Resumen de Aby Warburg: his aims and methods
The writer discusses art historian Aby Warburg's views on art history and the methods it should employ. For Warburg, the ultimate aim of art history was to provide a “historical psychology of human expression.” Warburg's career coincided with the birth of modern art, a stylistic revolution at least as radical as the Italian Renaissance. It seems that his own reaction against the current emphasis on continuous stylistic evolution in art history, and his leaning towards “Auseinandersetzungsenergie”—the power to react against prevailing trends—was grounded in his own experience of the dramatic break of art of his time. His determined, non-conformist stance, and his intense desire to revise the notions with which art history had operated for too long, can still inspire our admiration.
