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The Warburg Institute, 1933–1944

A precarious experiment in international
collaboration
Elizabeth Sears

R arely does a research library travel. In 1933, the year the Nazis came to power,
the Warburg family in Hamburg negotiated with British sponsors to enable the
Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Study)
to find safe haven in London. An initial three-year agreement was followed by a
seven-year arrangement and, at the end of 1944, with Europe still at war, the
Warburg Institute was incorporated into the University of London. The story of the
first eleven years in London – highly productive years in which the staff sought to
pursue their original mission while assimilating into British academe – reveals the
working of complex politics and shows the degree to which, early on, the fate of the
Warburg Institute was linked to that of the newly founded Courtauld Institute of Art.

On 28 November 1944, the Warburg Institute was
incorporated into the University of London. The
decision was viewed as a sound solution to a problem
that had long vexed benevolent parties: how to insure
the long-term financial and administrative stability of
a transplanted research library with a largely foreign
staff. The transfer of the Kulturwissenschaftliche
Bibliothek Warburg (KBW) from Hamburg to
London had taken place eleven years earlier, in
December 1933, in response to rapidly deteriorating
political conditions. Nazi legislation enacted the
previous April had barred ‘non-Aryan’ staff members
from teaching at the university and was discouraging
use of the library. The audacious idea to pick up and
move was possible only because the KBW, however
close its ties to the University of Hamburg, was a
private institution. Books, photographs, furnishings,
and equipment, as well as the purpose-built structure
that housed them, were the property of the Warburg
family, a prominent Jewish banking family with deep
roots in Hamburg. When Aby Warburg, the
seminally important art and cultural historian who
had founded the library, died in October 1929, his
four younger brothers – Max and Fritz in Hamburg
and Felix and Paul in New York – had continued to
provide an annual operating budget; this inevitably
decreased as the international economic situation
worsened.1 It fell to Warburg’s successor, the Austrian
art historian Fritz Saxl, to oversee the move in 1933
and to meet such crises as arose in the early London
years.
To mark the occasion of the institute’s
incorporation into the university in 1944, Saxl
prepared a brief piece for the Manchester Guardian
that opened with a reflection on the sheer
improbability of the move.
…travelling adventures are not so common in the
lives of learned institutions. These are stable by
nature, rooted to the spot by massive buildings or
heavy equipment, and requiring a tranquil
environment in which to develop. The transfer of
the Warburg Institute from Hamburg to London,
which took place in the Hitler year 1933, was thus
a somewhat unusual event. One day there arrived
in the Thames a shipment of six hundred cases of
books, iron shelving, reading desks, bookbinding
machinery, photographic apparatus, and so on.
Ten thousand square feet were needed to house
the library, and Viscount Lee of Fareham, who
from the beginning took a great interest in the

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venture, had secured accommodation in a huge ‘practically ceased to function as a living institution,’
office building on Millbank. Mr. Courtauld and he requested that it be loaned to England – ‘say for a
the Warburg family in America generously period of three years.’ The Hamburg authorities, after
provided the running expenses and a number of debate, allowed the move on condition that it be
English scholars welcomed the immigrants conducted quietly, with no notice taken in the
warmly. But how were the six people who came German press. Eric Warburg recalled that it was a
over from Hamburg with the books to set to near thing: just weeks later Goebbels’ Ministry of
work?2 Propaganda in Berlin had taken control over such
The six people who came were Saxl, Gertrud Bing decisions and would never have permitted the move.3
(Aby Warburg’s assistant in his last years), Edgar
Wind (a scholar trained in art history and philosophy,
whose English was fluent and who initiated Thames House
discussions with British sponsors), Hans Meier
(librarian), Miss von Eckardt (treasurer), and Otto The Warburg Institute’s first London home was a
Fein (bookbinder and photographer). Rudolf ground floor suite in Thames House, a new office
Wittkower, a German art block located not far from
historian with British the Houses of Parliament,
citizenship through his built under the auspices of
father, was soon appointed to Imperial Chemical
oversee the photographic Industries. Henry Mond,
collection. The small band 2nd Baron Melchett, ICI
set to work quickly, for they director, from a family of
had but three years to make Jewish philanthropists,
themselves indispensable to made the space available;
British academe. The initial Benjamin Guinness paid
agreement was due to expire for the library’s installation.
