Wind, Edgar [Marcel]

Date born: 1900

Place born:  Berlin, Germany

Date died:  1971

Place died:  London, United Kingdom

Iconologist specializing in the Renaissance era; and interdisciplinary art historian; first professor of art at Oxford University.  Wind learned classical languages along with French, English, and his native German at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Schule, a humanistisches Gymnasium in Charlottenburg.  He studied jointly philosophy and art history at various Germanic universities: three semesters in Berlin under Adolph Goldschmidt, one in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and Vienna with Max Dvořák, Julius von Schlosser, and Josef Strzygowski. In 1920 he moved to the new university in Hamburg (begun in 1919) where he was the first student to write a dissertation under Erwin Panofsky, then a 28-year-old privatdozent, and supervised by the philosopher/art historian Ernst Cassirer.  His topic was on art-historical method.  To escape the economic depression gripping Germany, Wind traveled to New York in 1924, initially staying with a cousin.  He was appointed Graham Kenan Fellow in philosophy at the University of North Carolina, teaching there 1925-1927.  Wind returned to Hamburg, took a job as a research assistant at the Warburg Library, and wrote his habilitation under Cassirer in philosophy, employing the philosophy of Charles Sanders Pierce (1839-1914), whose work he had read in America.   Wind's initial methodological influence had been that of Cassirer through Panofsky, but his close personal relationship with Aby Warburg brought him nearer to the "cultural history" approach of Warburg as well as the work of Pierce.  Wind became a privatdozent at Hamburg, 1930-33.  With the advent of Nazism in Germany, he played a key role in moving the Warburg library to London and, with Rudolf Wittkower, founded the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute in 1937.  Throughout the second World War, Wind taught at universities in the United States, (New York University, 1940-1942 and the University of Chicago, 1942-1944) and eleven years at Smith College, 1944-1955 afterward.  In 1955 he assumed the first position of Professor of art history at Oxford (under the Faculty of Modern History) and remained there until his retirement (and emeritus status) in 1967.  In 1960 Wind delivered radio lectures for the BBC, the Reith lectures, which later became his book Art and Anarchy.  Though Wind was considered a classicist and renaissnace expert, he staunchly defended modern art, unlike many of his colleagues.

Wind’s name is most closely connected with his research in allegory and the use of pagan mythology during the 15th-16th centuries and his book of essays on the topic, Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance.  In Art and Anarchy, Wind argued that the height of art’s powers to portray an idea had occurred in the Renaissance.  The Romantic era’s distrust that knowledge interfered with imagination had destroyed the acumen in modern viewers.  Wind fits no traditional academic classification and is one of the prime examples of the intellectual tradition of Warburg's blend of mythological/psychological approach to art history.  One of his students, William S. Heckscher, referred to Wind as a "magician" for his brilliance as an art historian. His papers are housed at Oxford. LS

Home Country:  Germany/United States/United Kingdom  

Sources:  Sears, Elizabeth.  “Edgar Wind on Michelangelo.”  in, Wind, Edgar. The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: the Sistine Ceiling.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000;  Kleinbauer, W. Eugene.  Research Guide to the History of Western Art.  Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2.  Chicago:  American Library Association, 1982, p. 78; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene.  Modern Perspectives in Western Art History:  An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts.  New York:  Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, pp. 63, 34 n. 72, 45 n. 90, 63 n. 1445; Bazin, Germain.  Histoire de l'histoire d l'art; de Vasari à nos jours.  Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 227; Eisler, Colin. "Kunstgeschichte American Style: A Study in Migration." In The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America: 1930-1960. Edited by Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1969: 618.; New York Times Biographical Index, September 18, 1971;  Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 474-7;  James McConica.  "Edgar Winds Oxforder Jahre" in Edgar Wind:  Kunsthistoriker und Philosoph.  Berlin:  Akademie Verlag, 1998, pp. 3-9;  The Dictionary of Art 33:  242-3; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 774-779; [obituary:] "Edgar Wind Dies: Art Historian."  New York Times. September 18, 1971, p. 32

Bibliography: [dissertation] Ästhetischer und kunstwissenschaftlicher Gegenstand: ein Beitrag zur Methodologie der Kunstgeschichte.  Hamburg, 1922. Partially reprinted as: "Zur systematik der künstlerischen Probleme." Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1924): 438-86. and 25 (1931): 163-68 [Beilageheft]; [habilitationschrift] Das experiment und die metaphysik; zur auflösung der kosmologischen antinomien. Tübingen: Mohr, 1934;  The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo: the Sistine Ceiling.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000;   Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Faber & Faber, 1958; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958. Revised ed., Baltimore: Penguin, 1967. "The revolution of History Painting." Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938-9): 116-27. Bellini's Feast of the Gods: A Stidy in Venetian Humanism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948. Art and Anarchy. London: 1963. "Michelangelo's Prophets and Sibyls." Proceedings of the British Academy 51 (1965): 47-84. Giorgione's Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione's Poetic Allegories. Oxford: Clarendon, 1969; Hume and the Heroic Portrait : Studies in Eighteenth-century Imagery.  Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986.

Subject's name: Edgar Wind