The Warburg Institute in Bloomsbury, a London University institution that houses a unique library smuggled out of Nazi Germany in 1933, hopes to raise its profile with a £14.5m overhaul.
The “Warburg Renaissance” project, which has been six years in the planning, is due to be unveiled on 1 October. It encompasses new commissions from contemporary artists, writers and thinkers, a new space for exhibitions open to the public and an auditorium to accommodate an expanded events programme.
“It has been an architectural renovation, an artistic engagement plan and an audience development strategy all in one,” says Bill Sherman, the institute’s director. “We have built a platform for growing our ability to share our history, holdings and expertise with new publics and partners.”
The Warburg, a research institute catering to masters and doctoral students, is devoted to the study of cultural memory through the interactions between images and society over time. Its collection of more than 450,000 images and at least 350,000 books is based on the library amassed by the German Jewish art historian and banking scion Aby Warburg (1866-1929). Established in his Hamburg home in 1909, it was smuggled to London in 1933. The institute became part of the University of London in 1944, moving into its current building, designed by Charles Holden, in 1958. It is affiliated with the Warburg House in Hamburg, which focuses on art history and culture.
We needed to do more than fix what was broken
Bill Sherman, director, Warburg Institute
On his arrival at the Warburg Institute in 2017, it was clear to Sherman that “we needed to do more than fix what was broken”, he says. “While this includes more room for books, upgraded digital infrastructure and a more sustainable building, it also meant becoming known and open to everyone who will find it interesting and useful.”
The transformation, designed by Haworth Tompkins architects, involved repairing the long neglected building and creating a new structure in the courtyard, which houses the expanded auditorium and a new reading room for special collections, Sherman says.
Larger community
“An enlarged teaching suite and improved group study areas will help us reach a larger and more diverse community of students,” he says. “Our double-height ground floor will be opened to the public for the first time, with the institute’s first gallery for physical and digital exhibitions.”
The University of London provided the core budget of £9.5m. “We were lucky to secure the generous support of some major donors in Warburg’s home city of Hamburg: the Hermann Reemtsma Stiftung became our lead donor, with the biggest gift they have ever made, and took us more than halfway to our target,” Sherman says.
“Our architectural legacy, our status as the UK’s great library rescued from Nazi Germany, our potential to create a unique gallery in the heart of London and our influence on artists, curators and digital designers, as well as scholars, all appealed to major foundations and philanthropic individuals. We have so far raised more than £6m and there is more to come as we shift from bricks and mortar to people and programmes.”
Major donations were provided by the American Friends of the Warburg Institute, the Wolfson Foundation, the Garfield Weston Foundation, the Foyle Foundation and Stuart Roden, the non-executive chairman of the Israeli venture capital firm Hetz Ventures, among others. (Roden gave the Labour party £570,000 ahead of the UK general election in July.)
In 2019, Sherman raised concerns about Brexit, which threatened vital research and student funding. “The ‘Warburg Renaissance’ project has coincided with Covid, Brexit and the widely reported crisis in the humanities,” he says. “While we lament the loss of student mobility and European research funding, and worry about the challenge to the scholarly skills needed to preserve and interpret the past, our numbers continue to grow and we remain committed to international collaboration.”
Sherman says there are currently around 20 PhD and MPhil students. The 2022-23 report shows that the institute received £5.4m that year—in 2018-19, the comparative figure was £4.7m—with £364,898 coming from research grants and contracts.
Crucially, the Warburg Institute will programme and organise exhibitions under Matthew Harle, its curator of artistic programmes. “We are very excited to be able to activate our collections in our custom-built gallery,” Sherman says. “Our first year will feature shows on ‘Memory & Migration,’ ‘Tarot: Origins and Afterlives’ and Edward George’s ‘Black Atlas’, as well as a season devoted to art and the book. All of these programmes will be open to the public.” A programme for creative practitioners-in-residence will also be launched.
The largest work donated to the Warburg Institute is Edmund de Waal’s library of exile. Created for the Venice Biennale in 2019 and displayed at the British Museum in 2020, it was donated to the Warburg in 2021. “Its porcelain-covered walls are inscribed with the names of lost libraries and authors forced into migration,” Sherman says. “It will be lit at all times and visible to passers-by on the most public-facing side of our building.”
The revamped institute will offer regular public lectures, concerts and films, Sherman says, adding that the new auditorium will also house the restored piano donated by Ernst and Ilse Gombrich, so “we hope to offer musical performances, too”.
Everything at the Warburg centres on the unique library, which is still organised according to Warburg’s original four key concepts: image, word, orientation and action. “We have provided room for growth and also improved climate control and security throughout the building,” Sherman adds. “The stacks are now filled with light, breathing room and what Warburg called Denkraum: thinking space. We have also created a state-of-the-art facility for storing, conserving and studying our archive and photographic collection.”