on 31 December 1936. Eric The rooms met
Warburg – nephew of Aby, requirements surprisingly
son of Max, representing the well: a long corridor facing
family in the negotiations – the court accommodated
later explained the reasoning the 60,000 books and
behind this manoeuvre. The allowed readers open
goal on the German side, he access; staff offices and
indicated, had been to workrooms were located to
develop an exit strategy that either side of a large space
would protect the library and that doubled as a reading
its staff; one tactic had been room and a lecture hall
to gain American consular capable of holding some
support through the claim 125 visitors (Fig. 1). The
The Warburg Institute, Thames House, Millbank,
that the KBW received staff were initially
1934-37. © The Warburg Institute.
support from the American concerned about their
branch of the family and thus was in part U.S. isolation from other scholarly institutions but soon
property. After the staff had established the discovered that a twenty-five minute bus ride would
connection with British sponsors and the newly bring them to the British Museum in Bloomsbury or
founded Academic Assistance Council had become to the Courtauld Institute of Art on Portman Square.4
involved, visits were exchanged and the terms of the The fates of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes
transfer negotiated. Temporary housing in London were closely intertwined in these years, owing in good
would be supplied and Samuel Courtauld, part to the involvement of Viscount Lee and his circle
anonymously, would provide an annual stipend of in the histories of both. Shortly before the transfer of
£3000 to supplement other contributions. The the KBW, he had worked with the industrialist
chairman of the London committee, Viscount Lee of Samuel Courtauld and Sir Robert Witt—solicitor,
Fareham, sent a formal invitation to Max Warburg, collector, creator of an art historical photographic
chairman of the Hamburg committee, on 28 October archive—to found the Courtauld Institute. This had
1933. Noting that in Hamburg the library had been envisaged as a teaching institute ‘for the training
of art critics and experts,’ part of the University of
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London from the outset. In a promotional publication
of 1930 Viscount Lee appealed to national pride,
decrying the lack of facilities for the systematic
education of students in the history of art and
comparing the far superior situation in Germany,
Austria, and the United States.5 The Courtauld
Institute opened its doors to students in October
1932. In the summer of 1933 Viscount Lee, Samuel
Courtauld, and Sir Robert Witt teamed up again, with
others, to facilitate the move of the KBW to London.
After the arrival, it was Witt who drafted the Trust
Deed creating a ‘Warburg Society,’ ratified in May
1934, which exempted the institute from paying rates
and made it possible to draw cheques; the document
was signed by all members of the original committee.
These included Sir Denison Ross, director of the
School of Oriental Studies; Professor W. G.
Constable, first director of the Courtauld Institute;
Dr. C. S. Gibson of Guy’s Hospital representing the
Academic Assistance Council; and the classicist Sir
Richard Livingstone, a friend of Wind who had given
a lecture at the KBW on ‘The position and function
of classical studies in modern English education’ in
1930-31.
In 1933, as Wind remarked in a letter to Saxl, the
Courtauld Institute was in ‘embryonic’ state.6 It stood
to benefit significantly from the transfer of the KBW,
however different the orientation of the German
institute. The KBW was a problem-based research
library, encyclopedic in range, supporting
investigation of the ‘survival of antiquity’ across
interconnected domains of knowledge (art, literature,
philology, philosophy, religion, magic, the natural
sciences, political history, social anthropology, etc.).
