Belomor

by Nicolas Rothwell

  But these delusions, wild though they were, were not only wild. One of his family had been brought to Bellevue, the clinic of choice, in those days, for members of the European elite. Warburg’s son, Max Adolf, whose nervous breakdown had been triggered by his father’s collapse, was being cared for there, in a ward close by: and during his treatments, which took the form of long, calming lukewarm baths, the son could hear the father’s tormented shrieks as they rang repeatedly down the corridors. Indeed, the dividing line between Warburg’s darkest intimations and the unfolding fate of Europe is quite hard to trace. The wider one’s perspective, the more precise his madness seems. He could sense murdering armies on the march, seeking out his people, seeking to take them away, to torture them, to kill them all. He sensed them; and in due course they came.

  How not to feel that foresight, as much as lunacy, lay at his derangement’s heart? He had made himself into the man who sees; since childhood he had trained his eyes to look through the surface code, the symptom, to the cause, the hidden pattern, the final, all-deciding force. He scorned knowledge that was fixed, received, accepted: he wanted to be certain, not merely to share the world’s beliefs. If there was violence at the core of religion, and ecstasy, it was for him to seek it out and find it, just as he had in the Pueblo region once: if antiquity’s pagan strength was to live on in the new Europe of electric telegraph and telephone, then he would be the prophet of that ambiguous future and its winding patterns; it was for him to trace its coming’s tell-tale signs.

  By chance, a description exists of Warburg during those days in Kreuzlingen, shortly after his arrival and first treatment there, when his initial mania was beginning to subside, and he was waging his great duel with the demons inside his head. A young Swiss scholar of art history, Werner Kaegi, who would later study under Warburg, was passing through the region in the autumn of 1921 on his way home from courses in Florence: he came to the Kreuzlingen clinic to pay a visit to a friend of his who was working there. One morning, he was out walking in the sanatorium gardens when he happened to pass by a slight figure on the path beneath the Bellevue. It was Warburg. Kaegi was struck by the encounter, and set down his impressions years later: ‘He was surprisingly small, of a robust and healthy constitution, with the features of his face giving a mixed impression of suffering, struggle, violent constraint and a magical will to power precipitated in marble.’

  So Warburg seemed: an image of emotions, of human depths made visible, more than a man. But after some months in those surrounds, the morphine calmed him, his mind was still, his delusions lulled: there was a space within him for the chains of ordered thought to be linked together and the ramparts of his ideas to rise once more. He knew his condition: he could see himself with great clarity; he knew where he was—but should he be there? Could he free himself? A notion came to him. He was not a Warburg for nothing: deals were his stock in trade—the giving, and the getting; giving himself away. In the wake of prolonged treatments, feeling that the full measure of his capacities had at last been restored to him, he made an offer to Binswanger: the quid pro quo was stark.

  He would attempt to deliver an hour-long lecture on aspects of art history to an invited audience within the asylum walls—and if he succeeded in this task, which the experts, at the time of his admission, had regarded as forever beyond him, it would be taken as a proof of his restored sanity and equilibrium: his doctors would set him free. Warburg had proposed a similar deal of life-changing resonance once, long before, when he was only thirteen years old: it is part of the legend that clusters round him. He offered his rights as the first-born of the dynasty to his brother, Max, who was a year younger than him. In return, Max was to guarantee that for the remainder of Aby’s life the Warburg Bank would buy him the books he wanted—every single one. Max, in the memorial address he delivered at his brother’s funeral, told the tale—Aby had put the proposal forward: ‘After a very brief pause for reflection, I consented. I told myself that when I was in the business I could, after all, always find the money to pay for the works of Schiller, Goethe, Lessing and perhaps also Klopstock, and so, unsuspecting, I gave him what I must now admit was a very large blank cheque.’ It was just such a well-sprung deal that was before the doctors at the Bellevue. They turned it over, and agreed. Mastery of art must betoken a degree of mental order. They set a date, the twenty-first of April 1923, and announced the forthcoming attraction to the more settled of the clinic’s inmates—men and women, after all, of a high cultural level: their number included, at that time, the expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, the dancer Nijinsky and the writer Leonhard Frank.

