Fritz Saxl

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Fritz Saxl in the Warburg Art History Library, Hamburg, around 1924

Friedrich "Fritz" Saxl (born January 8, 1890 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; died March 22, 1948 in Dulwich , England) was an Austrian art historian .

He successfully endeavored to create Aby Warburg's library of cultural studies from Germany to England after the Nazis came to power . He was also considered to be the employee of Warburg who pursued his theories most purely.

Life

Born as the son of the court attorney Ignaz Saxl, Fritz Saxl grew up in a well-off Jewish family. While the grandparents were still of Jewish faith, the father converted without denying his roots. Friedrich Saxl converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1908.

Saxl studied archeology and history in Vienna , Berlin and Rome . In Vienna he was one of the close circle of students of Franz Wickhoff , Julius von Schlosser and Max Dvořák. In Berlin he mainly studied with Heinrich Wölfflin . At the age of 22 he submitted his dissertation on Rembrandt to his doctoral supervisor Dvořák. Shortly before, he had met Aby Warburg privately, and from then on he was one of his students. In 1912/13 he completed an academic year in Rome, where he specifically analyzed medieval texts on mythology and astrology . This stay was made possible for Saxl by a generous grant from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research in Rome .

In 1913 he married Elise Bienenfeld and moved to Hamburg , where he started work as a research assistant for Aby Warburg in his cultural studies library . As a result, he adopted the theses of Warburg, who recognized that ancient mythological and artistic themes and pictorial formulas had survived in art history , and turned away from his original area of ​​interest, baroque art . During the First World War he was drafted as a soldier and served as an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army , where he was deployed as a lieutenant in Italy from 1915 and as a trainer and teacher in the last two years of the war. He then organized exhibitions in Vienna as part of popular education.

In 1919 Saxl returned to Warburg, who was meanwhile seriously ill and had been admitted to a closed institution until 1924, so that Saxl and his colleague Gertrud Bing took over the management and organization of the library, which comprised around 20,000 volumes. In the 1920s he worked initially as a private lecturer and until 1933 as an associate professor at the University of Hamburg .

Saxl had the foresight to understand the handover of power to the National Socialists as a threat to academic Germany in order to establish contacts with the patron Samuel Courtauld in England so that Warburg's library could be preserved. He himself also managed to emigrate to England in 1933. Since 1940 he had the English citizenship. Since 1944 the library has been an official part of the University Library of London ( Warburg Institute ); it was incorporated into the Courtauld Institute of Arts at the University of London and can still be used there today. In 1944 he was elected a member ( Fellow ) of the British Academy .

In 1946, Saxl founded the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance together with the art historian Richard Krautheimer and the archaeologist Karl Lehmann .

Saxl's efforts were primarily aimed at the Warburg library and the maintenance of Warburg's memory.

Fonts (selection)

  • Lectures by the Warburg Library. (Ed. By Fritz Saxl), 1921–31 (9 vols.)
  • Studies of the Warburg Library. (Ed. Ders.), 1922–32 (21 vols.)
  • Directory of astrological and mythological illustrated manuscripts from the Latin Middle Ages . Vol. 1, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1915, Vol. 2, Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1927, [Vol. 3 u. 4 ed. by Meier, Hans, and Bober, Harry, and McGurk, Patrick.]
  • A Heritage of Images: A Selection of Lectures by Fritz Saxl . Introduction by EH Gombrich. 2 vols. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1970
  • The History of Warburg's Library. In: Ernst Gombrich , Aby Warburg. 2nd ed. Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1986, pp. 325-38
  • Gesture, form, expression , presented by Pablo Schneider, Zurich-Berlin: diaphanes, 2010, ISBN 978-3-03734-131-5 .

Posthumously

  • English sculpture of the 12th century. 1954
  • Lectures . 1957.

Letters

  • Riding out the corners. The Aby Warburg - Fritz Saxl correspondence 1910 to 1919 . Edited by Dorothea McEwan. Munich 1998. ISBN 3-930802-79-1 .
  • Walking routes of culture. The Aby Warburg - Fritz Saxl correspondence 1920 to 1929 . Edited by Dorothea McEwan. Munich 2004. ISBN 3-935549-85-7 .

literature

  • EH Gombrich:  Saxl Friedrich (Fritz). In: Austrian Biographical Lexicon 1815–1950 (ÖBL). Volume 10, Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-7001-2186-5 , p. 7.
  • Charlotte Schoell-Glass:  Saxl, Fritz. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 480 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Donald J. Gordon (Ed.): Fritz Saxl (1890-1948) . Nelson, London 1957.
  • Eric M. Warburg, The Transfer of the Warburg Institute to England, from: The Warburg Institute Annual Report 1952–1953.
  • Ulrike Wendland: Biographical handbook of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism. Part 2: L – Z. Saur, Munich 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 586-592.
  • Dorothea McEwan: Fritz Saxl - A biography. Aby Warburg's librarian and first director of the Warburg Institute in London . Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-205-78863-8 ( full text for download ).
  • Hellwig, Karin. Aby Warburg and Fritz Saxl unravel Velázquez. A Spanish interlude to the afterlife of the ancient world . Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, Sept. 2015, ISBN 978-3-11-042052-4 (e-book)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Warburg Institute. Retrieved March 21, 2017 (English).
  2. ↑ Anna L. Staudacher: "... announces the departure from the Mosaic faith". 18,000 exits from Judaism in Vienna, 1868–1914: names - sources - dates. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009, ISBN 978-3-631-55832-4 , p. 512
  3. ^ Deceased Fellows. British Academy, accessed July 28, 2020 .
  4. ↑ On the history of the Census. In: http://www.census.de/census/projekt
personal data
SURNAME Saxl, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Saxl, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian art historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 8, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1948
Place of death Dulwich , England