Aby Warburg's name is today most widely known in connection with the scholarly institution he founded on the basis of his private Hamburg library, the Warburg Institute on Woburn Square in London. After World War I the library became a cultural history research institute affiliated with the new Hamburg University Warburg had helped to found. It was moved from Germany to London in 1933 and made a part of the University of London at the end of World War II. Directors or noted scholars associated with it have included Fritz Saxl, E. H. Gombrich (also author of the standard intellectual biography of Warburg), Ernst Cassirer, P. O. Kristeller, and Arnaldo Momigliano. In many ways Warburg's life reflected the fortunes and misfortunes of the successful and culturally integrated German-Jewish elite during the brief German Empire and its successors after World War I. Echoing the evolution of another Hanseatic family, albeit a fictional one, the Buddenbrooks, Aby broke away from the family banking tradition to become a “private scholar,” although one well endowed by the family's resources, eschewing an academic career that was in any case made difficult by the official and unofficial anti-Semitism of his times as well as his own reluctance to give up his independence. Even some allusions to illness in Thomas Mann's novels were reflected in Warburg's personal afflictions, including symptoms of bipolar disorder, a nervous breakdown, and a multiyear residence in Ludwig Binswanger's Swiss sanitarium. His fascination with Renaissance Florence and the Medici undoubtedly reflected his hope that Hamburg, under the leadership of upwardly mobile commercial elites such as his own family, would become capable of producing a comparable cultural flowering in modern Germany that would, however, also carry over and revive the best traditions of antiquity. He lived a good part of his life away from Hamburg, however, including a lengthy visit to America (and inspiration by the Pueblo and Hopi Indians in New Mexico and Arizona), several years of residence in his beloved Florence (the longest 1897 to 1904), and more in Switzerland (1918 to 1924).

Mark Russell is therefore quite justified in claiming that Warburg's involvement with Hamburg civic and artistic life has gone practically unstudied and that a fresh look at archival and other sources might yield new insights into both Warburg's thought and personality as well as Hamburg's social and cultural history. His first chapter is a subtle and suggestive tour of previous interpretations of Warburg, bringing a more shaded if tenuous and sophisticated interpretation.

The remaining four chapters take a narrower case-study approach, involving close analysis of four topics in the selected time frame involving Hamburg's public art and its arts community (including patrons and critics). These stretched chronologically from the private performance of a play by young Warburg (“Hamburg Comedy,” reflecting different roles and views of contemporary art players and critics), through his participation in and view of three public art projects down to World War I. On balance these episodes reveal a more nuanced and complex view of Warburg, whose ideas and theories by no means promoted avant-garde agendas in Hamburg and raise in the reader's mind some questions about the wisdom and judgment of his local artistic alliances and efforts.

The first public arts project was the huge Bismarck Memorial finished in 1906, an odd choice to illustrate Warburg's views since he was absent from the city during most of the near-decade of wrangling and finishing of the heroic statue, published and wrote virtually nothing about it (although he evidently approved of it, as did his family), and at best may have viewed the memorial through the lenses of the Hamburg patriciate's business-class, authoritarian pince-nez (at least toward the workers) that could be reconciled with a somewhat de-Prussianized Bismarck cult.

The second project, a “collective memory failure” as Russell titles the chapter, was the decoration (with the largest murals painted since the Italian Renaissance) of Hamburg's immense new city hall (1898-1909). Warburg detested the project and its artist, Hugo Vogel, although others ranging from Alfred Lichtwark, the virtual founder of modern public artistic taste in Hamburg, all the way to Emperor Wilhelm II supported the anonymous, generic, and slightly symbolist mural cycle. In the end Warburg's opposition was unavailing, as were his attempts to use his brother's friendship with Alfred Ballin to get commissions for what Warburg regarded as good contemporary artists (between conventional and modern) to decorate the Hamburg-Amerika Line's huge new liner Imperator.

The third project claiming a whole chapter was a decorative mural cycle by Warburg's protégé Professor Willy von Beckerath at the new Hamburg School of Art and Industry (Kunstgewerbeschule) from 1913 to 1918. The vaguely symbolist paintings were in Warburg's view the brilliant creations of a Gedankenmaler, giving expression to religious and Arcadian archetypes Warburg had explored as a part-time anthropologist. But many later critics saw instead in Beckerath a derivative and second-rate version of Marées or Hodler employing “empty rhetoric” (p. 198). In any case the work had to be interrupted while World War I claimed the murals' home (a lecture hall) for a military hospital. In the Volksheim, where Warburg had attempted unsuccessfully to elevate the minds of the uncomprehending proletariat with subtle art-history lectures, an earlier Beckerath mural cycle was actually obliterated in the 1920s. Warburg's life thus evidently reflects the great gulf between the rising urban working class and the ruling Hamburg patrician elite.

It comes as no surprise that the philistinism of Hamburg's commercial elite continued to foil the dreams of Warburg and others to promote a public arts culture in the city comparable to Renaissance Florence. Lacking royal patronage, arts-educations centers, and (until Lichtwark's achievements) a major museum characteristic of other large German urban centers, the Hamburg art scene had rarely matched the size and wealth of the city, with aficionados importing their artworks much as they did their other consumer goods, from abroad. Local artists were in a slump after 1880, disunited in their professional aspirations and answers, confronting new stylistic currents and the decline of such traditional genres as seascapes and merchant portraits. The art-buying public and patrons were at loggerheads with each other, as well. Under the circumstances it is doubtful if anybody—not even the wealthy Warburg family—could have defined “the public purposes of art” in a hegemonic manner. Russell's fresh look at one famous native son's attempts to do so provides a modest but well- and newly researched illumination of the perennial tension between supreme personal artistic connoisseurship and a commerce-dominated culture. And unlike Florence, Hamburg was still living down the notoriety of tearing down its most impressive old churches instead of filling them with great art. For further background on these struggles vignetted in Russell's monograph one can resort to such recent works as Jennifer Jenkins' Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003) or more briefly my own Prophets, Paupers or Professionals? (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004).