Still, art historical publications made up a substantial
part of its holdings, and the presence of a staff of
German experts, three of them art historians, could
only help the new English enterprise. In 1934 the
Rockefeller Foundation picked up half of Saxl’s and
Wind’s salaries so that they might teach at the
Courtauld Institute and University College London
respectively; in August 1934 Constable wrote to Saxl
confirming the title of his first offering: ‘Some Aspects
of Renaissance Iconography’ – a topic markedly
Warburgian in cast.7
The Warburg Institute began admitting readers in
May 1934. Funding was tight. The staff did what they
could to maintain accustomed activities while trying
to ‘feel their way’ towards new ones. The first order of
business was to draw people in: from July 1934 to
June 1935 they counted 2700 visitors (60% English,
30% German, and 10% other nationalities) – which
may be compared to 4243 readers at the KBW during
the calendar year 1931.8 They quickly established
contacts with other London libraries, lending a copy
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of their author catalogue to the National Central
Library to facilitate interlibrary loan. At the same time
they re-established connections with the General
Director of the Prussian Libraries so that they could
lend to and borrow from German state and university
libraries as part of the ‘Deutscher Leihverkehr’. Aware
of a new need to explain features of their unusual
library – premises, purposes and cataloguing system –
Bing and Wind both wrote articles for the Library
Association Record, published in August 1934 and May
1935 respectively. The staff organised public lectures
(single talks by eminent scholars), courses (short series
of informal lectures followed by discussion), and
classes (among them a course on palaeography given
by the Hamburg professor Richard Salomon). In
Germany they had mounted photographic exhibitions
to coincide with large academic conferences; in July
1934 they invited participants in the International
Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological
Sciences, held in London, to an exhibition
demonstrating the connection between
anthropological and historical studies. The staff
honoured past publishing commitments and took on
new, including joint projects with the Courtauld
Institute, among them the critical catalogue of
Poussin’s Drawings, undertaken by Walter
Friedländer with the help of Wittkower and Anthony
Blunt. The KBW’s monograph series, ‘Studien,’
inaugurated in 1922, was renamed ‘Studies of the
Warburg Institute.’ New contributors as well as old
were invited to contribute entries to the annual
Bibliography of the Survival of the Classics, the first
volume produced in Germany, the second in England.
Momentum was gathering.
The Crisis of 1936
The terminus of the first negotiated agreement
approached all too quickly and produced much
anxious uncertainty – not least because in January
1935 the American Warburgs, notably Felix, began to
argue that the library should continue its
peregrinations and re-establish itself in New York.9
Saxl and the staff viewed a move from Europe with
horror. The depth of feeling is revealed in a lengthy
memorandum, dated October 1935, reprising the
library’s inner history (innere Geschichte) and
emphasizing the European orientation of Warburg’s
scholarship; the case was made that Europe was the
natural place of the library, and England, at present,
its only possible home. Already in March 1935 Max
suggested a compromise to Felix: rather than pulling
the library out of England and potentially damaging
the family’s reputation (and that of ‘Judentum’), they
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might, for little more expense, found a sister library,
the A. M. Warburg Memorial Library, in New York.
In a second memorandum of October 1935, the
Warburg staff expressed its enthusiastic willingness to
act as a bridge between American and European
scholarship. They thus won the reprieve, but possibly
more crucial than institute sentiment was advice
received from Hamburg. In a letter of January 1936 to
Eric Warburg, Dr. Kurt Sieveking, operating on
behalf of the M. M. Warburg Bank, raised concerns: it
was not clear how the American press would treat the
move, nor what the reaction in the German press
would be. In the current state of affairs any exciting of
public opinion, he feared, ran the risk of working
against the interests of the firm.
In London, time was running out: funding would
soon cease on the British side and the American
Warburgs were pulling back; the hour of eviction
from Thames House approached. As early as January
1936 Viscount Lee, feeling personal responsibility,
presented a draft appeal to the court of the University
of London.10 Further petitions were composed at the
Warburg Institute with the aim of garnering
declarations of support from distinguished friends.
The concluding paragraph of a draft dated May 1936
suggests the depth of the concern: there was real fear
that the Institute would imminently be forced to
‘cease its activities and store its collections.’ As they
put it: ‘If this takes place it will mean that the one
scientific institution which was saved from destruction
under the Hitler régime will suddenly cease to exist
even after its transplantation. One more hope will
have been taken from those who believe in and fight
for humanization and enlightenment.’
On 22 June 1936, Saxl furnished a promised update
to Sir Kenneth Clark, then director of the National
Gallery. Max Warburg had passed through London,
but nothing had been resolved. Samuel Courtauld
offered an additional £1000, for one more year, on
condition that a longer term arrangement be found;
Viscount Lee could do nothing with respect to funds.
