Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion [Hardcover]

Philippe-Alain Michaud (Author), Sophie Hawkes (Translator), Georges Didi-Huberman (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 2004

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included such celebrated art historians of the twentieth century as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the interpretation of symbolic material. As Phillippe-Alain Michaud shows in this important book, Warburg's own project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Nietzsche and Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a "critical iconology" to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture. Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Vasari, Warburg's method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using "montage-collision" to create textless collections of images, he brought together pagan artifacts and masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, ancient Near East astrology and the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals and the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was the discovery within the art work itself of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism. Challenging normative accounts of Western European classicism, Warburg located the real sources of the Renaissance in the Dionysian spirit, in the expression of movement and dance, in the experience of trance personified in the frenzied nymph or ecstatic maenad.Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion is not only a book about Warburg but a book written with him; Michaud uses Warburg's intuitions and discoveries to analyze other categories of imagery, including the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loie Fuller. It will be essential reading for anyone concerned with the origins of modern art history and the visual culture of modernity.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion frames the work of its subject with a deft intelligence." Thomas Crow Bookforum

About the Author

Philippe-Alain Michaud is the Film Curator at the Musée national d'art moderne-Centre Georges-Pompidou and the author of Le Peuple des images.

The purposeful discontinuities and juxtapositions of Aby Warburg's iconography and how they can be used to analyze other imagery.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 382 pages
• Publisher: Zone (April 9, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890951390
• ISBN-13: 978-1890951399
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,236,109 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars butterflies in the details, May 24, 2004

By 

Alvaro Lewis "jwatson5" (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion (Hardcover)

It is my hope there will be more such pleasing books and articles about Aby Warburg's life and works. M.'s book suffices to place the Florentine and Native American explorations of Warburg in context and in (usefully) anachronistic correspondance. The complete title promises an image in motion, though most of the images Warburg used for his work were static plates. Mightily, M. shows the energies of the figures--the reticulations and folds of serpents and veils--express the flash of a captured ecstatic movement that enthralled Warburg and echoes the Dionysian-pagan vision of Nietzsche.

The pursuit of iconography and quest for symbols and similar energies in art and ritual culture still remain prominent in the writing of working Warburgians. However, Warburg himself gains popularity now too among historians who find interest in his techniques (montage work and avoidance of narrative) and M. makes similar claims for Warburg's relevance to cinema and film theory.

Spanning biography, analysis, theory and history, this book is most handsomely produced (gorgeous b/w plates), utterly readable, and completely cogent.