The 2016-2017 International Warburg Seminar, to be held in Taipei on 26-30 September 2016 and in Hamburg on 3-7 April 2017 and aimed at doctoral candidates and young academics, will be devoted to comparative views of the landscape genre. People’s perception of their surrounding landscape is subject to a variety of cultural encodings. This becomes particularly clear when international comparisons are made – between, say, Eastern and Western conceptions of landscape. Whereas in the Western world ‘landscape’ and ‘landscape painting’ are practically synonymous (‘Claude Lorrain’s landscapes’), the Chinese language, for instance, uses very different terms for the two concepts: ‘landscape’ in the sense of a vista, (jǐngsè), is thus conceptually quite separate from the traditional notion of landscape painting, (shānshuǐ), which is composed of the characters for ‘mountain’ and ‘water’. At the same time, notions of landscape are subject to constant historical change, and the landscape painting genre has performed a whole series of different tasks which may also vary from period to period. Landscapes are not only veduta-like depictions of nature, but they also provide subjective perspectives on the artist’s realm of experience; they may be outlines for ideal or world landscapes that are more or less distinct from their natural models; and they may be much else besides.

The International Warburg Seminar on Memorial landscapes: world images East and West will focus not so much on aspects of landscape that only depict natural settings as on those that address the construction of cultural links in the broadest sense, creating landscapes with a motivic, thematic, social or political charge – to paraphrase Pierre Nora, paysages de mémoire. Such landscape images encapsulate historical events and national identities, basic philosophical attitudes and political conflicts or cultural, social or environmental issues. The landscape can then become not only a form of reflection on links beyond landscape itself, but also a meta-genre that expresses how nature and landscape are perceived by a particular artist, cultural region or period.

Doctoral candidates or young post-graduate art historians from all over the world are invited to submit proposals for the seminar theme. These may include both proposals in the field of Asian and Western art history during any period from the Middle Ages to the present day, as well as – and in particular – themes that already deal with transfer between Eastern and Western notions of landscape. Participants will be expected to give a talk on their proposal. It is planned that proposals accepted for the seminar will be published. During the first week of the seminar, in autumn 2016, all the participants will present preliminary papers which will be further developed in the light of discussions in preparation for the second week of the seminar. The contributions will be jointly edited during the spring 2017 session.

All travel and accommodation expenses will be covered by the organizers. The seminar will be held in English. Applications including a detailed thematic proposal (max. two pages), a CV (resume), a list of relevant publications and a letter of recommendation from the applicant’s academic supervisor or a senior researcher must be submitted in PDF format by 10 March 2016 to Professor Shai-Shu Tzeng, National Taiwan Normal University (sstzeng@ntnu.edu.tw), Professor Yih-Fen Hua, National Taiwan University (yfhua@ntu.edu.tw) and Professor Uwe Fleckner, University of Hamburg (uwe.fleckner@uni-hamburg.de).

Application closed.

The International Warburg Lectures in Hamburg and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, in collaboration with the “Entartete Kunst” (”Degenerate Art”) Research Center in Hamburg, helt a two-part workshop on the art market under National Socialism. The workshop for emerging scholars  addressed fundamental questions on the confluence of the history of art, economics, and the law. Case studies were from disparate sectors of the Third Reich’s art market, such as official and clandestine transactions, national and international sales, stolen and looted art, the seizure and disposal of “degenerate art” from German museums, the expropriation of art from Jewish collectors, and restitution cases past and present. Lectures addressed new findings in the history of the art market, its protagonists and inner workings, the history of public and private collections in the Nazi period, as well as research on exiles and topics related to “degenerate art.”
The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles hosted the first meeting of the workshop September 23-27, 2013. The Art History Seminar at the University of Hamburg (Warburg House) convened the second meeting October 6-9, 2014.

Support for “Market and Might: The Business of Art in the ‘Third Reich’” was provided by the Volkswagen Foundation, Hannover.