The University of London was prepared to offer
quarters in South Kensington beginning in January
1937 if a solution to the financial problems could be
found, and the library just might be allowed to stay in
Thames House until that time. He concluded: ‘The
position therefore is such that we shall be obliged to
store the Library in December if nothing unexpected
happens.’11
Efforts continued. On 25 June 1936, Hugo
Buchthal and Ernst Kitzinger, then young art
historians attached to the institute, sent out a letter of
appeal to fellow refugees. They furnished a paragraph
in German and a statement in English which
recipients were to sign and return:
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The undersigned German scholars have learned
that the continued existence of the Warburg
Institute in London has become doubtful owing to
lack of funds. They feel deeply indebted to this
Institute, as to most of them it has rendered
valuable services at a critical time.
Coming from Germany in search of a new start in
life, they found in the Warburg Institute three-fold
help:
1) A library which by its international character
was suited to act as a bridge between the
interrupted studies for which they were trained
and the future work for which they were
preparing.
2) A staff willing to give advice with regard to
openings in England, recommendations, and
opportunities for personal contact with members
of English learned institutions.
3) A body of students – German as well as English
– eager to include them in their circle, prepared to
discuss their problems and to further their studies.
They greatly appreciate the scientific activities of
the Institute’s staff, which continues to investigate
the wide field of cultural history; and they are
convinced that the closing down of the Warburg
Institute would mean an irreparable loss to
research.
The two-pronged appeal, to British and foreign
scholars, yielded a pile of letters of support. Out of
this came a final statement, ‘We, the undersigned wish
to make an earnest appeal for help towards the
retention and maintenance of the Warburg Institute
and Library,’ which was signed by the Vice
Chancellors of Oxford, Cambridge, and the
University of London as well as Lord Rutherford, Sir
William H. Bragg (President of the Royal Society),
Sir George Hill (Director of the British Museum), Sir
Josiah Stamp, and Viscount Lee of Fareham. A list of
fifty-one further names was attached.
Ultimately what saved the Warburg Institute was a
contemporaneous crisis at the Courtauld Institute:
ensuring the future of the latter involved rescuing the
former. The story comes out in a frank letter dated 10
July 1936, that Bing wrote to Eric Warburg – a letter
that shows the staff’s growing grasp of the
complicated academic politics in which they were
embroiled. A rift had developed within the board of
the Courtauld Institute: on one side were ranged
Viscount Lee, Sir Robert Witt, and Samuel
Courtauld, on the other, the more scholarly members
who objected to what they saw as increasingly
dilettantish educational practices. Constable resigned

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from the directorship after an attempt at mediation
failed and (scandalously) his resignation was
accepted.12 Viscount Lee then put forward a plan to
the Warburg people. The Courtauld and Warburg
Institutes would be fused (initially there was thought
of a ‘Courtauld-Warburg Trust Fund’), if they would
be separately housed and have separate budgets. The
Warburg Institute would offer post-graduate
education. Samuel Courtauld would place £5000 a
year at the institute’s disposal for seven years, and the
university would provide housing. Bing voiced their
concerns to Eric Warburg: this was yet another short-
term solution; Viscount Lee would always follow his
own agenda; and they would be aligning with a party
whose reputation among scholars was anything but
high.13
Saxl immediately crafted a twelve-page reply to
Viscount Lee’s proposal, dated 13 July 1936. In it, as a
prelude to acknowledging the benefits of
collaboration, he articulated distinctions between the
two institutes and gave some thought to their
different trajectories. The Courtauld Institute, he
believed, even while serving as an educational institute
for non-specialists, had the potential to become ‘the
central art historical institute in England’ and to
undertake the task of establishing the essential facts of
English art history for international scholarship. At
the Warburg Institute art history played a crucial but
more limited role, for the aim was that of teaching
‘method’ to students coming from any of a number of
specialized fields, and this was best accomplished not
by lecturing but by giving advice.
The student has to spend a certain, not too
limited, time in the Institute working out a single
detailed problem. By so doing, he learns how to
handle books containing very different
information, and how to co-ordinate his own
method with the methods of other historical
sciences.