  In his quarters, Warburg drew his notes together. His doctors were expecting a treatment of some familiar theme from the north Italian Renaissance, in keeping with their patient’s most recent studies: fresco cycles in Ferrara, the Primavera of Botticelli, Leonardo’s figure drawings. But Warburg’s thoughts reached much further back—he returned to the scenes he had witnessed twenty-seven years earlier on the Indian reservations, during his visit to the Pueblo region and the settlements round Santa Fe. He would describe to his audience the successive dances of the snake cult, but beyond this ethnographic narrative he would trace the birth of the rational, scientific picture of the world from its origins in pagan superstition—and in so doing he would show what he had gone through: he would face his own fears, and master them. The lecture text, which he wove between an array of photographic images, survives, as do the first drafts Warburg wrote—‘sketches that should never be printed, begun March 16, while still on opium’. He went through them, over and over: ‘Help,’ he scrawled across the title page. He annotated them, dismissively: they were fragments; they were nothing more than ‘dusty documents’. He had dredged up all the memories he could from the Pueblo: and how slight they were, how faint, how much they were confined to the surface of the life there he had wished to know—they reflected only the appearances of things. The problems they brought to mind were insoluble; they weighed on his soul: had he been healthy he would not have dared make any scientific statements about them—but there was no choice, now, none. And with that he turned the spotlight on himself: ‘In Kreuzlingen, in a closed institution, where I have the sensation of being a seismograph assembled from the wooden pieces of a growth that has been transplanted from the east into the fertile north German plains and onto which an Italian branch was grafted, I allow the signals that I have received to come out of me.’ This was Warburg’s picture of himself: he was a creature caught on the frontier between worlds; he was an instrument through which light could pass; he was where thought and instinct met. There were serpent forces, deep within him; there was the gleam of art, and beauty, with its healing grace, as well.

  He began: he laid out his themes. His argument had a clear, rapid flow. He recounted his experiences: he had been down in the murk of magic, in the Indian world, in the midst of a remote, primal culture, one that still held the secrets of mankind’s first beliefs in its grasp. On that journey, what had he been shown? What images, what mysteries—and why was the serpent so much at the heart of things, snaking its way through men’s hearts? Was it the pure lightning symbol? Was it the poison emblem: danger? Was it truth and death conjoined?

  All these ideas emerged smoothly from his narrative: he held the details of his travels through that far-off landscape in precise order in his mind. It was a Wild West story, and illustrated: forty-seven images, artfully selected, carefully slide-mounted, gleaming in the projected flicker of the light. There were the Indian strongholds in the sun, and the ceremonial dancers in their snaking lines; there was Warburg himself, against the desert mesas, bandana at his neck, a solemn Hopi chieftain standing by his side.

  But gradually, in mid-lecture, the tale fragments: it becomes a succession of images, word portraits, evocations of snake forms in art, matched by free passages of speculation. Might the serpent that could so smoothly shed its skin be sending its devotees a message: for the snake was not only the fatal
foe, the assassin, in readiness or fulfilment, destroying without mercy—it also showed how a body could go through a death and yet continue to live. The tone shifts again: now the scholar joins forces with the asylum patient. Warburg finds the serpent spirit where all begins, in the Bible’s Eden tree; in the marble coils of ancient statues; in the heavens, too: in the constellation of the great winding snake, where the stars are given focus by an earthly image, in order to make comprehensible an infinity of distance we cannot frame. The creature is answer as much as it is question: its ceremonies among the Pueblo are nature coming into culture; they are the birth of reason given form in dance.

