Warburg Commentaries: Mnemosyne Atlas
Warburg Commentaries: Mnemosyne Atlas
The Mnemosyne Atlas is an unfinished project of the art and cultural historian Aby M. Warburg (1866-1929). The Atlas is an attempt to map the Western “afterlife of antiquity,” or how some images of great symbolic, intellectual, and emotional power emerge in antiquity and then reappear and are reanimated in the art and cosmology of later times and places, from Alexandrian Greece to Weimar Germany. Conceived in 1924, the Atlas, in its various formations, took the form of over 60 wooden panels of approximately 120 x 150 cm, covered with black cloth. On these panels Warburg arranged and rearranged black-and-white photographs depicting artifacts of art and cosmography, as well as images from newspapers, advertising, and other material. With these arrangements, Warburg created thematic constellations and visual linkages. A century after Warburg conceived the Mnemosyne Atlas project, Alexander Kluge engages deeply with this material and offers commentary in word, still and moving images, and sound.
Images from the reconstruction of Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas, 1929 (last version) by Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil, 2020, appear in the text and video commentaries by kind permission of the copyright holders: The Warburg Institute and fluid editions.
Alexander Kluge: Cultural History in Dialogue is a joint project of Cornell University, Universität Bremen and Princeton University.