Saxl concluded: ‘Complete amalgamation cannot
therefore be contemplated, whereas collaboration
seems to be the obvious course of action,’ and he
followed up with suggestions for coordinating
Courtauld instruction and Warburg courses and
lectures so that true collaboration could be achieved.
In the autumn of 1936 agreement with the
Warburg family was reached. The Warburg Institute,
provided annually with the sum of £5,500 from
Samuel Courtauld and given housing in South
Kensington by the university, would remain in
England ‘on loan’ for another seven-year period,
beginning the first of January 1937. The status quo
was thus maintained, if further connections with the
Courtauld were forged. One project the Warburg
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staff undertook in 1937-38 was to prepare of a series
of textbooks for the use of Courtauld students,
including ‘Introduction to the Study of
Iconography.’14
The Warburg family wished that international
connections be maintained. The German branch of
the family, it was agreed, would continue to send
books from Germany and to subsidize the local
printing of publications, while the institute would
continue to exchange books with German libraries
and possibly offer scholarships to German scholars.
The staff would also to stand ready to establish ties
with the new A. Warburg Memorial Library in New
York, and this would entail providing a copy of its
catalogue, helping to create an art historical library of
20,000 books, and offering exchange scholarships. As
war approached, the family’s optimistic plans quietly
faded. The sister library was never created.
Imperial Institute Buildings
A space for the Warburg Institute library had opened
up in the Imperial Institute Buildings – a sprawling
Victorian-era structure in South Kensington –
because the University of London was transferring its
own library to Senate House, newly constructed in
Bloomsbury. The Warburg Institute staff now had a
tricky space to contend with: books had to be
distributed among ten rooms of different size, each
divided between the ground floor and a balcony (Fig.
2). Eager to start in, they met with frustrating
bureaucratic delays through the whole of 1937 and
beyond. Alterations had to be approved by H. M.
Office of Works, and no amount of prodding met
with success – until erudition was brought to bear.
Seeing that their contact at the Office of Works was F.
J. E. Raby, a medieval Latinist, E. H. Gombrich
resubmitted the request in Latin verse; Raby replied
in kind in January 1938 and indicated both metrically
and prosaically that he had written London
University authorizing the changes.15 For the next
twenty years, until the move to long-promised
purpose-built quarters in Bloomsbury in 1958, the
Imperial Institute Buildings would be the institute’s
home.
After the resolution of the crisis of 1936, Wind and
Wittkower put plans in motion to inaugurate a
quarterly journal, the Journal of the Warburg Institute.
Their call for submissions amounts to a definition of
Warburgian endeavour:
In accordance with the Institute’s policy,
representatives of different historical disciplines
will discuss detailed problems which demonstrate
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The Warburg Institute, Imperial Institute Buildings, South Kensington, 1938-58. © The Warburg Institute.
the connection between the Histories of Religion,
Art, Drama and Literature, Natural Science,
Social and Political Life etc. The formation and
transmission of symbols will be the central theme,
and the ‘Survival of the Classics’ will be its chief,
though not its only, field of application.
The first issue appeared in July 1937, its four
opening articles submitted by a French philosopher,
Jacques Maritain, writing on ‘Sign and Symbol’; a
German art historian of the ‘Hamburg School’, Erwin
Panofsky, treating Piero di Cosimo’s paintings of the
early history of man; an English paleographer,
liturgist, and art historian, Francis Wormald,
providing a piece on the cult around a relic, the ‘Rood
of Bromholm’; and Elizabeth M. Butler, an English
Germanist, on ‘Alkestis in Modern Dress,’ offering a
lively tracing of the later life of a Greek myth.
If the Warburg staff tried always to tap into the
estimable British tradition of classical studies, and if
their cultural historical approach to image study was
distinct, art history could not but gain a certain
prominence in these years. Connections with the
Courtauld Institute continued to be close, to the point
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that in July 1937 Saxl was invited to be Constable’s
successor as its director. Because the post could not be
combined with the directorship of the Warburg
Institute, he declined the honour – even though it
would have meant a professorship, doubled income, a
pension, and English citizenship.16 T. S. R. Boase took
up the position, relations between the institutes
remained amicable, and members of the Warburg
staff helped to maintain continuity in instruction at
the Courtauld Institute once war had broken out. In
its third volume (1939–40) the new Warburg journal
became the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Institutes.
