The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 108

silent
auction

closely associated with the Warburg Institute, either for personal
reasons or because of very different interests. The best known
were Nikolaus Pevsner, who subsisted on various short-term jobs
in publishing and education until well into the war, Johannes Wilde,
later an influential member of staff of the Courtauld Institute,
who was initially supported by a wealthy former pupil, and Friedrich
Antal, who was able to obtain some teaching at the Courtauld
thanks to Anthony Blunt, who was sympathetic to his Marxist
approach.
Almost all the art historians active in Britain before the 1930s
were self-taught and employed either in museums or in the art
trade. The new arrivals brought new approaches to the subject,
a new kind of scholarly rigour and a wide range of expertise that
was to be decisive for the development of art history here after
the Second World War. A very similar development occurred,
for much the same reasons, in the United States. But in Britain,
the contribution of the AAC, although modest in financial terms,
seems to have been decisive in persuading many scholars to
remain, rather than crossing the Atlantic.

Artwork and stories of exile

Reproduced by kind permission of Ali Al Ferzat

Professor Charles Hope
Former Director of the Warburg Institute

106 The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom