ABY WARBURG

.. . and hisAtlas Mnemosyne

In 1879 the 13-year-old Aby Warburg, the eldest son of a wealthy Hamburg banking family, is

said to have traded his birthright for a more lasting inheritance. Already convinced (despite

parental objections) of his future as an art historian, he struck a deal with his younger brother

Max, who would inherit the family business on condition that he agreed to supply the elder

Warburg with as many books as he required. (Max later wrote: I gave him what I must now

admit was a very large blank cheque.) When Warburg died in 1929, his library contained

60,000 volumes and had been transformed by his colleague Fritz Saxl from a private collection

into a research institution. Four years later it was transplanted to London and became the

Warburg Institute, now part of London University.

If his library was already the most eccentric of collections - organized not alphabetically or

according to subject but by elective affinities, the secret intimacies that Warburg himself

intuited between its volumes - its oddest offshoot is surely the massive and fragmentary

constellation of images that Warburg, in the last five years of his life, obsessively tended and

reorganized: the Mnemosyne Atlas. It is the strangest of art-historical artefacts: the kaleidoscopic

image of the scholars enigmatic reordering of a lifetimes meditation on the image. The

Atlas, wrote Warburg, was a ghost story for adults: it invents a kind of phantomic science of
the image, a ghost dance in which the most resonant gestures and expressions its creator had

discovered in the course of his career return with a spooky insistence, suddenly cast into wholly

new relationships.

In a sense, the Mnemosyne Atlas has never really existed, at least not in the form Warburg

envisaged. At the time of his death it comprised 79 wooden panels, covered with black fabric, on

which were pinned some 2,000 photographs from Warburgs collection. The project was never

completed, and only ever constituted a provisional version of its eventual incarnation in book

form. 1 The panels themselves were lost when Warburgs colleagues, fleeing Nazi Germany,

relocated to London, and the images are now dispersed in the archives of the institute.

Warburgs final arrangement of the Atlas survives, however, as a series of 79 photographs. In

reproductions these are often cropped to show only the black background and the luminous
images, but the original photographs include the edges of the panels, beyond which can be

glimpsed the shelves of Warburgs library, so that you cannot fail to imagine the scholar

himself at the centre of his grand photographic planetarium, setting the whole thing in fantastic

motion as he searches for the proper arrangement of his fragmentary universe.

Warburg conceived of the art historian as a necromancer who conjures up the art of the past

to give it an enigmatic new life, a strange figural floating. 2

He was intrigued by the representation of movement, by the way in which the gestures of

Classical bodies in motion survive into the art of the Renaissance and beyond, each image

possessed by a particular pathos formula which gives it a specific allure and is resurrected

centuries later in similar attitudes and expressions. Obscurely linked by the conductive
medium of the black ground, human bodies flex and falter in an array of gestures that

stretches from Sandro Botticellis Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to the contemporary physique of a

woman golfer, from medieval zodiacal figures to a 1920s advertisement for 4711 cologne.

Zeppelins float in the darkness beneath ancient cosmological maps; the entire anachronistic

discordia concors is dedicated to finding the most startling relationships between images that

are worlds apart. The Atlas proposes an art of the in-between, what Warburg called the

iconology of the interval. God, he famously declared, resides in the details; the inhuman

presence that hovers in the darkness between these images is, says the philosopher Giorgio

Agamben, the dark demon of an unnamed science whose contours we are only today

beginning to glimpse. 3

It is perhaps fitting that the sturdy panels of Warburgs unfinished project have vanished

somewhere between Hamburg and London, evanesced into the dark drawers of the institutes
present archive. The notion of its essential immateriality, its existence as a pure phantasmagoria

in the imagination of its author, is given a faint outline on the pages of the large hardback

notebooks in which Warburg ceaselessly planned and revised its shape. The pencilled ghosts of

absent images haunt these volumes notional arrangements of the actual material. With their

blank squares and scrawled captions, they are the perverse mirror images of the textless

patterns on the photographic plates, hastily sketched storyboards for a movie that only ever

played in the mind of the scholar/director. Warburg, who was obsessed by the figure of Laocon,

the dying Trojan prince, seems to have conceived of art history according to an image from G. E.

Lessings Laocon (1766), in which the German writer describes the poetic and painterly

depiction of mist: it is used to render both the visible invisible and the invisible visible. Gaze

long enough at the dark screen of Mnemosyne and it is like looking at a black cinema screen;

as your eyes grow used to the dark, something comes to light: the screen itself, the empty but
meaningful interval between images.

If there is a ghostly quality to the Mnemosyne Atlas, perhaps it resides in the odd amalgam of

science and superstition that it shares with other works on the image and memory. It looks back

to the taxonomic efforts of Charles Darwin to photograph the essences of human emotions, and

forward to the memorial extravagance of Gerhard Richters Atlas (1962-ongoing). But it also

brushes up against Walter Benjamins aura and Siegfried Kracauers monogram: the

memory-image that adheres to the last photograph of a loved one. Despite Warburgs intense

effort to bring the past into focus in the present, it appears to suggest that an anatomy of the
image is only ever a science of spectres: an impression heightened by its sudden demise in 1929,

as if Warburg had succeeded in freeze-framing European culture in a paradoxical pose of

frenzied immobility, just before the continent was plunged into the terrible mass-mobilization

that sent his colleagues into exile in 1933. Warburg turned the scholarly archive into a mobile

(and moving) artwork, transforming, as Karl Kraus wrote of the true artist, a solution into an

enigma.
1. Eventually published as Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink,
Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
2. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes, Zone
Books, New York, 2004, p. 261.
3. Giorgio Agamben, Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science, in Potentialities, trans. Daniel
Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, p. 90.

By Brian Dillon From Frieze Magazine