Denham
The night of 17 April 1941, was a hard one for the
institute.17 The librarian Hans Meier, who had been
with the library for some twenty years, was killed in an
air raid – a devastating loss. With him material for the
third volume of the Bibliography of the Survival of the
Classics was destroyed; the series would never be

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revived. That same night, the only duplicate copy of
the library’s author catalogue, which had been
deposited at the National Central Library, was lost to
a German bomb. Already in 1939, at the outbreak of
the war, various measures had been taken: over 600
boxes of books had been evacuated to the Watts
Gallery in Compton, Surrey. But now Wittkower
spurred the staff to further efforts. Bing and Margot
Wittkower found a country residence – The Lea,
Denham, Bucks., located two miles beyond Uxbridge
at the end of the Piccadilly line – that was large
enough to accommodate fifteen people; Sir Robert
Witt helped them with the lease. They brought with
them the last copy of the catalogue, the reference
library, the photographic collection, and some books
and photographs from the Courtauld Institute. By
pooling these resources with their own personal book
collections, as well as those of Wind, Blunt, and
others, they formed a working library of some 10,000
books, arranged ‘in Warburg Institute fashion.’ Staff
members commuted fairly regularly to London to
conduct business, and bookbinding and photography
continued on site, but Denham became a scholarly
retreat for members of the greater circle, including
English scholars employed in the government or the
military. In September 1941 Bing wrote to Hamburg
friends in America: ‘I do not think that there is any
other place in England at the moment where you will
find 3 or 4 scholars of an evening, seriously engaged
on research as if the world was not at all in the topsy-
turvy state that it actually is in.’18
The Warburg staff did what it could to contribute
to the war effort. In 1941, as bombs were falling, the
National Buildings Record was founded to create
systematic visual documentation of buildings under
threat. With Wittkower acting as point person and
Helmut Gernsheim as principal photographer, the
Warburg Institute, to this end, took thousands of
photographs of classicizing architecture and sculpture,
beginning with the Courtauld Institute itself and
including Ashburnham House, Westminster,
Chatham House, Chiswick House, St. James’s Palace,
Hampton Court, and Greenwich Hospital.
The best known of the institute’s wartime efforts were
the great photographic exhibitions that opened in
London and toured in British cities, attracting large
audiences. An exhibition on the theme of Indian Art –
which aimed to show ‘the religious attitude of Hindu
and Buddhist art, partly by means of comparison with
works of art from Europe’ – opened in November
1940 and was well attended despite it being a period
of intense bombing. Even more successful was
‘English art and the Mediterranean,’ an exhibition
theme that appealed to national sentiment, which
opened in December 1941, toured for two years, and
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after the war was memorialized in a folio volume with
the title corrected to British art and the
Mediterranean.19 Up until May 1945 the Warburg
Institute supplied the Churchill Club with bi-monthly
exhibitions on English art for American visitors.
Edgar Wind had been caught in the United States
at the beginning of the war and stayed to work on
behalf of the Institute. He lectured widely,
demonstrating Warburgian method; organized an
‘American’ issue of the JWCI; raised funds for the
Institute; and secured an invitation from the National
Gallery of Art, the Library of Congress, and
individual patrons to house the library in America for
the duration of the war. Viscount Lee, as he declined
this offer, spoke of the risk of shipping the collections
in wartime and, citing Sir Robert Witt, voiced
concerns about the legal implications of the transfer
for the future; his clear desire was to keep the institute
in Britain after the war.20 In 1942 Wind took up a
professorship at the University of Chicago, which he
left near war’s end with the intention of returning to
the Warburg Institute. As letters exchanged between
Wind and Saxl in 1943 and 1944 indicate, the
assumption was that Wind would eventually succeed
Saxl as director. But in the summer of 1945 the two
met in America, when Saxl was travelling to gather
support for a collaborative project he wished to
launch from the Warburg Institute – a twenty-volume
encyclopaedia of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Wind was strongly opposed to the project (it soon
came to naught) and differed with Saxl on
administrative policy. Never an easy man, he resigned
from the institute, and one of the original
Warburgians was lost to the succession.
