Person Page - 734

     David J. Warburg is the son of Edward Mortimer Morris Warburg and Mary Whelan Prue.¹ He married Caroline Susan MacDonald, daughter of I. Keith MacDonald, on 6 July 1962 at Riverside, Fairfield County, Connecticut.³ He and Caroline Susan MacDonald were divorced before 1971 at USA.⁴ He married Natalia J. Aires on 9 August 1992.⁵

     Edward Mortimer Morris Warburg was born on 5 June 1908 at White Plains, Westchester County, New York.^1,2 He was the son of Felix Moritz Warburg and Frieda Schiff.¹ He married Mary Whelan Prue in 1939.¹ He died on 21 September 1992 at Norwalk, Fairfield County, Connecticut, at age 84.^1,2 Edward Warburg, Philanthropist And Patron of the Arts, Dies at 84

By ERIC PACE
Published: September 22, 1992



Edward M. M. Warburg, a philanthropist and benefactor of the arts, died yesterday afternoon in Norwalk Hospital in Norwalk, Conn. He was 84 years old and lived in Wilton, Conn.

He died of heart failure after he was admitted to the hospital four days earlier for heart disease, said his son, David.

In 1933, Mr. Warburg was a founding father of the American Ballet, which was George Balanchine's first American company and the precursor of the New York City Ballet. In that era, ballet was nearly an unknown quantity in the United States. "No one in their right mind would have gotten involved," Mr. Warburg cheerfully said in an interview in 1984.

He was also a founder of the Museum of Modern Art and served on its board of trustees from 1932 to 1958. In addition, he was a trustee and organizer of the museum's film library. From an Author of Mr. Warburg's pioneer role in ballet and modern art, the cultural historian Nicholas Fox Weber wrote in his book "Patron Saints: Five Rebels Who Opened America to a New Art, 1928-1943" (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992) that Mr. Warburg "gave the public its first look at one startling art form after another."

In a telephone interview from his home in Bethany, Conn., yesterday, Mr. Weber said, "Through the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, which he helped found in 1928, he established a precedent for a lot of what was later done at the Museum of Modern Art: a show of Alexander Calder's wire sculpture, exhibitions of the latest American and Parisian art and Bauhaus design."

Mr. Warburg was long active in philanthropic and relief organizations. From 1939 to 1965, with time out for military service in World War II, he was a co-chairman of the Joint Distribution Committee. He was also the national chairman of the United Jewish Appeal from 1950 to 1955 and served for a time as president of the United Jewish Appeal of Greater New York. In addition, he was a member of the New York State Board of Regents from 1958 to 1975. Father a Philanthropist

Edward Mortimer Morris Warburg was born June 5, 1908, in White Plains. He was the youngest of five children of Felix and Frieda Warburg. His mother was the only daughter of Jacob Schiff, the merchant banker and financier. His father was a partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Company, the investment banking firm, and a philanthropist.

Edward Warburg grew up in New York City and graduated from Middlesex School in Concord, Mass., and in 1930 from Harvard.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, he joined his classmates Lincoln Kirstein and John Walker in forming the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art, which held exhibitions, in rented rooms in Cambridge, Mass., of work by such artists as Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe.

After Harvard, Mr. Warburg taught Modern Art at Bryn Mawr College and then returned to New York, where he was a co-founder, with Mr. Kirstein, of the American Ballet.

Of that experience, Mr. Warburg said in 1984: "I was visually trained, but music was quite foreign to me. It became meaningful to me by being interpreted through gesture."

In the years before World War II, Mr. Warburg was also active as an art collector, and he aquired works by such modern artists as Picasso, Matisse, Hopper, O'Keeffe, Lachaise, Klee, Miro, Brancusi and Calder, some of which he later donated to the Museum of Modern Art and other museums.

During World War II he served in the Army, going ashore in Normandy shortly after D-day. He was awarded the Bronze Star and also received decorations from the Belgian and Italian Governments for his work with the displaced in Europe after the war.

From 1971 to 1974, he was vice director for public affairs of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, of which he was an honorary trustee from 1983 to his death.

In addition to his son, of Wilton, Mr. Warburg is survived by his wife, the former Mary Whelan Prue Currier; a daughter, Daphne Astor of Cambridgeshire, England; eight grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at a later date.

Photo: Edward M. M. Warburg. (1987.)²

     Emily Margaret Warburg is the daughter of Anthony Stoddard Warburg and Judith Ann Mayer.¹ She married Jonathan Charles Sandler on 17 October 2009 at Sacramento, Sacramento County, California.³

     Eric Warburg was born in 1900.¹ He was the son of Max M. Warburg and Alice Magnus.¹ He died in 1990.¹

     Eric David Warburg is the son of Jason Clement Warburg and Karen McKibben.¹

     Felix Max Warburg II was born on 24 May 1924 at Vienna.^2,3 He was the son of Gerald Felix Warburg and Marion Sophie Bab.^4,2 He married Sandol Milliken Stoddard, daughter of Carlos French Stoddard Jr. and Caroline Lyons Harris, in 1949 at Cambridge, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.^1,5 He and Sandol Milliken Stoddard were divorced in May 1966.^1,6 He married Sue Rosenthal on 25 June 1966 at California.⁷ He died on 11 August 2019 at California at age 95.⁸

In Memoriam: Felix M. Warburg AB ’46, MArch ’51, Architect and Environmental Leader

(San Francisco)—Felix Max Warburg AB ’46, MArch ’51 of San Francisco, known to his friends as “Peter,” died at home on August 11 after 95 remarkably full years of life. An architect and lifelong environmental activist, Warburg played a significant role in designing noted public spaces and private homes in Northern California, including Ghirardelli Square and Sea Ranch, for which he served as project manager for the award-winning firm of Lawrence Halprin. He was a WW II veteran US Army intelligence officer, serving also in the Korean War, and the father of six sons and 22 grand- and great-grandchildren.

