Frieze

Brian Dillon

There is pain and suffering in these pictures, but also a sense of pure possibility, as though the space between images, or between panels, contained only wind, or the beating of wings.

New York Times

Martha Schwendener

A project of art history lore, predating works like Marcel Duchamp’s Boîte-en-valise…. the waves made by Warburg’s atlas still ripple in works like Gerhard Richter’s Atlas…. Warburg was interested in creating a visual system that would help us understand how we came to be where we are, and how we are profoundly tied to the past and to the natural world.

Art In America

Lucy Ives

If the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne shows more than it tells, this is by design. Warburg hoped to create a visual tool that would foster what he saw as art’s innate ability to generate reflective, dialectical distance for the viewer, a key to the civilizing process: by means of this Distanz, states of rational detachment can co-exist with animalistic frenzy, the sober philosopher meets the rampaging maenad, over and over through the ages. This seems like an odd intellectual goal now, but the panels hold an aesthetic fascination that either exceeds this magic theory or, paradoxically, proves it. I find them strange and hard to look away from ...

Artnet

Editors

...Brings together all panels of Warburg’s unfinished magnum opus for the first time after his death. It is a must-see for everyone who is intrigued with reimagining the world

London Review Of Books

Chloe Aridjis

Warburg juxtaposed reproductions of artworks with astronomical and astrological charts, diagrams, advertising brochures, newspaper clippings, postage stamps and photographs, in an attempt to create something like a flowchart of Western civilisation, mapping the migratory routes of images with their undertow of human drama and emotion. [...] It’s all the more fascinating for being inherently melancholic, incantatory and unresolved (Matthew Vollgraff of the Warburg Institute calls it a modernist ruin); by reconstructing the atlas, the curators have revived it as a site of contemplation.

Apollo

At the time of his death Warburg’s unfinished magnum opus consisted of nearly 1,000 reproductions of artworks that traced visual motifs and themes across the centuries. Warburg’s arrangement of these images into 63 panels was photographed as it stood in 1929; the reproductions were subsequently dispersed and absorbed into Warburg Institute’s collections. In a feat of archival research, these ‘original’ images have been tracked down, rephotographed in colour and published as a book for the first time.

Antiques and The Arts Weekly

Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, this commentary volume provides an explication of each of the panels constituting Warburg’s Modernist masterpiece. The Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was begun in 1925 and ended with Warburg’s death in 1929. He created it as a series of 63 large, themed panels, each featuring a constellation of images – postcards, maps, adverts, reproductions of artworks – that trace the migration of symbols from antiquity to the present.

Artforum

Nick Mauss

A project intended to abolish the hierarchies that bind the hands of art and history. The Bilderatlas is a model for thinking like history’s overloaded switchboard operators, in somersaults and arabesques, and a reminder that even our most progressive institutions depend on the “border-police bias” that Warburg defied nearly a century ago.

Brooklyn Rail

David Carrier

Not really a book at all, but an exercise in visual free association.... [A] gloriously puzzling work of art.

Brooklyn Rail

David Carrier

A gloriously puzzling work of art.

Forbes

Jonathon Keats

Warburg’s unfinished masterpiece has now been reconstructed… Recovering the lost pieces was a feat of dedication that even Warburg would have admired.