The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 106

AAC (CARA) and Art History
Although the main purpose of the Academic Assistance Council
(AAC, as CARA was founded) was to help individual German
academics find new posts, soon after its foundation document was
published in May 1933, it received an appeal from an institution
in Hamburg known in English as the Warburg Institute. This
had developed out of the remarkable private library of the art
historian Aby Warburg, a member of a wealthy banking family, and
had become closely associated with Hamburg University. But its
activity had come to a halt in April 1933, when all Jewish employees,
including academics, were deprived of their government jobs, and
university students were told not to use the Institute. Even more
threatening was the wave of book burning which occurred across
Germany on 10 May.
By mid-June a member of the Institute’s staff, Edgar Wind,
had made contact with the AAC, and in the following month its
Honorary Secretary, Professor C S Gibson, travelled to Hamburg
with William Constable, the Director of the recently-founded
Courtauld Institute of Art. William Beveridge, the founder of
the AAC, refused to allow the organisation to make any financial
contribution to the library, but this did not prevent the leading
members from providing moral support and practical help.
At the suggestion of Gibson and Ross, in October Sir Denison Ross,
Director of the School of Oriental and African Studies, visited
Hamburg and towards the end of that month Lord Lee of Fareham
was able to write to the Director of the Warburg Institute, Fritz
Saxl, inviting him to bring the library to Britain for three years.
The idea of a loan had been devised as a means of placating the
Nazi authorities, who agreed to the proposal on the condition
there was no adverse publicity. Two weeks after permission was
granted, the matter would have been handled by Goebbels’s
Ministry of Propaganda, and would certainly have been refused.
But thanks to the quick action of the AAC, the library and six
104 The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom

members of staff were transferred to London. Until 1936, when
the German authorities agreed to the extension of the loan, the
Institute was housed rent-free in Thames House. Soon afterwards
it moved to premises belonging to the University of London,
and survived largely thanks to support from Samuel Courtauld
and the American branch of the Warburg family. Because of the
prestige of the Institute and its staff, Courtauld and Lord Lee
saw it as a valuable complement to the Courtauld Institute, the
first place in Britain to offer degrees in art history. The family,
by contrast, hoped in time to transfer the Institute to America,
but this proved impossible as long as Max Warburg and his family
remained in Hamburg, because it would have involved breaking
the loan agreement made with the German authorities. During
the War private funding was exhausted, but R A Butler, who was
Courtauld’s son-in-law, made funds available to the University
Grants Committee to pay for the Institute’s incorporation in
London University.
Although the Institute was always chronically short of funds
in the 1930s, it served as a focus for a number of German and
Austrian art historians who were able to survive on grants, in some
cases from the AAC, on the generosity of private individuals and on
limited freelance work. Saxl, together with two Warburg Institute
research fellows, Otto Kurz and Ernst Gombrich, taught for the
Courtauld Institute, while Edgar Wind was partly employed by
University College with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.
Kurz was also supported by Denis Mahon, who shared his interest
in Bolognese painting. Other scholars associated with the Institute
who received AAC grants included Hugo Buchthal, Alphons Barb,
Gertrud Bing, Adelheid Heimann, Rudolf Wittkower and Raymond
Klibansky, as well as Erwin Panofsky, who, like many other art
historians, later found more secure employment in the USA.
Other refugee art historians helped by the AAC were not
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