Sophie Duvernoy

I wrote a biography of Gertrud Bing for the Jewish Women’s Archive and the Shalvi/Hyman Encyclopedia of Jewish Women. You can read it in full here.

“Art historian Gertrud Bing was a key figure at the Warburg Institute, a research library focused on the afterlife of antiquity in the art of the Renaissance. Beginning as personal assistant to the Institute’s founder, Aby Warburg, and ultimately rising to become its director, Bing helped develop and disseminate iconology, a methodology that investigates the social, historical, and cultural meanings of themes and subjects in artworks and that transformed twentieth-century art history. As Warburg’s assistant, editor of his collected writings, director of the Warburg Institute, and gatekeeper for future generations of scholars, Bing ensured the lasting influence of iconology and the Institute’s intellectual legacy, from its early days in Hamburg as the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (Warburg Library for Cultural Studies), or KWB, to its present home in London.”