The Snake and the Lightning: Aby Warburg's American Journey

An unprecedented excavation of Warburg’s famous 1895 visit to the Pueblo peoples, compiling his photographs, drawings, writings and archival documentation

When the great German art theorist and historian Aby Warburg (1866–1929) left for the United States in September 1895, few would have guessed that his search for the symbolic strata of art would prove to be one of the most foundational and critically debated events in the discourse of Western art history. Warburg’s journey in North America lasted only months and his stay in the Pueblo areas only a few weeks, but in 1923 he presented his findings in the groundbreaking lecture on the Hopi “Snake Ritual.”
Using selected photographs, ethnographic drawings and various archival documents, The Snake and the Lightning: Aby Warburg's American Journey compiles research, showing Warburg’s diverse interlocutors during this trip—from chiefs to missionaries—and focusing especially on his documentation of dances, ritual objects and artworks. These documents are evidence of an emerging shift in Warburg’s scholarly thinking that would eventually lead to the cultural comparative methodology for which he is now held in worldwide esteem.