The Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.), which was exiled from Hamburg at the end of 1933, achieved a new presence in London under the name The Warburg Institute and as a research institution with a library and photo archive. The emigration was organised by Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl, who had previously been employed at the K.B.W. in Hamburg alongside the founder Aby M. Warburg (Treml/Weigel 2018, 17f.). Warburg, an art and cultural historian, devoted his research to the afterlife of antiquity. In addition to an extensive research library, he also created an image archive, arranged by key words, which was used for lectures, courses and the conception of the Mnemosyne Picture Atlas. In the 1920s, the K.B.W. was an interdisciplinary research institution and a centre of attraction for scholars such as Ernst Cassirer, Erwin Panofsky, Hellmut Ritter and many others. Terms coined by Warburg such as “Bilderfahrzeuge”, “Bilderwanderung” and “Pathosformel” have themselves become enduring concepts that continue to preoccupy researchers to the present day.

Aby M. Warburg died in 1929, having determined that the K.B.W. should remain together as a research instrument after his death (Wuttke 1986, 209). Fritz Saxl took over and held the position as director from 1934 to 1948, even after the library emigrated and was re-established as The Warburg Institute. Gertrud Bing also continued her work for the Institute in London exile and led the institution from 1955 to 1959. Other emigrants such as Hans Meier, Edgar Wind, Rudolf Wittkower and Ernst H. Gombrich were also associated with the Warburg Institute as staff members, some of them for decades. Gombrich headed the research institution as director from 1959 to 1976 and, in addition to his widely received works on cultural history such as The Story of Art (1950), also published the first comprehensive biography of the library’s founder: Aby Warburg. An Intellectual Biography.
The Warburg Institute, Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl were important points of reference for emigrants. The slip box at the Warburg Institute archive contains numerous names of exiles who wrote to the institution, including the art dealer Gustav Delbanco, the physicist Albert Einstein, the art historian Carl Einstein, the artist Benno Elkan, the publisher Kurt Enoch, the photographer Lucia Moholy, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, the orientalist Hellmut Ritter and the costume and stage designer Ernest (Ernst) Stern.
Some of the emigrants turned to the Warburg Institute for help and work. The Hamburg art historian Rosa Schapire sent an SOS letter to the Warburg Institute after a personal meeting with Gertrud Bing, asking them to help her leave the country for the U.S. (Schapire 1939; Beiersdorf 1009). Although Schapire was unable to emigrate to the U.S., she managed to escape to London, where she lived as a freelance art historian. The photographer Helmut Gernsheim applied for a position as a photographer at the Warburg Institute and worked for the National Buildings Record from 1942; under the direction of the head of the photographic library, Rudolf Wittkower, Gernsheim photographed buildings and sculptures in and around London that were threatened with bombing during the war.

The Warburg Institute was housed in Thames House from 1934, then moved to the Imperial Institute Buildings in South Kensington near the Victoria & Albert Museum for several years from 1937. In 1958, it moved to its current location in Woburn Square, Bloomsbury (McEwan 2005, 286; Anglo 2015). Publication series such as Studies of the Warburg Institute, the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute, as well as the lectures and exhibitions held there, were intended to underpin the scientific significance and raison d'être of the research institution, which was initially run as a private institution and then incorporated into the University of London in 1944 (Gramberg 1965, 294).
Above all, the Warburg Institute attracted attention through its lively exhibition activities. The exhibitions drew on the Institute’s photographic collection and followed director Fritz Saxl’s premise that the image was more universal than the spoken word (see McEwan 2015, 97). The Warburg Institute’s exhibitions were didactic and designed as instruments of visual education (Mazzucco 2011, 3). The Visual Approach to the Classics – An Exhibition of Greek and Roman Art opened in 1939, followed by Indian Art in 1940, English Art and the Mediterranean in 1941, and Portrait and Character in 1943. These exhibitions presented photographic reproductions arranged in an explanatory manner.

The English Art and the Mediterranean exhibition opened on 2 December 1941 with a lecture by Kenneth Clark, the director of the National Gallery, and was widely reviewed in the press, including a review by Herbert Read in The Listener and an article in the émigré newspaper Die Zeitung; both reviews appeared on 18 December 1941 (Anderson/Finch/von Müller 2019, 147–163).
The fact that the exhibition took place in wartime brought it to the public’s attention and it received more than 10,000 visitors (Anderson 2019, 44). During the war years many museum collections were moved out of London to safer, often rural, locations. Institutions were sometimes closed and few exhibitions took place.
The Warburg Institute co-organised the lectures on English Art and the Mediterrenean with the Courtauld Institute. Over just two months, from December 1941 onwards, 24 public lectures were held, covering the central themes of the exhibition – English art in the Baroque, the ‘discovery’ of Greece, the Pre-Raphaelites and Italy (Anderson/Finch/von Müller 2019, 168). The purpose of this series of lectures was to contextualize the exhibition theses and to act as a public relations tool. At the same time, local and emigrated scholars from within the Warburg Institute’s ambit gave lectures, including Frederick Antal, Emile Cammaerts, Kenneth Clark, Ernst H. Gombrich, Otto Paecht, Nikolaus Pevsner. It is thus clear that the Institute also contributed to the presence and recognition of emigrant scholars by giving them the opportunity to  participate in an ensemble of recognised and young British scholars.

English Art and the Mediterranean went on tour after its London stint and was shown in more than 20 other British cities, such as Exeter, Liverpool, Leicester, Cambridge and Darlington between 1941 and 1944, organisationally supported by the Circulation Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum. The show had a political impact within the context of the ever-expanding war, encouraging the British to see themselves as an important part of a Europe threatened by fascism. It is worth noting that a second exhibition organised by emigrants with a political impetus was being held at the same time, namely the Allies Inside Germany exhibition which opened in 1942 and, via picture-text panels, made visible the resistance to the National Socialist regime. Organised by the emigrant association Free German League of Culture, the show toured a number of British cities.