There is a possibility that, in Warburg's Atlas, images also acquire a conspicuous political and social resonance. Parallel to Benjamin's and Godard's historiographies, so too in Warburg are the ...images of low and high culture potential testimonies of the catastrophes of history and a reservoir for the construction of a public space of historical awareness. Carrying a sort of mnemonic political urgency, dialectical images are interpreted in all of them as catalysts for resurrecting the past in the light of historical choices and modes of ethical participation in the present world.
This article offers a new reading of Aby Warburg's seminal lecture on "Italian Art and International Astrology in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara" in which he deciphered some of the obscure ...iconography as referring to astrological decans of Egyptian and Indian provenance. The article argues that Warburg recovered the ancient discourse of "astral theology," of neo-Pythagorean and Platonic provenance, in order to bolster his more general and systematic accounts of the role played by astrological images to bridge myth and science in the Italian Renaissance. Warburg showed that the "survival of antiquity" in early modernity was crucially dependent on the previous "wanderings" of astrological images and cosmological speculations from West to East and back again. My hypothesis is that Warburg understood the Renaissance reception of these "wandering" astrological images as being motivated by a desire to recover astral theology and its attendant astral politics.
By 1918, the very existence of the Warburg Library was endangered due to Aby Warburg’s serious illness. His family recruited the Viennese Fritz Saxl to come to Hamburg as acting director of the ...library. Starting in April 1920, Saxl, who had already worked with Warburg before the outbreak of the First World War, developed a comprehensive reform program to transform what was originally a private scholar’s library into a public research institute. One initiative was the pursuit of his habilitation in the spring and summer of 1922 with the goal of academic teaching and thereby creating a close link between the library and the newly founded Kunsthistorisches Seminar of the University of Hamburg. The reconstruction of the hitherto neglected habilitation procedure – and the difficulties that Saxl encountered – is based on newly discovered documents and sheds new light on the process of institutionalization of the Warburg Library between 1920 and 1922.
An Eel Soup Vellodi, Kamini
Art History,
11/2018, Letnik:
41, Številka:
5
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Reviewed: The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art, by Georges Didi‐Huberman, translated by Harvey Mendelssohn, University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania ...State University Press, 2017, 432 pp., 93 b. &w. illus., hardback $79.95, paperback $34.95.
This article attempts to throw a light on Warburg’s little-known engagement in political caricature during World War I. Though deemed unfit for military service, Warburg was eager to contribute to ...the German war effort. Perceiving Allied war propaganda as anti-German lies, he recorded what he considered its half-truths and falsehoods in his
, or war archive. But Warburg, as indicated by his involvement with the short-lived
in the early stages of the war, kept looking for a more active role in influencing public opinion: From privately commenting on the output of the Allied press, he went on to offering his own ideas for political caricatures to leading artists like Olaf Gulbransson and Max Slevogt, and to well-established satirical journals such as
Begun in 1923, the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne Mnemosyne Atlas was German art historian Aby Warburg's (1866–1929) attempt to crystallize his most important theories about the migration and transformation ...of powerful images and symbols. Left unfinished and unpublished at the time of his death, the Atlas comprised a series of cloth-covered panels on which Warburg arranged groupings of photographs of artworks and contemporary newspaper clippings. The extant version consists only of photographs of these individual panels, and an archive of working materials. Despite its idiosyncratic methodology and eternal incompletion, contemporary scholars have come to regard the Atlas as a provocative touchstone for an array of disciplines. While some have lamented that this explosion of interest has resulted in the dilution of Warburg's project, this article argues that the so-called "afterlife" of the Atlas is consistent not only with Warburg's own conception of his work, but also with its very impossibility as a finishable undertaking. This article begins with a selective historiography of the structural and material qualities of the Mnemosyne Atlas, before considering the Atlas's peculiar relationship to photography and examining it in dialogue with recent scholarship about digital images and archives. What ultimately becomes clear is that, having left the Atlas in contradictory iterations and fragments, having turned it into a set of images of itself, Warburg left open the opportunity for his project to enact its own thesis and anticipate technological developments and cultural discourses that are only now coming into focus.
The work of German cultural theorist and art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) has had a lasting effect on how we think about images. This book is the first in English to focus on his last project, ...the encyclopedicAtlas of Images: Mnemosyne. Begun in earnest in 1927, and left unfinished at the time of Warburg's death in 1929, theMnemosyne-Atlasconsisted of sixty-three large wooden panels covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg carefully, intuitively arranged some thousand black-and-white photographs of classical and Renaissance art objects, as well as of astrological and astronomical images ranging from ancient Babylon to Weimar Germany. Here and there, he also included maps, manuscript pages, and contemporary images taken from newspapers. Trying through these constellations of images to make visible the many polarities that fueled antiquity's afterlife, Warburg envisioned theMnemosyne-Atlasas a vital form of metaphoric thought.
While the nondiscursive, frequently digressive character of theMnemosyne-Atlascomplicates any linear narrative of its themes and contents, Christopher D. Johnson traces several thematic sequences in the panels. By drawing on Warburg's published and unpublished writings and by attending to Warburg's cardinal idea that "pathos formulas" structure the West's cultural memory, Johnson maps numerous tensions between word and image in theMnemosyne-Atlas. In addition to examining the work itself, he considers the literary, philosophical, and intellectual-historical implications of theMnemosyne-Atlas. As Johnson demonstrates, theMnemosyne-Atlasis not simply the culmination of Warburg's lifelong study of Renaissance culture but the ultimate expression of his now literal, now metaphoric search for syncretic solutions to the urgent problems posed by the history of art and culture.
A problematização do caráter performático de Aby Warburg, aplicado ao Atlas de imagens Mnemosyne (1924-1929), em diálogo com a obra multimídia de Bill Morrison, Decasia (2001), é o nosso foco. A ...partir da penetração nas camadas do tempo e da materialidade das imagens operadas por ambos, investigaremos alguns dos conceitos-chave do historiador da arte – como a iconologia dos intervalos, a sobrevivência (Nachleben) das imagens, os movimentos pendulares (dinamograma) e as forças móveis das Pathosformeln – em contraponto com outros autores que desenvolveram pensamentos paralelos (Benjamin, Vertov, Epstein). Nosso objetivo é a ampliação das perspectivas sobre a natureza do cinema – explicitada no trabalho arqueológico e, ao mesmo tempo, transcendental do cineasta – apoiada no pensamento de Warburg sobre as particularidades das imagens.
TOTENTANZ Impett, Leonardo; Moretti, Franco
New Left review,
09/2017
107
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The object of this study is one of the most ambitious projects of twentieth-century art history: Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne, conceived in the summer of 1926 -- when the first mention of a ...Bilderatlas, or ‘atlas of images’, occurs in his journal -- and truncated three years later, unfinished, by his sudden death in October 1929. Mnemosyne consisted in a series of large black panels, about 170cm by 140cm, on which were attached black-and-white photographs of paintings, sculptures, book pages, stamps, newspaper clippings, tarot cards, coins and other types of images. Warburg kept changing the order of the panels and the position of the images until the very end, and three main versions of the Atlas have been recorded: one from 1928 (the ‘1–43 version’, with 682 images); one from the early months of 1929, with 71 panels and 1,050 images; and the one Warburg was working on at the time of his death, also known as the ‘1–79 version’, with 63 panels and 971 images (the one we shall examine). But Warburg was planning to have more panels -- possibly many more -- and there is no doubt that Mnemosyne is a dramatically unfinished and unstable object of study.
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