  At which point, with these grand notions widening, the dilemma facing Warburg’s doctors as they listened and tried to gauge the extent of his recovery loomed large. But their patient was a step ahead. It had been necessary to lead them down that path of fantasies, fears and speculations. There was a way forward, beckoning, for all those gathered in Bellevue. There was the mind’s light. Thought was vanquished fear; cult was mastered superstition; art was religious feeling given structure by the mind of man. That was the balance that the snake dance found. But in the days they were all living through then, in that strange present, with the states of Europe pulverised and ruined, the shadows had closed in again; they pressed down: new shadows, gifts of modernity. Not only for the Indians but for all old cultures and religions, an end was close. Their beliefs would vanish: new forms of knowledge would prevail. It was the triumph of science: the snake was no longer needed to control storms and lightning: ‘It is an animal that must succumb, if humanity wills it to.’ All man’s history had been lived in the task of mastering and refining fear: now fear itself had been trampled underground. The consequences were in the future, still taking shape.

  Warburg had a last slide to show the inmates. He had met the conquering hero, the figure who destroyed the serpent cult and the fear of lightning: he had seen this victor, who inherited all the lands of the indigenous people of America. Warburg even had his photograph, taken on a street in San Francisco early in 1896. The image shows a burly man in black three-piece suit, thick-bearded, wearing a tall top hat, face set in a scowl as he strides along a wide, light-drenched street beneath powerlines. ‘He is Uncle Sam in a stove-pipe hat, strolling in his pride past a neoclassical rotunda. Above his top hat runs an electric wire. In this copper serpent of Edison’s, he has wrested lightning from nature.’ The machine age had destroyed what man so painfully made in the temples of his thought—the space for devotion, which in turn became the space for reflection. Distance had gone forever. All was instant now. And Warburg was done. He had succeeded, in formal terms. He had strung his arguments together, he had been able to speak freely, for an hour and a half, without losing his train of thought.

  The doctors saw, in this performance, ‘a very encouraging sign’ that his capacity for communication had been restored—and it was precisely such outward signs of rationality that they required. For the patient, the triumph was more qualified. The vision he had presented was of a world in nightmare colours: that view had called forth the wild fears he felt within him. It had not been a question of mere illness in his mind; it was not a simple case of cure. He knew how things stood with him. He knew the praise Binswanger lavished on his performance was misplaced. ‘I do not want my presentation of images from the life of the Pueblo Indians to be taken in any way as results of a supposedly superior knowledge or science—but rather as the desperate confession of an incurable schizoid, deposited into the archives of the doctors of the soul.’ There was talk of publishing the lecture. Warburg was firm. He realised very well he was a subject for a story: a majestic story; it was a story he wanted to stay untold. He pleaded with his academic assistant, Fritz Saxl, not to show the text to anyone: ‘This gruesome twitching of a decapitated frog should absolutely not find its way to print.’

  He was released. By this stage his course in life was almost run. He resumed his researches into the Quattrocento in Florence. They became increasingly ornate: his writing style came to match the new scope of his thought; in his lectures and his essays competing concepts were held in suspension, and stayed unresolved for pages on end. He moved back to Hamburg, where his labyrinthine library had been installed, and opened as a centre for scholarship in art: its holdings were an imprint of his life’s linked, deeply excavated enthusiasms; there were elaborately mounted displays of his research prints and photographs, and Warburg was constantly engaged in reordering them, or moving the books and papers into new categories to keep up with his shifting ideas on the cultural evolution of man. The main reading room had a magic air about it: it was like an arena for ritual, a stage—nor was this resemblance accidental. The book cabinets curved round the research desks like the enclosures guarding an altar: the library ensemble had been directly modelled on the subterranean chambers carved out by the Pueblo Indians for reflection and prayer.

  It was to this darkened space that Warburg went after his release from Kreuzlingen. He had the feeling that he had come back home at the end of a dreadful battle, a battle for life against the forces of darkness and hell, and he transmitted this conviction to his associates, who became the members of his cult. Saxl felt Warburg was a man for whom life in its normality existed no longer: ‘An almost awe-inspiring power emanated from him, and he lived and worked convinced that the scholar does not choose his vocation but that in all he does is obeying a higher command.’