The Crisis of 1943
The seven-year agreement that ended the crisis of
1936 was due to expire on 31 December 1943.
Already in the summer of 1942, in the midst of the
war, R. A. Butler – president of the Board of
Education, son-in-law of Samuel Courtauld – was
alerted to the problem by Viscount Lee. It was
becoming clear that, owing to the burden of taxation,
private patrons could no longer be expected to
maintain the institute. Butler consulted with Sir
Kenneth Clark and Viscount Lee, who both favoured
the idea of supporting the Warburg Institute with
public funds, and he formulated a proposal that, in
April, he forwarded to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer, the Rt. Hon. Sir Kingsley Wood.21 The
idea was that the Warburg Institute would
amalgamate with the Victoria & Albert Museum, then
a near neighbour in South Kensington. Sir Eric
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Maclagan, director of the V&A, had discussed the
idea with Lord Harwood, chairman of the advisory
committee, and had provisionally accepted the
proposal. In March Saxl had obligingly provided
Butler with a memorandum supporting the plan in
which he rehearsed the recent history of the institute
and described achievements of value to the British
nation, noting that as many as 100,000 people had
visited the travelling photographic exhibitions which
the institute had mounted over the previous four
years. Trying to imagine the benefits of the merge,
Saxl suggested that institute would then be able to
serve as a link between universities and museums, and
he volunteered his staff for the reorganization of the
museum’s photographic collection. His only
stipulation was that the institute, as a research centre,
remain administratively separate.
Butler incorporated Saxl’s suggestions into his letter
to Sir Kingsley Wood, suggesting that the
government might provide an annual grant-in-aid, on
the model of the British Council or the Council for
the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA).
He admitted the obstacles, beginning with the fact
that a good part of the personnel were of alien origin.
He was also concerned that if a government
department were to take over the Warburg Institute,
then the University of London might start to charge
rent beyond the £500 paid annually for maintenance
and, at war’s end, might even cease to supply quarters
in the Imperial Institute Buildings altogether. In this
case housing might have to be found for the library
near the museum.
The response to Butler’s proposal was
unfavourable. No one, it seems, could imagine
explaining the work and value of the Warburg
Institute to Parliament, and CEMA was regarded as a
potential embarrassment rather than a model. Butler’s
intervention, however, triggered a round-robin of
letters in which higher-ups from the Treasury, the
Board of Education, and the University Grants
Committee sought an alternative. Clearly no one
wanted the library to go to America. Consensus was
soon reached that the best course of action would be
to bring the institute into the University of London
and that the most expeditious way of doing things
would be to increase the university’s annual grant.
On 28 November 1944, a Trust Deed was signed in
the name of Eric Warburg and Viscount Lee of
Fareham on behalf of the Warburg Society,22 and the
director of the Warburg Institute ceremonially
presented a book from the library to the principal of
the University of London. The university agreed to
‘maintain and preserve the Warburg Library in
perpetuity in accordance with this Deed,’ and the
director received the title ‘Professor of the Classical
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Tradition.’ The institute now ceased to be a private
institution, and any possibility of its departure to
America or return to Germany was at an end. The
immediate benefits were obvious. Saxl’s letter to
Butler, written on the day of the signing, indicates the
depth of collective relief.
The Warburg Institute has to-day become part of
London University. You can imagine how relieved we
all feel that our uncertainties are ended. Without your
help this would have never been achieved. We are
very grateful that you have been our sponsor.
This transfer of the Institute from Hamburg to
London was a unique experiment and its results could
not very well be gauged at the beginning. It was
doubtful whether we would be able to make contacts
with English scholars. German methods and ideas are
so different from the English way of scholarship. But
it seems that a certain amalgamation has been
achieved during the eleven years of our London
existence. I should be very proud indeed if future
scholars would consider this transfer one of the few
successful attempts at international collaboration in
the field of the humanities.
