Tangled Paths - by Hans C Hönes (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

An intimate biography of an eminent historian of art and culture, exploring his life both within and away from the academy.

Tangled Paths tells the life story of Aby Warburg (1866-1929), 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--groundbreaking historian, public intellectual, ethnographer, shrewd academic administrator, and founder of a library--the book explores not only the vagaries of an academic career but also the personal demons of a man who relentlessly sought to live up to his own expectations. In this biography--the first in English in over fifty years--Hans C. Hönes 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.

Review Quotes

"This well-researched and accessible biography refrains from merely reprinting the Warburg legend. Hönes aims instead to recover him 'as a minor figure'--not as a solitary prophetic genius, but as a man in context, operating largely at the periphery of contemporary events and intellectual currents. . . . Though he is by no means hostile to his subject, Hönes succeeds in reclaiming him as a marginal character. Warburg once hoped that his life would make for a 'beautiful memory.' A biography like Tangled Paths--sympathetic and exact, but free of romantic embellishment--may or may not be what he had in mind. In rescuing the man from his own legend, though, the biographer has performed for his subject the task that eluded Aby Warburg his whole life: making sense of Aby Warburg."-- "New Criterion"

"In his own life, balance was never Warburg's strong suit. He was wracked by insecurities yet believed he was destined for great things, searching obsessively for the signs of destiny in his daily affairs. Hönes's new biography--which reconstructs the erratic zigzags in Warburg's thinking and refuses to swallow his vatic pretensions--stresses that he was the 'constant exegete' of his own life, revisiting and regurgitating his fleeting inspirations. Hönes argues that a 'warped self-image' proved an 'albatross' to Warburg, preventing him from finding either mental peace or a stable scholarly footing."-- "London Review of Books"

"Hönes's excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg's life and work. . . . It is meticulously researched, with Hönes's own position as a lecturer in art history at the University of Aberdeen enabling him to describe Warburg's professional tussles with ease and expertise, though the author carefully avoids too many excursions into academic theory that might have been off-putting for the general reader. It is also beautifully produced by Reaktion, a publisher that specialises in art books, with many illustrations here reproducing excerpts from Warburg's notebooks and his working drafts, along with the various forms of iconography that interested him."-- "Australian Book Review"

"Hönes's masterly study is a sure guide to the faltering steps followed by Warburg in the development of his 'nameless science, ' during a life that variously embodied the spirit of the age and drew on his billionaire connections to struggle against it."-- "Times Literary Supplement"

"[A] meticulous, ideas-driven biography. . . . Hönes is an admirably lucid guide to his subject's twisting course and the thickets of German intellectual politics."-- "Financial Times"

"The story of one of the most influential historians of art and culture of the twentieth century reveals a man of many identities--public intellectual, ethnographer, shrewd academic administrator and founder of a library--who still struggled to assert his place in the world."-- "Financial Times, "The Books to Read in 2024""

"This learned, lively book illuminates the life and work of Aby Warburg, the sphynx-like impresario of erudition who was one of the creators of modern humanistic scholarship. Hönes explicates Warburg's scholarship, his career and his life-long efforts at self-fashioning with skill and insight."--Anthony Grafton, Henry Putnam University Professor of History, Princeton University

"At last, Aby Warburg has the biography he deserves. Hönes gives us the man behind the myth and provides the guidance needed to make sense of one of history's great sense-makers."--Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute

"Hönes becomes a ghostbuster for the phantoms of Aby Warburg. No book to date has so consistently analysed the highs and lows of the biography and intellectual journey of today's most famous art historian. Warburg's new ideas for an interdisciplinary and cross-temporal art history beyond all border-guard mentality are explained in detail alongside German culture and science, with Warburg's dispute about his Jewish ancestry and with the struggle of art history to be finally recognized as a scientific discipline."--Ulrich Pfisterer, professor of art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, and director of Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

"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. . . . Hönes impresses through his insights into the cultural history of Warburg's time. . . . An ambitious and very much needed book."--Eckart Marchand, Warburg Institute

About the Author

Hans C. Hönes 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 Wölfflin and British antiquarianism, among others.