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Virtual Tour - Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne exhibition at Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Summary
Hamburg-born cultural theorist Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929) was a pioneer of modern art history and visual iconology. As an expert in Florentine art of the fifteenth century, he made a name for himself in professional circles before the First World War. Although he produced few publications, they opened up new paths of knowledge and led to numerous sensational discoveries. The project he dedicated himself to in the last years of his life was completely unconventional, however: the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, named after the Greek goddess of mem-ory and the mother of the nine Muses.
From 1927 to 1929, Warburg concen-trated his entire body of knowledge in this book project, which in its final ver-sion of summer/fall 1929 comprised sixty-three panels supporting just under 1,000 individual items. He primarily used photographs, but also illustrations from books or portfolios of pictures, original graphic works, pages from news-papers, and even stamps and advertising brochures. He juxtaposed so-called masterpieces with commercial art, and canonized images with lowly book illus-trations and press photos. Warburg systematically overstepped the bounda-ries of the discipline, drawing on sources from other areas of research such as philology and ethnology. He extended the linear logic of the slide lecture to create a complex web of image fields that offered numerous paths to understan-ding, employing what he called a “multi-dimensional” or “polyphonic” method. He also routinely utilized modern reproduction techniques as a means to an “instrument” of knowledge.
Today this work might remind us of the wealth of images brought up by Internet search engines. Warburg’s panels were constructed with much thought, however; they constitute a memory store that condenses the history of art into multilayered constellations built around the question of how an ancient world of images returned to the European cul-tural sphere, leading the Middle Ages into a new era. While the answer seems familiar-it gave rise to the Renais-sance the examples placed together on the panels of the Bilderatlas have little to do with the well-known great “values.” They point primarily to the early Renaissance, exploring the history of conflict by illuminating the moment-rather than the results of that mo-ment when quotations from ancient forms and images questioned the rigid canon of Christian art, forcing it to react. The dialogues and conflicting interests between artists, patrons, philosophers, poets, and the Church are rever mapped by Warburg with a view to establishing simple or clear positions. The lines of conflict pass through the participants themselves and through their works. It is therefore hardly sur-prising that the atlas does not recognize any borders within art itself. Painting, sculpture, graphic art, illuminated rianuscripts, tapestries, wedding chests, playing cards, objects of daily use, jewelry-in all these areas Warburg looked for evidence which helps deepen cur knowledge of the historical process.
For the first time, this exhibition presents the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne in its is, with all the images that Warburg criginal form from the fall of 1929-that used. This original form was thought to be lost to research when the reproduc-tions were re-sorted into his library’s Photographic Collection in 1929, However, during the course of intensive research conducted in the spring of 2019, from the inventory of the Photographic Collec-tion, consisting of almost 400,000 objects, and the Archive of the Warburg Institute in London, as well at the Universität Hamburg, the panels were almost completely reconstructed. The few images which have not yet been located as well as any elements which could not be loaned, such as old prints or pages from books, have been replaced by facsimiles .