  This sense’s of life’s grand, all-shaping patterns was encouraged by the headlines of the day. Systems of belief were breaking around them, new empires were rising. The dawns seemed stronger than the sunsets. In early 1929, Warburg made a return visit to Italy, together with a group of his disciples. By chance, they were in Rome on February eleventh, when Mussolini signed the Concordat that destroyed the last worldly powers of the Catholic Church. Warburg’s biographers glide past this trivial-seeming episode in the last year of the master’s life, but it is recorded by another intellectual magus, the Piedmontese historian Arnaldo Momigliano, who, in his golden prose and jewelled thought, was fully Warburg’s equal, and whose awareness of the shadows in the spectacle unfolding that day remained undimmed when he set down a record of the event, long afterwards, in the eighth volume of his contributions to the story of classical studies and the antique world. ‘There were in Rome tremendous popular demonstrations, whether orchestrated from above or from below. Mussolini became overnight the man of providence, and in such an inconvenient position he remained for many years.’

  It was hard to move freely on the streets of Rome that day: Warburg was swept up in the crowd and lost from the sight of his companions. They waited for him anxiously back in the Hotel Eden, close by the Spanish Steps, but there was still no sign of him when evening fell. The group consulted. They even telephoned the police. Nothing. Shortly before midnight, Warburg reappeared in the hotel, flushed, his face full of excitement, and when his friends reproached him, he replied, in his convoluted German: ‘You know that throughout my life I have been interested in the revival of paganism and pagan festivals. Today I had the chance of my life to be present at the repaganization of Rome—and you complain that I remained to watch it!’ The shape of the time had become clear that night. The demons he had pictured in his mind were on the march.

  III

  WINFIELD BLUE

  IT WAS MORE THAN a decade ago that I first encountered the artist Tony Oliver, a captivating, drama-courting figure with a talent for both feud and friendship, and though our paths in life ran close together in the ensuing years, only now, as I cast my thoughts back, do I begin to understand the dreams and ideals that drove him to set up a painting studio in the remote Kimberley, then flee his creation at the height of its success.

  The story of his northern life is well known: it is the tale of the Jirrawun art studio he brought into being; the rise to fame of its great painter, Paddy Bedford; and the creation of the grand, mysterious works the old man poured out in his final years
. It begins with the chance meeting that led to Jirrawun’s foundation: a tale that was circulating across the North well before I came to know its protagonists. You could hear it everywhere; it was told and retold in roadhouses and community art centres; it seemed to radiate outwards from Jirrawun’s back-country outstation like a spell; and, like all the best tales, it could be heard in several conflicting variants.

  Each one was set in Melbourne, where Tony, blessed with a keen eye and strong enthusiasms, had been a young high-flyer on the contemporary art scene. At the heart of that milieu, one evening, at an exhibition opening in a gallery on Flinders Lane, he came face to face with a visitor from the North: the Gija artist Freddie Timms, a man of few words and great silences, a man whose sombre style and grave look conveyed a forbidding first impression. The two spoke for hours; they found they had much in common: a belief in art’s redemptive force, and a longing to make visible the masked structure of the world. Tony saw the work on the walls; he felt its strength; he felt the depths lurking in the lines drawn on the canvas—he looked with care—he was caught.

  Freddie Timms was just as struck: he knew their talk was something different from the standard weightless talks he was subjected to each time he ventured to an art opening in a southern capital. He knew white men well enough: he had been a stockman on the East Kimberley cattle stations for years. He took Tony Oliver into his confidence; he described in detail the life he and his fellow artists led, how they worked, what they made. Why not come up to the north-west, he said: come up and see?

  There was another version of this account, a touch more fanciful, in which the two met by pure chance as the sun was setting on the concourse at Federation Square, and began talking, impelled by some obscure sense of affinity. But the most evocative variant I came across was the one I heard at Timber Creek, at the service station, from an old Mirriuwong man I once met there, travelling west. In this rendition, Tony Oliver was a figure of vast wealth and unbounded influence, and his journey to the Kimberley had a quite different origin: it was the direct result of a dream that came to him one night, and troubled him so deeply he had been compelled to throw over the settled pattern of his life.