Tangled Paths: A Life of Aby Warburg

(Hardback)

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Description

Tangled Paths tells the life story of Aby Warburg, one of the most influential historians of art and culture of the twentieth century. It also tells the story of a man who, throughout his life, struggled to assert his place in the world. Charting Warburg's many projects and identities ground-breaking historian, public intellectual, ethnographer, shrewd academic administrator and founder of a library Hans C. Hoenes explores not only the vagaries of an academic career but the personal demons of a man who relentlessly sought to live up to his own expectations. This biography the first in English for over fifty years presents an evocative and richly detailed portrait of Warburg's personality and career, and of his attempts to make sense of the tangled paths of his life.

Reviews

"Tangled Paths provides a critical overview of Warburg's life and work, and engages with Warburg's own myth making, not as a criticism, but as part of a depiction of his persona and presentation and development of his own work. . . . Hoenes impresses through his insights into the cultural history of Warburg's time. . . . An ambitious and very much needed book."--Eckart Marchand, Warburg Institute

Author Bio

Hans C. Hoenes is a lecturer in art history at the University of Aberdeen. He has written extensively on art historiography since the eighteenth century and has published books about Heinrich Woelfflin and British antiquarianism, among others.