Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science

L'oeil de l'Histoire #3

by Georges Didi-Huberman, Shane B. Lillis

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas (1925–1929) is a prescient work of mixed media assemblage, made up of hundreds of images culled from antiquity to the Renaissance and arranged into startling juxtapositions. Warburg’s allusive atlas sought to illuminate the pains of his final years, after he had suffered a breakdown and been institutionalized. It continues to influence contemporary artists today, including Gerhard Richter and Mark Dion.

 

In this illustrated exploration of Warburg and his great work, Georges Didi-Huberman leaps from Mnemosyne Atlas into a set of musings on the relation between suffering and knowledge in Western thought, and on the creative results of associative thinking. Deploying writing that delights in dramatic jump cuts reminiscent of Warburg’s idiosyncratic juxtapositions, and drawing on a set of sources that ranges from ancient Babylon to Walter Benjamin, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science is rich in Didi-Huberman’s trademark combination of elan and insight.

Genres: Art

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2011

About the author

Georges Didi-Huberman, a philosopher and art historian based in Paris, teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recipient of the 2015 Adorno Prize, he is the author of more than fifty books on the history and theory of images, including Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (MIT Press), Bark (MIT Press), Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, and The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art.

Reviews

[Carmilla Damnatio cam cam · Rating 3 out of 5]

You'll really appreciate this book if you like Aby Warburg's atlas and dissection of sheep livers for divination purposes.

[Nádia Rodrigues · Rating 5 out of 5]

análise geral e extremamente completa do projecto de Warburg com interessantes referências literárias (Foucault, W. Benjamin, Goethe, Nietzsche, Heine, Borges, Cassirer, ...).

[Danny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Didi-Huberman writes well and with great insight on the incredible contribution of German art historian Abi Warburg. Warburg pioneered a new way of looking at art and pictures. Tracing recurring visual motifs from classical antiquity to the 20th century, Warburg showed that pictorial symbolism was burnt into our collective unconscious.

[Milena · Rating 5 out of 5]

uau.UAU

[Weronika · Rating 5 out of 5]

❤️