The future of the Warburg Institute, one of London’s most influential and strangest libraries, is examined at length in this week’s New Yorker. Adam Gopnik covers the history of the center, from its founding in pre-Nazi Germany through the height of its influence on the world of art history, and attempts to articulate the particular properties of Warburg, the philosophy and aesthetics and modes of scholarship, that make it unique. After a recent victory in court granted Warburg a reprieve from being swallowed by the University of London, Gopnik seems hopeful that the library will adapt to a new century and preserve what advocate Brooke Palmieri describes as its signature investment in “the methodology of serendipity.”
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