This International Warburg-Seminar was dedicated to the theme of the portrait in all aspects of its genre history and its methodological complexity.

The portrait from its beginning to the very present is a contradictory art form: asked to strictly depict an individual human being and his/her character, while at the same time creating an art work of its own legitimacy, all forms of portraiture face an aesthetic conflict. Solutions and approaches to this oscillate strongly between a natural/close to nature reproduction and far reaching abstract ways of contriving the works. The seminar paid attention to the whole spectrum of the theme. The following themes were to be discussed, depending on submitted proposals: Images of all époques of art history; Western and non-European forms of portrayal; single, group or role portraits as well as their functional use in political, historical and other representational contexts, portraiture and physiognomy; portraiture beyond genre borders, also within New Media, non-figural images as well as deletions/negations of portraits.

During the first session week in autumn 2012, all seminar participants gave preliminray papers, which were further developed based upon the discussions for the second seminar week. During the spring meetings in 2013 joint editing of the submitted contributions took place.

Organized jointly by the Department of Art History of Hamburg University and the Aby Warburg Foundation, the thematic focus of the 2010 Warburg Seminar was on imbuing art with magical power, examining the topic from an anthropological and media-historical perspective. The Warburg Seminar addressed mainly young scholars, and took place on
The focus of discussion was on the magical image being an object, on its function as a likeness or surrogate, as well as its performativity. Aspects to be scrutinized in the Seminar were, on the one hand, the media specificity, materiality, as well as the conditions of production and reception of images that have been declared to have magic powers or perceived as alive or as agents. On the other hand, the Seminar also investigated the possible genre functions inherent in efficacious artworks. Thereby, images were scrutinized in politico-juridical, religious, or aesthetic contexts, such as in the case of executions in effigy, in funerary sculpture, in the vera icon and related genres, as well as in image substitutes in rites of rulers, in protective pictorial magic, miraculous images, but also in the form of “living” images in contemporary art forms as well as attacking images in the present.
Participants presented their topics during the first session in February. Based on discussions during the first part of the seminar, participants refined and expanded their papers by autumn.

The Warburg International Seminar, a joint initiative of the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar at Universität Hamburg and the Aby Warburg Foundation, took place from 14 to 18 July 2008 and from 9 to 13 February 2009. The objective of the seminar was to investigate the significance of time spent abroad by an artist, be it voluntary or manditory, and how it influences the creative process and the reception of works of fine art, as well as the perception of an oeuvre within the history of art. No geographical or methodical restrictions were specified and approaches from research on exile, colonial and postcolonial studies, as well as the analogical transfer of knowledge and related reception histories were welcomed.

The subject areas and research questions tackled by the seminar were as follows: travelling as a defining factor of an education in the arts, integration efforts undertaken by national art academies and institutions, migration motivated by political or religious grounds and the implications for artistic production, migration as a flaw or a commercial strategy of modern artistic practice, marginalization and defamation of particular art movements, their representatives, and their representation in nationalistic art historiographies, and art as a professed transnational language free of ideology.

During the first week of the seminar in the summer, participants presented their papers, which were then discussed by the group and subsequently revised on the basis of the discussions prior to the second week of the seminar. At the spring session, the group edited all of the submitted texts.

The Institute of Art History of the University of Hamburg and the Hamburg Warburg Foundation hosted their Warburg-Seminar 2006 on the general topic of “The Making of National Art”. The subject was approached from two different perspectives: on the one hand artistic constructions of national art were examined, i.e. national iconographies as well as formal strategies aimed at a national encoding of art. On the other hand studies were dedicated to the subject of national monopolization, instrumentalization and categorization of pieces of art as pursued by art criticism, art history, museums or other institutions. Since Nationalism only became a significant factor in the construction of collective identities around 1800, Modern Art was at the core of all analyses within the seminar, however pre-figurations as well as early forms of patriotic art were investigated as well.