Lightning Symbol and Snake Dance

The legacy of the art and cultural scientist Aby Warburg offers many subjects for reassessment. Almost unknown until now are the artifacts he collected on a journey through the southwest of the US in 1895/96 and donated to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg (today Museum am Rothenbaum). The results first unfolded in Warburg's famous lecture on the "snake ritual" of the Hopi (1923). Following Warburg's transdisciplinary approach, this publication examines his guiding principles in assembling his collection as well as his reading of Pueblo art and culture. It pays tribute to the works and their artistic significance and sheds light on the circumstances of acquisition in the sociopolitical environment of the Pueblo communities of the time. The contemporary fascination with the snake ritual is also a topic. Set against this are the previously neglected perspectives and strategies of Pueblo leaders to regain interpretive sovereignty over culturally sensitive content and imagery.

ABY WARBURG (1866-1929) is considered as the founder of a modern art history oriented towards cultural studies. His research was mainly concerned with the investigation of the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance, which he recorded in his iconic Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

The first presentation of Aby Warburg's rarely seen Pueblo art collection, from his famous 1895-96 visit to the US In 1895, the great German art historian and theorist Aby Warburg (1866-1929) came to the US, where he spent the bulk of his time meeting with Indigenous Americans. The encounter produced two famous works: his 1923 lecture on the Hopi snake ritual, and a body of photographs--both of them much discussed by art historians. Almost unknown until now, however, was the collection of objects he acquired from Pueblo tribes throughout the American Southwest, which he later donated to the Museum fur V

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