AAnyone interested in the history of art history knows Martin Warnke’s central role at the Cologne Art History Day in 1970. Some may still remember the tone of his always polished newspaper articles or his criticism “On the situation of the couch corner” on the since Biedermeier period in the corner of the “parlor ’ dwelling furniture monster – but haven’t heard anything else from or about this magician of deeply thought-out words and ideas. The iconology of the “Couchecke”, which Warnke described as a “closed cell”, was created in 1979 as a contribution to the “Keywords on the ‘Intellectual Situation of the Time'” compiled by Jürgen Habermas, and it speaks for the author that he stood beside himself so early to have dealt with the basest, not even courtly, furniture in his occupation with heroes of art such as Rubens, Goya and Velázquez; in which he succeeded the cultural scientist Aby Warburg, whom Warnke was one of the first to call back into the consciousness of the subject and who, a hundred years ago, placed advertising pictures next to Botticelli paintings.
If the history muse Klio knows a residual justice, the intellectual biography that the Oldenburg historian of ideas Matthias Bormuth is now presenting under the title “On the intellectual situation of the couch corner” will make one of the brightest German minds of the 20th century better known to the public. Although Warnke, who died three years ago and was born in 1937 in Ijuí, Brazil, as the son of a Protestant preacher, was actually a native of the New World.
Matthias Bormuth: “On the situation of the couch corner”. Martin Warnke in his time.
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Image: Berenberg Verlag
Nonetheless, it is hard to find an art historian who has amassed more ancient European knowledge and was able to communicate it more casually to his students and readers. This becomes vivid when Bormuth, in his dense sketch of his life, ends the flawless recitation of Goethe’s “Prometheus” in front of his relatives in Jena with the question of the sixteen-year-old, who is used to the jungle, what thistles actually are. Such bridging phenomena interest the comparative historian of ideas Bormuth more than a mere success story of the founder of political iconography. He is concerned with Warnke’s unconditional will to look strictly Protestant and to read images against the grain – it is not surprising that some of the most important articles on Luther’s and Cranach’s image policy are from him – coupled with the mischievous Socratic joy of raising more questions than fixed ones to give answers.
Free from cheap empathy
Warnke was always most interested in the insecurities in pictures and in the reactions they caused. What surprised him about his early research focus on “iconoclasms” was not their recurring existence, but rather their poor reputation. Bormuth places a strong emphasis on Warnke’s preoccupation with the cyclically occurring iconoclasms.
Color as criticism: Rubens’ “Meeting of Maria de’ Medici and Henri IV”
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Bild: Fine Art Images
In the book one finally learns how isolated Warnke felt after his courageous denunciation of the “brown sound” of the professors from 1933 at the Cologne Art History Day in 1970, after which his own professional association had publicly distanced itself from him. This makes it understandable why Warnke, out of his Protestant sober socialization, tried to pull the ground out of any pathos in voice and writing and to relieve his texts of all sentimentality and, above all, partisanship – and thus the “freedom of a Christian person”, which he in his own view as a preacher’s son was more nominal to regain. The description of the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which is still most moving today, precisely because it refrains from any cheap empathy and thoroughly names the abysses, comes from Warnke’s pen – as a young journalist he accompanied the trials for the “Stuttgarter Zeitung”.
Cheeky court artists
As you continue to read Bornmuth’s biography, one feeling comes to you more and more: Warnke must have internalized the catastrophes of the twentieth century to such an extent that he implicitly adopted the ancient motto “Et si omnes ego non” as his own. With dreamlike sovereignty he opposed – not only – scientific majority opinions and in the long run has almost always been right. Formally, he clothed it in the gesture of concealmentnever in Machiavelli’s treacherous, deceptive sense of purpose, rather in the sense of Cicero’s rhetorical draft of a tendency towards a vigilant, critical counter-movement that never gets common, always deviating linguistically through brilliance, in order to preserve the greatest possible freedom.