Edgar Wind

Heilige Furcht (Sacred Fear)
und andere Schriften zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Philosophie (and Other Writings on the Relation between Art and Philosophy)
VOLUME 174

With Rich Expertise, a Gift for Writing, and Brilliant Wit

Edgar Wind was not just Oxford University’s first professor of art history; he was above all a superb essayist with a penchant for polemics, a philosopher with systematic ambitions, and a scholar of art who supported his arguments with precise observations. Having completed his Ph.D. with Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, he joined the circle of art historians at the Warburg Library in Hamburg, whose iconographic tradition he carried on in exile. In writing, Wind always kept an eye on the artist’s, the scholar’s, and the philosopher’s responsibility. John Michael Krois and Roberto Ohrt selected from his output of the 1930s and 1940s to invite readers to discover this brilliant theorist.

Edgar Wind (1900–1971) was a German art historian of the Warburg School. In 1933, he played a major role in rescuing Aby Warburg’s library during the latter’s exile in London, where he was also one of the founders and first staff members of the Warburg Institute.

John Michael Krois (1943–2010) was an internationally renowned expert on Cassirer and, from 1994 on, an adjunct professor of philosophy at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Roberto Ohrt (b. 1954) is an exhibition curator and art journalist who has written for Art, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze, and other periodicals. He is a coeditor of the magazine Die Beute.