In recent years, the Warburg Institute has directly or indirectly become a centre of attraction for artists. It is not surprising that the institute and Aby Warburg have become increasingly important as a monument or a structure of knowledge that feeds cultural memory in its own right and that the institute and Aby Warburg have become the centre of intellectual debate. (1)  The innovative, comparative approach to image analysis followed in the Bilderatlas arrangements has been examined by thinkers, historians and artists. In particular, the intellectual pathways of meaning mapped in the panel assemblages seem to be extremely diverse and fascinating. (2) 

Georges Didi-Huberman argues that Warburg shared the same degree of experimentation and intuition as the avant-garde artists of his time. The tendency of avantgardists such as Kurt Schwitters, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille and Man Ray to establish commonalities between disparate or heterogeneous visual images is equally valid for Warburg. (3) It is possible to associate Warburg’s passionately constructed unusual image sequences and the display techniques he developed with a line of artists ranging from Duchamp to Gerhard Richter. At this stage, we can mention the works of artists such as Hito Steyerl, Arthur Jafa, Liu Chuang, which are shaped with explicit references to Warburg in both Bilderatlas-themed and independent events. As a matter of fact, in the recent period, in addition to artistic productions reconciled with Warburg’s plastic, it can also be mentioned the prevalence of intercultural subject preferences that offer contemporary perspectives with the themes they develop.  

For example, RB Kitaj, analysing the image sequences on Bilderatlas panels, develops a personal theory of the image. Likewise, Cornelia Parker, Nick Goss, Isaac Julien, Isaac Julien, Tobias Buche and Goshka Macuga identify the starting points of their work with reference to libraries, archives and large collections of photographs organised with iconographic links. Tobias Buche in particular develops arrangements that resemble information boards referring to the atlas concept. Using photographic icons and documents with cultural ties to different times and places, his installations recall Warburg’s panels with their silent visuality on a textless plane. The idea of creating a comprehensive linguistic field makes the arrangements complex but attractive, with a multitude of narrative possibilities. (4)

Similarly, the atlas format favoured by Taryn Simon and Aaron Swartz is laden with prophecies about the evolving digital culture of the 21st century. Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, Trevor Paglen and Georges Adéagbo’s installations at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in 2020 were both an homage to and a critique of Bilderatlas Mnemosyne. Adéagbo’s installation, which mimics the method used to organise images and objects, draws attention to the possibilities of Warburg and how preconceived ideas can become embedded in images as they migrate between cultures. 

As a result, the Bilderatlas continues to influence contemporary art and artists, both as a means of display and as a way of thinking. Perhaps the strongest contemporary response to Warburg’s ideas about images is concerned with how the ideas conveyed by images persist and transform as they cross temporal or geographical boundaries. For many artists, the aesthetics of ephemeral montage and its open-ended and modular nature have made it a touchstone for their own image assemblages. The following information is therefore clear: Warburg, who changed the perception of art with radical questions about unconscious memory, has become a fundamental reference and subject of study in contemporary visual art practices, especially with his Bilderatlas. And it is a very important source on the source and origin of decisive thoughts and the displacement and circulation of images. ♦