Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas Published by L'écarquillé

L'écarquillé has released a new edition of Aby Warburg's unfinished Mnemosyne Atlas, reproducing all sixty-three plates with a preface by Roland Recht. The atlas, a work in progress, is a monumental project of iconographic juxtapositions aimed at uncovering a figurative grammar of expressive forces—both emotional and stylistic—through memory. Warburg sought to create 'ghost stories for adults,' revealing engrams and primal rhythms haunting artworks, rather than tracing formalist art-historical lineages. The plates, originally lecture aids, gained autonomy and functioned in dialogue with the Warburg Library, whose books are organized into four themes: image, word, orientation, and action. Recht frequently cites Warburg's working journal to explain this logic of adjacency and montage. Mnemosyne is less a theory than a philosophical gesture toward the universal while preserving the fundamental heterogeneity of its objects. Through an 'iconology of the interval,' Warburg enacted a singular montage-thinking to navigate human thought via the survivals of human life imprinted in artworks.