Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

by Philippe-Alain Michaud, Georges Didi-Huberman, Sophie Hawkes (Translator)

Aby Warburg (1866–1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg’s project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a “critical iconology” to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture.

Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg’s method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using procedures of “montage-collision” he brought together pagan artifacts with masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, the astrology of the ancient Near East with the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals with the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism.

Michaud provides us with a book that not only is about Warburg but also extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loïe Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English.

Genres: Art, Art History, History, Film, Nonfiction, Theory, Psychology

408 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Erick Felinto · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've just began reading it, but Georges Didi-Huberman's preface is magnificent. Warburg's Mnemosyne project, carefully described and explained by Michaud, has that element of strangeness that always captures my attention in an encounter with a thinker. Borges employed the same reading criterion, by cultivating his particular list of "raros". Warburg has just become one of my "raros"...

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great study on Warburg and his immense historical scope in determining through the image a sense of motion in the beginning of moving pictures. It also deals with his amassing an atlas of material and organizing it in a logical but idiosyncratic way around core concepts in a non-linear or hierarchical sense. Fascinating.

[La Central · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Hace ocho años Didi-Huberman instaló definitivamente en nuestro imaginario el Atlas Mnemosyne, concediendo a Aby Warburg su justo papel en la construcción de una Historia del Arte que, desde su obra, no ha hecho más que revolverse.

El movimiento al que llama Michaud con su título es el que obsesionará a Warburg, tanto como objeto de estudio o como método de investigación. Movimiento que pone la Historia del Arte a andar a través de un Atlas y que estructura este texto en forma del viaje. Viaje de saltos, conexiones y contrastes que llevan al historiador desde los retratos florentinos al Black María, de Botticelli a las tribus Pueblo y en el que Michaud añadirá alguna parada.

Es el mismo movimiento que insufla a la Historia el poder animista que persigue toda obra de arte, que la contagia del ritual y la convierte en búsqueda que ya no explica, sino que reproduce y repite el fenómeno por el que la imagen revive infinitamente. La biblioteca de Warburg se convierte en dispositivo cinematográfico en el que las imágenes, como el historiador, se desplazan para restituir el timbre de esas «voces inaudibles» que viven en el universo cerrado de las representaciones. Mundo de fantasmas, de supervivencias y fósiles animados." Júlia García