Aby Warburg: Bilderatlas Mnemosyne
The Original
Edited by Haus der Kulturen der Welt and The Warburg Institute; Roberto Ohrt, Axel Heil
Publisher: Hatje Cantz, 2020
Graphic design by Axel Heil, Christian Ertel, fluid editions
184 pages, English
83 full page illustrations and more than 170 text illustrations, hardcover, 44 x 60 cm
ISBN 978-3-7757-4693-9
Price: €200
Mail order buying / postal shopping via the publisher
In the 1920s, the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. In cooperation with the Warburg Institute, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. Thus, the folio volume and the exhibition at HKW in fall 2020 will show his complete unfinished magnum opus for the first time since Warburg’s death.
The art historian Roberto Ohrt and the artist Axel Heil have searched through the 400,000 individual pictures in the Photographic Collection at the Warburg Institute, looking for the images for the atlas. Their work is a comprehensive tribute to Aby Warburg’s pictorial world.
With contributions by Roberto Ohrt, Axel Heil, Bernd M. Scherer, Bill Sherman, Claudia Wedepohl.
