Authors

Discussion

The German cultural scientist Aby Warburg was an intrepid explorer of the interface between art and anthropology. His inquiry into the symbolic meaning of signs established him as an exponent of the modern study of symbolism. Studying the art of the Renaissance period, the Hamburg-born historian of art and culture uncovered the crisis of the ancient symbol and the tradition that carried with it the forms and symbols of the past. In the view of culture as a process of transmission, reception and polarization, human expression, as an anthropological category, became the central focus of Warburg’s studies and the major subject of his library.

A founding member of the Der Blaue Reiter art movement, Wassily Kandinsky believed that image could have extraordinary power and that the artist could hold the key to communication with supernatural powers. Kandinsky’s expressions of a visual thinking – both in his writing and in his artwork – exerted live influence on twentieth-century culture. Kandinsky’s new attitude to art and his intention to bring down the walls between the arts were a prelude to a global understanding of art that would seem possible today. In the paper, I explore Warburg’s and Kandinsky’s writings and visual imagery, wherein Warburg’s studies of the history of the symbol and Kandinsky’s artistic vision – revealed in his palette of ‘living symbols’ – cooperate with one another. I propose that the connection between symbol, image, and creative imagination on the one hand, and historical time and cultural emancipation on the other, could be the unifying characteristics that draw these two twentieth-century pioneers of ‘thinking in pictures’ together.