Dhe canon of art history is currently being expanded considerably, one might say. It is asked exactly who is in there at all and, above all, why. It should be clear by now that quality is not the decisive factor. Rather, it is a complex network of power structures and coincidences that determine what remains and who is remembered. Thus, the canonization of art is always also a story regarding who had access to the academies and who might afford to devote their lives to art.
This overlooks all those who, due to social and economic circumstances, were unable to shape their careers the way they would have liked. But even those overlooked, most of whom are artists, have left their mark. And so the men in canon are beginning to have company. Not only by the women who have been making art since the 20th century, but also by those who lived and worked at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. The most famous case is that of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.
No housewife hobby
A previously forgotten artist who is currently being celebrated with an exhibition in Hamburg’s Ernst-Barlach Haus is Mary Warburg. The wife of the art historian Aby Warburg certainly played just as big a part in his career as Aby’s courageous and brilliant spirit – which he might hardly have lived out to such an extent without Mary, who took care of the children and the household. Mary Warburg also made the iconic bust of her husband that stands today on a pedestal designed by Franz Erhard Walther in the Warburg House in Hamburg. It is almost symbolic that her best-known work is a picture of her husband – and the fame of the sitter almost makes one forget the author.
It was always known that Mary Warburg was also an artist. But it was dismissed as a housewifely hobby, which she carried out with some enthusiasm but not with the required professionalism. In 2006, one might still read a small text on the occasion of a women’s group exhibition in the Hamburger Kunsthalle: “However, Mary Warburg was never able to bring her talent to a maturity that resulted in a consistent independent style.”
Woman reading at the edge of the forest, around 1902.
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Image: Andrea Völker/Barlach House
At that time, only a small section of text was dedicated to her. There is now a 536-page monograph that brings together almost nine hundred works and shows that there was indeed an “independent style”. Bärbel Hedinger and Michael Diers have been working on the comprehensive catalog raisonné since 2015, which might posthumously make the Warburgs a so-called “power couple” in art. He the theorist. You, the artist. Martin Warnke, who died in 2019, writes in an article that the art world almost “loves” Aby Warburg and “treats him more and more often as an artist”. Warnke suspects that it was the “good star, called Mary, that led him in this direction.”
Between art and family
Mary and Aby Warburg met on a study trip to Florence. Shortly therefollowing, Aby Warburg stated that she was an artist who “paints superbly and has an astonishing amount of simple yet profound interest in everything that is art”.