Aby Warburg; Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt (eds.), Bilderatlas Mnemosyne – The Original, by Kathryn Murphy
The reconstruction of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas has replenished its enigmas, writes Kathryn Murphy
Aby Warburg; Axel Heil and Roberto Ohrt (eds.) Hatje Cantz, €200
ISBN 9783775746939
What is the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, this strange assembly of passionate postures, mute and motley on their numbered black panels? A pictorial history of European art; a map showing the pathways of its recurring figures; an instrument for research; an argument about the development of human culture; a catalogue of types; a collage or montage of emotion. Aby Warburg ( – ), the German-Jewish art historian whose last years were devoted to the project, described it more soberly, as ‘an attempt at an art-historical cultural science’, and provided an almost parodically formal description: ‘An Image Series for the Investigation of the Function of Pre-formed Ancient Expressive Values in the Representation of Animated Life in European Renaissance Art’. But these academic claims coexisted with richer, stranger articulations. He named his atlas of images for Mnemosyne, the mother of the muses and the patron of memory, suggesting that it was both a matrix for creativity, and a theatre of remembrance and the return of the repressed. In the critical industry that has grown up around it, the Bilderatlas has been described as a ‘kinetic grotto’, a device for divination, a machine for metaphor, an exposure of the archetypes of the psyche, and an externalisation of the paranoiac workings of Warburg’s own mind.
In practical terms, the Bilderatlas, in the form it had reached at Warburg’s death in , consists of vertical panels, x cm, covered in black hessian, on which Warburg, with the help of collaborators, assembled items: reproductions of paintings and works of art, pages from manuscript and printed books, newspaper articles, photographs. The subjects ranged from Babylonian stelae and divinatory tablets to stamps, news reports on the Zeppelin, and contemporary adverts for the Hamburg fishing industry, though the bulk of the material shows mythological figures in Greek, Roman and Renaissance art. The panels were erected in the reading room of the research institution that Warburg had founded in Hamburg, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, as working materials towards a book project. This would give a verbal account of what the panels illustrated – an argument about the Renaissance revivification of what Warburg called pathos formulae (Pathosformeln). These nexuses of posture, gesture, and expression, Warburg speculated, imprinted the high emotion and propitiatory actions of ancient ritual, and were transmitted both through an art-historical tradition of imitation, and an atavistic identification with the emotions expressed and their freight of pity and fear, with an afterlife persisting to the present.
The book was never written. What we have instead is what Warburg called a Denkinstrument, a tool to think with: not the work itself, but the condition for its emergence. The photographs taken of the Bilderatlas panels in show the images affixed by clips, easily detachable, and so liable to movement. Warburg continually revised the classification system of his library, and compulsively reordered his numerous boxes of index cards. Shelves, boxes, and panels were all cognitive contraptions, holding places for temporary configurations of books, cards, images. They used adjacency – what Warburg called ‘good neighbourliness’ (gute Nachbarschaft) – and spatial disposition to prompt unexpected relations and trajectories of thought. Despite the local patterns of cohesion in individual panels, and their correspondence with arguments Warburg made in lectures and essays, their value as thought-instruments rests not in their illustration of a particular case, but in their provisionality, testifying to the always imminent possibility of reorganisation. Other constellations are possible.
This has at once given the Bilderatlas a tremendous enigmatic charge, inviting scholarly labour and imaginative reconstruction, and thwarted all attempts to complete it.
After Warburg’s death, Ernst Gombrich was tasked with rendering the publishable; he gave up. Gertrud Bing, Warburg’s assistant who collaborated with him on the arrangement of and the elliptical panel headings, continued to elaborate the themes of the work into the s, alongside Fritz Saxl and Edgar Wind, but no final version was realised. The panels were dismantled and the reproductions subsumed into the photographic archive at the Warburg Institute, which emigrated, with the library and several of Warburg’s collaborators, to London in . Subsequent editions and exhibitions, including the edition by Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink for Warburg’s Collected Works (De Gruyter), use reproductions of the black-and-white photographs of the panels to render the Bilderatlas in its state of incompletion, foregrounding its invitation to use it as a means of thought.
This openness and irresolution is also the tack taken by this wonderful new facsimile, which accompanies an exhibition that took place at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, last autumn (it travels to the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, this month), and a wider project on the part of the Warburg Institute to digitise and make available its archival materials, including a virtual tour of the recent display (accessible at www. warburg.sas.ac.uk). Collectively, they advance both the accessibility of, and the possibilities of thought offered by, the Bilderatlas. This is the first reconstruction of the Bilderatlas to use not the photographs of the panels, but, as far as possible, to reconvene the photographs, prints, and reproductions that Warburg himself assembled. The book and exhibition demonstrate an astonishing labour of reconstruction by the curators, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, through which much can be learned about Warburg’s methods in acquiring reproductions, of the construction of the panels, and of the ways in which images could serve multiple purposes. The provision in the book of images of earlier versions, a concordance, and an index, also allow the reader to navigate the panels by artist or by