Ronald Brooks Kitaj: Aby Warburg e Ernst Gombrich, due ritratti a confronto

Aby Warburg and Ernst Gombrich, two of the most influential personalities of the 20th century, are compared through the personal point of view of Ronald Brooks Kitaj, an American painter who studied Art in Europe. An indirect relationship binds the artist – who belongs to the environment close to the British Pop Art movement – and Aby Warburg: Edgar Wind, heir to the Warburgian tradition and, at the same time, Oxford University’s first professor of Art history – at the end of ’50s Kitaj attended his lessons there – was a mediator between Warburg and the painter. An unmediated relationship was established between Kitaj and Gombrich, of whom the artist made a portrait which was commissioned by the National Portrait Gallery in 1986. The “Pictorial Interpretation” of these two scholars has become an opportunity to examine the comparison which actually featured Warburgian thought, and the tradition and the fate of the Warburg Institute itself.