Georges Didi-Huberman

Warburg's Haunted House

This article deals with the genesis of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne , composed by Aby Warburg between 1927 and 1929 as a response to the Great War. His reaction to the war was both pathetic (even pathological) and epistemic (which is to say, methodological). If the history of culture amounted to a great psychomachia of the astra (concepts) and the monstra (chaos), as Warburg said, the war was for him a direct test of his theory (or Kulturwissenschaft ). It should be no surprise, then, that between 1914 and 1918 he should assemble a large iconographic collection of materials from and about the war. This essay compares that collection and its theoretical foundations with similar projects of Warburgs contemporaries in France and Germany (notably those of the historians Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch).

The Album of Images According to André Malraux

Georges Didi-Huberman argues that with the Museum Without Walls, André Malraux invented a new type of art book based on the concept of the family album. Here, the family – with its resemblances, dissemblances, portraits in beauty and monstrosity – is Malraux’s attempt to encompass art from the world over. If he was largely successful in this endeavor, it was not only because Malraux had a broad vision honed in the heyday of collage and montage, but also because he knew how to assemble a peerless team of technicians to help him realize the vast project. Despite their extremely divergent idioms, the explorations of Walter Benjamin and André Malraux met at several surprising points: Didi-Huberman identifies yet another of these affinities by showing the parallels between the Museum Without Walls project writ large and the general theory of the creator in Benjamin’s ‘author as producer’.

Ex-Voto: Image, Organ, Time

Considering their historical persistence and various forms from the Middle Ages to the present day, Didi-Huberman opposes the relegation of votive offerings to the status of the primitive, arguing instead that they operate a material resemblance, in which the symbolic and the iconic are irreducibly contaminated by indexical contact.

The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento:

Aby Warburg placed the wind, or air, at the centre of his investigation of the art of the Italian Renaissance. This article investigates how an ‘external cause of the image’ takes on the role of a figure in Quattrocento painting and sculpture, and becomes foundational for Warburg’s understanding of the Pathosformel and of Nachleben.

Introduction: Warburg's Library and Its Legacy

In this introduction to a Common Knowledge special issue on the Warburg Institute, the authors argue that the Institute remains today—as it has been, in different forms, for almost a century—one of Europes central institutions for the study of cultural history. At once a rich and uniquely organized library, a center for doctoral and postdoctoral research, and a teaching faculty, the Institute was first envisioned by Aby Warburg, a pioneering historian of art and culture from a wealthy Jewish family in Hamburg. Warburg rejected the traditional view that the classical tradition was a simple, purely rational Greek creation, inherited by modern Europe. He argued that it was as much Mesopotamian as Greek in origin, as at home in the Islamic as in the European world, and as often irrational as rational in its content—and on the basis of this rich vision he devised brilliant new interpretations of medieval and Renaissance symbols and ideas. Warburgs chosen associate Fritz Saxl put his creation on a firm institutional base, first in Hamburg and then, after a narrow escape from the Nazi regime, in London. For all the changes the Institute has undergone over the decades since then, it continues to ask the questions that Warburg was the first to raise and to build on the methods that he created.