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Art historian Aby Warburg's groundbreaking image atlas reunited in Berlin after nearly a century
Nearly every art history student has heard of Aby Warburg’s unfinished final project, the
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, created in the years preceding the German art historian’s death in 1929. But few have more than a cursory idea of its contents. Now, after “50 years of denial”—as the curators Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil refer to the period since the art historian Ernst Gombrich categorised the work as a failure—it is to be exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Unlike previous attempts to show the entire 63 panels (each measuring 2m by 1.5m), the HKW show will include not only reproductions but around 80% of the actual images used for the atlas’s last version, recovered through extensive research in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute in London.
Nearly every art history student has heard of Aby Warburg’s unfinished final project, the
Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, created in the years preceding the German art historian’s death in 1929. But few have more than a cursory idea of its contents. Now, after “50 years of denial”—as the curators Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil refer to the period since the art historian Ernst Gombrich categorised the work as a failure—it is to be exhibited at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. Unlike previous attempts to show the entire 63 panels (each measuring 2m by 1.5m), the HKW show will include not only reproductions but around 80% of the actual images used for the atlas’s last version, recovered through extensive research in the photographic collection of the Warburg Institute in London.