To a greater extent than still widely assumed, the German scholar Aby Warburg drew, throughout his life, on the lessons of two of its early episodes: his travels of 1895–96 among Pueblo Indian communities in the North American Southwest, and his residence of 1896–97 in Berlin, which he prized as a center for the study of ethnography, ethnology, and anthropology. Over the next three decades, this pioneering thinker was able to affect a fruitful amalgamation of those disciplines with that of art history (in which he had himself been trained): the origin of a form of cultural studies that continues to exert an extraordinary intellectual allure. Quoting from Warburg’s diaries, notebooks, and correspondence, this newly translated study throws fresh light on a most eventful journey through the realm of ideas.
 

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.