2005 Reports

Aby Warburg in America again : with an edition of his unpublished correspondence with Edwin R. A. Seligman (1927-1928)

Stimili, Davide

"I presented on this occasion for the first time the unpublished correspondence between the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) and Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman (1861- 1939), who was to retire in 1931 after a distinguished career as McVickar professor of political economy at Columbia University. The correspondence between Warburg and Seligman is preserved among the Edwin R. A. Seligman Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, and is going to be published, along with an introduction, based on a revised and expanded version of my talk, in the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 48 (2005). As I argue in my introduction, the correspondence provides the best available record of a still largely unexplored chapter in Warburg’s life: his thwarted attempt to return to America in 1928, after the famous trip to the Hopi regions of Arizona and New Mexico in the waning years of the nineteenth century. The publication of the correspondence is therefore a necessary complement to any future "definitive biography" of Aby Warburg."