At the Warburg

A shifting array of hundreds of reproductions showing the art and architecture of two millennia, carefully selected and arranged without regard for orthodox historical conventions, Aby Warburg’s monumental, lost Bilderatlas Mnemosyne (‘Picture Atlas of Memory’) was intended to reveal a secret visual history that charted the development of ancient cosmological iconography, its seeming disappearance in late antiquity and recrudescence in the Renaissance and afterwards.

By bringing together hundreds of reproductions under various thematic headings, Warburg hoped to demonstrate the strange persistence of certain images, gestures, compositions and meanings through time – a concrete evolutionary tree of visual forms that would disclose hidden historical patterns. The relations between the images, with little or no supplementary text, would point towards the mysterious subterranean life of visual images that subsists in the cultural imagination and collective memory.

The work, by then on its third version, was left unfinished at Warburg’s death in 1929. His circle at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg in Hamburg tried to keep the Bilderatlas going, but with limited success. To escape the Nazis, the KBW was moved to London in 1933, where it became the Warburg Institute. The large, black hessian panels on which Warburg had been constructing his great work were lost.

In 1936, Ernst Gombrich was tasked with reconstructing and completing the Bilderatlas by Gertrud Bing, who had been a librarian at the KBW and Warburg’s closest collaborator on the project (she was later director of the institute in London). But Gombrich thought the Bilderatlas lacking in scientific rigour and flawed in principle. His reconstruction of the projectstagnated, and eventually the two thousand or so images that had made up Warburg’s final working selection were reabsorbed into the archive. No record was kept of what they were or where into the collections they had gone, and the work was thought to be definitively lost. A properly reconstructed version of the Bilderatlas, based on photographs and written descriptions of the original, didn’t became available until 2020.

In the interim, the Bilderatlas became a legend (not unlike Walter Benjamin’s similarly unfinished and unfinishable Passagenwerk): an esoteric and perhaps tragic attempt to gain a glimpse of the occulted angel of history, whose perdurable sinews would be conjured in negative space by marshalling thousands of mysterious traces into a grand, kaleidoscopic hallucination.

The Bilderatlas remains a prophetic work, which both travelled to and came from places that the linear, rationalist narratives of art historical writing, or indeed language, could not go; it sought what had moved and moves beneath the surface. Like the collages and montages of Dada and Surrealism, it spoke into a world where ideas of rational thought and linear history had been shattered by catastrophic violence. No wonder that Gombrich, whose intellect tended more towards order, didn’t get along with the work’s incipient chaos or the strange unconscious history it intimated.

Edward George’s exhibition Black Atlas, at the Warburg Institute until the end of January 2026, operates in the tradition of the Bilderatlas. George, one of the founders of the Black Audio Film Collective and host of the Strangeness of Dub series on Morley Radio, spent a year at the Warburg examining an archive file entitled ‘The Image of the Black’. The file was commissioned in the 1960s by Jean and Dominique de Menil, in response to the civil rights movement in the US. Two archives were created, in Houston and Paris; the Parisian collection was transferred to the Warburg in 1999. The archives now contain more than thirty thousand reproduced images of paintings, sculptures, decorative and popular arts, all of which contain, in some aspect, representations of African or African-descended people. Most of the objects were created by Europeans.

From this archive of traces, George has created a sequence of nine large Bilderreihen (‘image series’), presented in the gallery on black-backed panels like Warburg’s original compositions, and an hour-long film of hundreds of images from the archive file. George narrates over a churning soundtrack of electronic noise and saxophone by Crystabel Efemena Riley and Seymour Wright.

The title, Black Atlas, plays on the meanings of ‘atlas’ as both a picture-book or map and as the name of the Greek Titan whose forced labour was said to hold up the sky and after whom the Atlantic Ocean is named. The connection suggests not only the topography of New World colonialism and African enslavement, but also the foundational significance of enslaved and colonised labour in the creation of the modern world. There is also a nod toward the historical field whose cultural interconnections were named long ago by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic.

Warburg had hoped to reveal the transit of the ancient gods and their world across time and space; George brings images together in ways that seek, as his film narration explains, to show both ‘the movement of images of race through time’ and also, more expansively, ‘the warping of time through images of race’.

Like Warburg’s Bilderatlas, the film is structured thematically, with sections that focus on particular patterns of form and intent in European depictions of Black people and Black bodies. It opens with an extraordinary section on dogs: while George riffs on Derrida’s lecture ‘The Animal That Therefore I Am’, the montage isolates the recurrent presence of dogs in paintings that feature Black subjects, in any context or arrangement. The dogs look up at the unfolding action, cower before their master or sit duty dutifully at his heel, scavenge at the table for scraps, bark, hunt, fight: no matter what the scene depicts or what role its Black subjects take, the dogs always seem to be there. Are they mute witnesses – to crime, to slavery, to colonialism, to racialisation and prejudice? Are they the artists’ or the viewers displaced awareness of this crime, displaced into an animal because the function of race-thinking is precisely to obscure, to minimise, to obviate?

Their role is certainly obscure: it hints, in the way that Warburg’s technique allows so well, at the presence of powerful but secret processes, which move beneath the level of understanding but are very real and leave clear visible traces. And in another way, all these dogs point at things which are not obscure at all but still require recovery, explanation and remembering: the proverbial fact that the English in the colonies treated their dogs better than their human subjects, the dehumanising colonial language of the bestiary, the attack dogs of police and coloniser, and so on.

The work as a whole is an extraordinary compendium of images of race and racism, and it constitutes a shocking primer on the everyday visual training that the peoples of the West underwent for hundreds of years while the edifice of race-thinking was constructed, and which we still undergo in different forms. Mnemosyne, the daughter of Gaia and Uranus, was the goddess of memory; her children were the nine Muses. Nothing in modern history has been subject to such violent and intentional forgetting as the history of empire, and with it the history of race and racialisation.

The magic effect of Warburg’s visionary method is to bring to light what cannot be remembered or known in words, and to display in images the secret dynamics that sustain image, idea and ideology through time. It is a method that puzzles orthodox art history, but as George shows it is well suited to apprehending the complex, manifold difficulties posed by the attempt to recover – and really to see – the vast ramifications of colonialism, slavery and their aftermath across the globe and through the centuries.