The Memory House: The Continuing Influence of the Warburg Institute

The Warburg Library has a knack of acquainting its readers with books they didn’t know they needed. This is a practical legacy of Aby Warburg (1866–1929), the historian of art and culture who transformed his private library in Hamburg into a research institute that opened in 1926. Warburg insisted that books be classified according to ‘the law of the good neighbour’ – a thematic arrangement whereby a reader can search for a book they know in the likelihood of encountering others that they don’t.

In 1933, Nazism compelled the evacuation of the institute’s collection and its predominantly Jewish staff to London, where, in 1958, as the Warburg Institute, they eventually took up residence in Bloomsbury in a new building designed by Charles Holden. The distinctive classificatory system survived, feeding the curiosity of generations of cultural historians and scholars of renaissance art and prompting them into cross-disciplinary inquiry. Warburg once described his institute as ‘an observation tower [that] looks out over all the migratory routes of cultural exchange’.

Less widely recognized is the role that the Warburg Institute has played for artists. Many have found thinking space amid its shelves, whether drawn by its esoteric holdings in subjects such as magic and alchemy, or by the intellectual pathways mapped by Warburg himself. R.B. Kitaj developed a personal theory of images through his study of its journals. In 1999, Cornelia Parker showed some of her ‘Avoided Objects’ in its corridors. Nick Goss, Isaac Julien and Goshka Macuga, among others, have located points of departure for their work in the library, archive and vast photographic collection, itself organized unconventionally by iconographic subject rather than by artist. The institute, Macuga observed in a 2022 interview, ‘stands as a monument or a structure of knowledge that feeds cultural memory in its own right’.

Warburg gradually recognized that his great subject was cultural memory.

This shadow history of the Warburg Institute as retreat for artists will be asserted more visibly with the opening of its first gallery space this autumn and the launch of a fellowship scheme that will host three creative practitioners annually. The gallery is a core component of the ‘Warburg Renaissance’, a project that stands to transform the building and its use with the construction of new facilities, including an auditorium and a dedicated centre of special collections. Programming will incorporate displays of work by practising artists attuned to Warburg’s achievements, as well as exhibitions that offer contemporary perspectives on Warburgian themes. Opening in January, for instance, is ‘Tarot: Origins & Afterlives’, in which Suzanne Treister’s deck Hexen 2.0 (2009–11) and a virtual reality ‘tarot garden’, designed by Ugo Dossi, will resonate with objects that chart the evolving meanings of tarot since the 15th century.

It is perhaps unremarkable that the Warburg Library, with its promise of latent and lateral connections, should have proved so energizing to those artists who have found their way across its threshold. More surprising, perhaps, is that a long-departed scholar of the Italian renaissance, in the figure of Warburg, should have become an intellectual sparring partner for artists around the world in recent decades. Warburg wrote – or, at least, completed – comparatively few texts and, in isolation, his subjects may seem arcane. His doctoral dissertation, for instance, suggested classical sources, mostly literary, for the billowing drapery of Sandro Botticelli.

What Warburg gradually recognized, however, was that his great subject was cultural memory. He came to see his early lectures and essays as local attempts to understand the transmission of ideas between ages and cultures – and to make sense of images as both vehicles for, and expressions of, such journeys. Most radical was his realization that his argument was best made through images themselves, clustered in groups that demonstrate affinities and transitions. From 1927, Warburg dedicated himself to the arrangement (and continual rearrangement) of the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, a thematic image map named after the Greek goddess of memory that sets out the survival of antiquity through the early modern period and beyond. Incomplete on Warburg’s death two years later, the final version comprised 63 large panels featuring almost 1,000 images spanning (largely Western) visual culture from Etruscan artefacts to a contemporary advertisement for toilet paper. Warburg had engaged, he wrote in the institution’s diary, in ‘a desperate battle with an army of ghosts’.

The Bilderatlas haunts contemporary art, as both means of display and mode of thinking. For many artists, such as Gerhard Richter in his own Atlas project (1962–ongoing), its aesthetic of provisional montage, its open-endedness and its modular nature have made it a touchstone for their own assemblages of images that coalesce or correspond. For others, such as Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz in their Image Atlas (2012), it carries a prophetic charge in relation to the digital culture of the 21st century: to hyperlinking, meme culture and digital-image recognition, for instance.

Perhaps the most powerful of the contemporary responses to Warburg’s thinking about images are those that engage with its migratory context, how the ideas that images carry persist or morph as they cross temporal or geographic boundaries. In Re-enchanting the World (2022), for instance, Roma-Polish artist Małgorzata Mirga-Tas celebrated Roma identity in large textile panels that reimagined the 15th-century frescoes of Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara – paintings which first prompted Warburg to determine connections between European art and the Islamic world.

Or take »L’œuvre d’art d’Aby Warburg et les œuvres d’art des artistes«…! (The Artwork of Aby Warburg and the Artworks of Artists, 2024), a recent installation by Beninese artist Georges Adéagbo at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, which functioned as both homage to and critique of the Bilderatlas. Emulating Warburg’s method in its wall-based arrangement of images and objects from Benin, it drew attention to Warburg’s omissions (among them sub-Saharan Africa) and to how prejudicial ideas may take hold in images as they migrate between cultures.

The Warburg Institute is also fostering more global perspectives on its founder. In autumn 2025, it will host Black Atlas, a newly commissioned film and image-essay by Edward George that promises a dynamic visual history of Black figures in art, from antiquity to the modern era. Propelled by artists, the cultural memory of Warburg himself is forever on the move.

This article first appeared in Frieze Masters, London 2024 under the title ‘The Memory House’.

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_{Main image: Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, ‘Re-enchanting the World’, Venice Biennale 2022, installation view. Courtesy: the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London, Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw, and Karma International, Zurich; photograph: Daniel Rumiancew}