As chair of the Marin County Planning Commission in the early 1960s, Warburg pushed for creation of Point Reyes National Seashore and helped lead the successful fight against a Gulf Oil/Frouge Corporation plan to build a town of 30,000 people (“Marincello”) in what later became the open space Marin Headlands, now part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. A long-time supporter of preservation efforts, he also led Jewish history tours throughout Old West sites and helped preserve San Francisco’s Bush Street synagogue.

Felix Warburg was named for his grandfather, the noted financier and community leader whose family home on New York’s Upper East Side today houses the Jewish Museum. Felix “Peter” was born in Vienna, Austria on May 24, 1924 to parents Gerald Felix Warburg and Marian Bab of Vienna. Educated at Middlesex and Harvard, during World War II and the Korean War he twice interrupted his studies to serve as an Army intelligence officer, first 1944-46 in liberated France and occupied Germany, then at the newly built Pentagon, and finally, in 1952-3 at Camp Ritchie (later Camp David), where he taught infiltration and map reading to special forces troops prior to their deployment in Korea. The work of his WW II cohort was profiled for the 2004 documentary film The Ritchie Boys, which followed the service of German-speaking Jews in the US Army who interrogated senior Nazi officials. Warburg returned to Vienna in 1945 during his service with the U.S. Army. Attempting to find any trace of his mother’s community, he later recalled that “the only one who survived the Nazi holocaust was the doctor who delivered me.”

An undergraduate when he first enlisted, Warburg was studying to be a geologist. After witnessing the Nazis’ destruction first-hand, he resolved to be a builder. He declined recruitment into the Office of Strategic Services (later the Central Intelligence Agency) and changed his major when he returned to college in Massachusetts in 1947 as a 23-year-old sophomore. He graduated from Harvard College, then earned a degree from Harvard’s School of Architecture. The week in 1953 when he completed his second military tour, Warburg moved cross-country by train with his wife, the late Sandol Milliken Stoddard, and their two infant boys. The family initially lived in a cottage at the Alta Mira Hotel in Sausalito while he designed their first home on the newly constructed Belvedere Lagoon. The property at the end of Peninsula Road looks across the water to Mt. Tamalpais and features clean Bauhaus lines and Frank Lloyd Wright-style geometry.

Active in Marin County Democratic Party campaigns, Warburg was recruited to lead the Planning Commission at a time when the Marin County population was growing ten-fold. His efforts to block the Marincello development led to his defeat in the next election. He was later recruited to the firm of his friend Larry Halprin, who had designed the landscaping for the Warburg’s first home in Belvedere. Among the many Halprin projects Warburg aided was the Sea Ranch, the first ‘green’ development of a major residential community on the wild coastlines north of San Francisco Bay.

His second marriage in 1966 to the late Sue Rayner and move into San Francisco led to his further engagement with the City’s arts community and his interest in Jewish history from the Gold Rush era. Warburg was later appointed to the San Francisco Arts Commission by then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein. One of the projects he championed was the placement of artworks that brighten the long pedestrian concourses at the city-run San Francisco Airport. Warburg retained a lifelong commitment to environmental causes, advocating against the location of a nuclear power plant on the coastline north of Monterey Bay and for such imaginative initiatives as the use of the old Bay Bridge as armature for wind turbines and solar panels.

A poly-linguist, Warburg spoke five languages. He insisted that having casual conversations in his native German or French (which he picked up as a teenager while schooled for a time in Switzerland) “keeps your mind fresh.” After his move west in 1953, the former Boston Red Sox fan became a devoted San Francisco Giants fan who attended games from Seals Stadium to Candlestick Park to the stadium now known as Oracle Park. Asked on his 95th birthday how he always remained so cheerful, he noted wryly that “my name means ‘happy’ in Latin…and I got some of the lightness from those interwar years in Vienna, when all seemed light and cheerful.”

Warburg is survived by sons Anthony (Judy) of Sacramento, California; Peter (Melinda) of Eugene, Oregon; Gerald (Joy) of Arlington, Virginia; Jason (Karen) of Seaside, California; and Matthew (Maggie) of Seattle, Washington; sisters Geraldine Zetzel of Lexington, Massachusetts and Jeremy Warburg Russo of Newton, Massachusetts; brother Jonathan Warburg AB ’63, MArch ’68 (Stephanie) of Boston, Massachusetts; 10 grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren. He was predeceased by his son Joshua in 1960 and his wife Susan in 2014.

Text provided by the Warburg family.⁸

     Felix Moritz Warburg was born on 14 January 1871 at Hamburg.^1,3 He was the son of Moritz Moses Warburg and Charlotte Esther Oppenheim.⁴ He married Frieda Schiff on 19 May 1895 at New York, New York.⁵ He died on 20 September 1937 at age 66.¹

     Frede C. Warburg was born in 1904.¹ She was the daughter of Abraham Moritz Warburg and Mary Hertz.¹ She married Adolf Prag in 1938.¹ She died in 2004.¹

     Frederick M. Warburg also went by the name of Freddy.² He was born in 1897.¹ He was the son of Felix Moritz Warburg and Frieda Schiff.¹ He died in 1973.¹

     Fritz M. Warburg was born in 1879.¹ He was the son of Moritz Moses Warburg and Charlotte Esther Oppenheim.¹ He died in 1964.¹