Philippe-Alain Michaud, "Ghost Stories for the Full Grown-up: Aby Warburg's 'Mnemosyne,' or Art History as Cinema"

Philippe-Alain Michaud is Film Curator at the Museum of Modern Art-Centre Pompidou, Paris, and author of the book Aby Warburg and the Image in Movement (Zone Books, 2004).

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) created a new anthropological paradigm for the history of art which illustrates the processes by which memory of the past affects culture. His unfinished project "The Image Atlas Mnemosyne" traced the influence of pagan antiquity on modern European civilization in all its aspects: social, political, religious, scientific, philosophical, literary and artistic. Analyzing non-European iconography, he conceived the figure of the Denkraum, a space for symbolic thinking where the relation of human beings and their environment is understood in terms of concrete and organic shapes.

The lecture will be followed by a screening of silent short films from the collection of the Musee du Louvre (16 mm, 20 min.).