Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne - (Hardcover)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p><strong>A legendary modernist epic of visual thinking from the founder of iconology, tracing the migration of symbols through art, history and cosmology--reconstructed and accessible for the first time</strong></p><p>From 1925 until his death in 1929, the great German art theorist and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on an ambitious, unprecedented project he called the <i>Mnemosyne Atlas</i>: a series of 63 large themed panels, each featuring a constellation of images--postcards, maps, adverts, reproductions of artworks--that trace the migration of symbols from antiquity to the present. His goal was to show how certain gestures and icons repeated themselves across history, constituting what he called a "pathos formula"--that is, an enduring emotional metaphor. Warburg had the panels photographed, conceiving of their ultimate incarnation as being in book form--but never completed the atlas. <p/>Warburg has become famed for many things--founding the discipline of iconology (what would now be called visual studies); his incredible library (and its idiosyncratic organization); his photographs of Hopi Indians; and the august institute in London that bears his name. But the greatest, most mythical aspect of his legacy is the <i>Mnemosyne Atlas</i>, which is to art history what Walter Benjamin's <i>Arcades Project</i> is to cultural history--an incomplete, collaged modernist epic attempting to comprehend the patterns of history and human emotion through flashes of insight that circumvent discursive thought. <p/>Artists, theorists, writers and curators as various as Gerhard Richter, R.B. Kitaj, Joan Jonas, Charlene von Heyl, Giorgio Agamben, Marina Warner, Ernst Gombrich and Hans Ulrich Obrist have all paid homage to this mythic entity in different ways; many books have been written about it, and many exhibitions themed around it. Since Gombrich was tasked with its recreation in 1937, several scholars have attempted editions of the <i>Atlas</i>, all using Warburg's indistinct, nearly illegible photographs. Now, for this major publishing event, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have done what long seemed impossible, searching the 400,000 images in the archives of the Warburg Institute, identifying those from the <i>Atlas</i> and reconstructing Warburg's panels, rendering the <i>Atlas</i> visually accessible to the world for the first time.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>Warburg's unfinished masterpiece has now been reconstructed... Recovering the lost pieces was a feat of dedication that even Warburg would have admired.--Jonathon Keats "Forbes"<br><br>A gloriously puzzling work of art.--David Carrier "Brooklyn Rail"<br><br>Not really a book at all, but an exercise in visual free association.... [A] gloriously puzzling work of art.--David Carrier "Brooklyn Rail"<br><br>A project intended to abolish the hierarchies that bind the hands of art and history. The Bilderatlas is a model for thinking like history's overloaded switchboard operators, in somersaults and arabesques, and a reminder that even our most progressive institutions depend on the "border-police bias" that Warburg defied nearly a century ago.--Nick Mauss "Artforum"<br><br>At the time of his death Warburg's unfinished magnum opus consisted of nearly 1,000 reproductions of artworks that traced visual motifs and themes across the centuries. Warburg's arrangement of these images into 63 panels was photographed as it stood in 1929; the reproductions were subsequently dispersed and absorbed into Warburg Institute's collections. In a feat of archival research, these 'original' images have been tracked down, rephotographed in colour and published as a book for the first time.-- "Apollo"<br><br>Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, this commentary volume provides an explication of each of the panels constituting Warburg's Modernist masterpiece. The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was begun in 1925 and ended with Warburg's death in 1929. He created it as a series of 63 large, themed panels, each featuring a constellation of images - postcards, maps, adverts, reproductions of artworks - that trace the migration of symbols from antiquity to the present.-- "Antiques and The Arts Weekly"<br><br>Warburg juxtaposed reproductions of artworks with astronomical and astrological charts, diagrams, advertising brochures, newspaper clippings, postage stamps and photographs, in an attempt to create something like a flowchart of Western civilisation, mapping the migratory routes of images with their undertow of human drama and emotion. [...] It's all the more fascinating for being inherently melancholic, incantatory and unresolved (Matthew Vollgraff of the Warburg Institute calls it a modernist ruin); by reconstructing the atlas, the curators have revived it as a site of contemplation.--Chloe Aridjis "London Review Of Books"<br><br>...Brings together all panels of Warburg's unfinished magnum opus for the first time after his death. It is a must-see for everyone who is intrigued with reimagining the world--Editors "Artnet"<br><br>If the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne shows more than it tells, this is by design. Warburg hoped to create a visual tool that would foster what he saw as art's innate ability to generate reflective, dialectical distance for the viewer, a key to the civilizing process: by means of this Distanz, states of rational detachment can co-exist with animalistic frenzy, the sober philosopher meets the rampaging maenad, over and over through the ages. This seems like an odd intellectual goal now, but the panels hold an aesthetic fascination that either exceeds this magic theory or, paradoxically, proves it. I find them strange and hard to look away from ...--Lucy Ives "Art In America"<br><br>A project of art history lore, predating works like Marcel Duchamp's <i>Boîte-en-valise</i>.... the waves made by Warburg's atlas still ripple in works like Gerhard Richter's <i>Atlas</i>.... Warburg was interested in creating a visual system that would help us understand how we came to be where we are, and how we are profoundly tied to the past and to the natural world.--Martha Schwendener "New York Times"<br><br>There is pain and suffering in these pictures, but also a sense of pure possibility, as though the space between images, or between panels, contained only wind, or the beating of wings.--Brian Dillon "Frieze"<br>
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