Journal of Art Historiography (Dec 2013)
‘”Cannon fodder for respectable question marks”: Fritz Saxl and the history of the Warburg Library’. Review of: Dorothea McEwan, Fritz Saxl – Eine Biografie: Aby Warburgs Bibliothekar und Erster Direktor des Londoner Warburg Institutes, Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2012
Abstract
As the first Archivist of The Warburg Institute, University of London, from 1993 until her retirement in 2006, Dorothea McEwan compiled the database of the Aby Warburg Correspondence. McEwan has published and lectured widely on Warburg and Fritz Saxl. The present book is preceded by two previous volumes treating the Warburg-Saxl correspondence: Das Ausreiten der Ecken, Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1998; and Wanderstrassen der Kultur, München und Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 2004. Based largely on Fritz Saxl’s correspondence in his various capacities as Aby Warburg’s principal aid and successor, this recounting of the Austrian scholar’s life and work is presented as a narration of the events of his professional career, and not as an intellectual biography per se. Saxl is situated within a history of the Warburg Library, is pictured as devoted to Warburg and his work, and is shown to have been critical to the functioning and survival of the Library in its various forms. As such, the book suggests that Saxl’s greatest achievement was his administrative and organizational contribution to what became the Warburg Institute. Surveying and integrating a large body of material, the author provides the necessary outlines of a career and corpus of scholarship worthy of further exploration.
