities”. We have met Freedberg in Pavia, Italy, were he took part to a symposium organized by philosophers Michele Di Francesco and Mattia Gallotti under the titled Social change in the Brain age. “The institute has been in a state of great decline – continues Professor Freedman – ever since the death of Ernst Gombrich. The scholars here where mainly antiquarian and the presence in the cultural debate that this cultural institution had for many years was slightly fading away. But we will never really understand humans’ engagement with culture until we understand what the neuronal and biological substrates of our engagement with images are. That’s why the dialogue with science is indeed so important for the Warburg of the future”.

Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, Freedman is well known for his interest in the relationship between art and science. Nevertheless his reading of Aby Warburg’s holistic approach to culture is rooted in the humanities: “The Warburg has been affected by two narrow forms of antiquarianism and seeds of this problem lie in the notion of what Warburg called the “afterlife of antiquity”. But the influence of antiquity, first in the Renaissance and then in other cultures, does not consist merely in putting similar looking images alongside one another. It is not a form of stamp collecting, or comparing one stamp with another one. The emphasis for Warburg was on the notion of life, hence what makes cultural phenomena continue to be alive. And that is why we have to look at Warburg’s new approach to primitive, irrational, superstitious, biological drives. He didn’t do much, but there is plenty of indications in his writings that he was interested in them.”

Freedberg also points out that one of the difficulties the Warburg faced under the direction of Gombrich was his positive approach to art history, an attitude that took away the matter of interest of Warburg’s work. As it is known Gombrich was sceptical about Warburg’s interest in the role of the irrational and superstition in culture. “But these were the very things that were in fact the engines of culture transmission – claims Freedberg –, and Warburg reclaimed the anthropological basis of culture.”

Effectively, the way Warburg organized his library seems surprisingly innovative if compared, for instance, to how information is today generally organized on-line. The circular structure originally conceived to store the books, as the creative “naming” of each section, promotes that same horizontal organization of knowledge that is typical of the digital era. Just like a web site, and different from a traditional archive, Warburg’s library (Mnemosine) was a kind of functional aggregation in the service of a specific aim, that was the full understanding of images in a cultural perspective. “So there is a huge task – says Freedberg – to make the Warburg original, innovative, not antiquarian. Humanities have lost ground because they are not able to justify what they are doing in the way that scientists can. What I am hoping to do is to make clear why the humanities are essential to life not only in the academic world, but in the world at large. We cannot just lose confidence in our sense of the relevance of what we do. It’s not just a matter of collecting information, being documentary. The days of scholarship for its own sake are over.”

Freedberg seems thus aware of the importance of linking the Warburg to contemporary art. “We are definitely opening the door to the present. We are living in an information age. We have more information than we have ever had before, and the Warburg will be very concerned with the digital world. I’ve just appointed a digital librarian in addition to our traditional librarian, and we are planning to have artists in residency. Instagram is a big thing, virtual images are a big thing too. These are things we are going to have in the Warburg institute”.

Freedberg also asserts that the Warburg is looking for someone in contemporary art to fill the gap of know how the Institute still has in this field. Considering Freedberg’s ambitious programme of innovation and his awareness about the delicate mechanisms behind contemporary art, a big name is expected despite the lack of money Freedberg also laments for. But with such a tradition, and taking into account the importance of Aby Warburg for the international art community, it shouldn’t be that difficult to find new supporters in London.

February 21, 2018