References
1. Saxl, in a memorandum of 1935, notes that the
library received RM 300,000 in 1929, RM
100,000 in 1933 (Warburg Institute Archive
[WIA], Ia.2.3.8). See also, Saxl, “The history of
Warburg’s library (1886-1944), appendix to E. H.
Gombrich, Aby Warburg: an intellectual biography
(London: Warburg Institute, 1970); Lucas
Burkart, ‘“Die Träumereien einiger
kunstliebender Klosterbrüder...”: Zur Situation
der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg
zwischen 1929 und 1933’, Zeitschrift für
Kunstgeschichte 63 (2000): 89-119. I am grateful to
Ja Elsner and Claudia Wedepohl for their
comments on this paper.
2. Fritz Saxl, ‘The Warburg Institute: gift to
London University’, Manchester Guardian, 13
December 1944, 4.
3. Eric M. Warburg, “The transfer of the Warburg
Institute to England in 1933’, appendix to the
annual report of the Warburg Institute, 1952-53.
http://warburg.sas.ac.uk/home/aboutthewarburgi
nstitute/history/migration/
4. I draw throughout on documents I have amassed
for a book-length study of Warburgian
scholarship after Warburg’s death. Pre-war annual
reports survive from 1933-34, 1934-35, 1937-38.
On the early years in England, see Erika Klingler,
‘The Warburg Institute: 1933–1936’, in

38 / 4 2013
Übergänge und Verflechtungen: Kulturelle Transfers
in Europa, ed. Gregor Kokorz and Helga
Mitterbauer (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004), 263-80;
Dorothea McEwan, Fritz Saxl – Eine Biographie
(Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2013).
5. The Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of
London – a pamphlet incorporating pieces from
The Times, Monday, 27 October 1930.
6. Wind to Saxl, 15 May 1933 (WIA, GC).
7. Constable to Saxl, 27 August 1934 (WIA, GC).
8. Annual report, 1934-35, 12; ‘Bericht über die
Tätigkeit der Bibliothek Warburg in den Jahren
1930 und 1931’, 32.
9. Relevant documentary material on the crisis of
1936 is preserved in the WIA (‘Appeal
1935/1936’, uncatalogued). For letters in the
archive of the M. M. Warburg Bank in Hamburg,
see Klingler, ‘The Warburg Institute’, 272-76.
10. H. Claughton to Walter Boberly, 16 May 1943
(documents collected by Charles Hope).
11. Saxl to Clark, 22 June 1936 (WIA, GC).
12. See ‘The Courtauld Institute’, an editorial written
after Constable’s successor was appointed, and the
response from Viscount Lee, published in The
Burlington Magazine 71, no. 414 (September
1937): 107-8; no. 415 (October 1937): 188-89.
13. Kenneth Clark, in Another Part of the Wood: A Self-
Portrait (London: Murray, 1974), 178, refers to
Viscount Lee as ‘the most detested figure of the
museum world’ and recalls his own role in
interesting Lee in the fate of the KBW.
art libraries
journal
14. Courtauld Institute annual report, 1937-38.
15. E. H. Gombrich, The Warburg Institute and H. M.
Office of Works (Cambridge: Friends’ Press, 1984).
16. Bing to Trude Krautheimer, 9 July 1937 (WIA,
GC).
17. Warburg Institute annual reports, 1939-40, 1940-
41, 1944-45.
18. Bing to Elly and Walter Solmitz, 5 September
1941 (WIA, GC).
19. Christy Anderson, ‘War work: English art and the
Warburg Institute’, Common Knowledge 18, no. 1
(2012): 149-59 (a special issue devoted to the
Warburg Institute).
20. Viscount Lee to Wind, 24 December 1940; this
letter and others cited are preserved among the
Wind papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.
21. The story unfolds in documents gathered by
Charles Hope from the WIA and the archives of
University of London.
22. The Trust Deed is reproduced in Common
Knowledge 18, no. 1 (2012): 4-5.
Elizabeth Sears
Department of History of Art
University of Michigan
110 Tappan Hall, 855 S. University Ave.
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1357
USA
Email: esears@umich.edu
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