Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic There is something soothingly institutional about London’s Warburg Institute, something I was anxious might be lost in the wake of a major restoration and rebuilding, but was delighted to find is still very much there. In parts, the interior can look a little like a history of filing systems: stacks of index card drawers atop steel cabinets beside heaving bookshelves, document boxes and wooden cases. But there is nothing technocratic about its contents. The Warburg is home to the unique archive of a scholar dedicated to understanding the role of the image: in the Renaissance, in modern culture and consciousness. Among the most eccentric, occult and enjoyably unpredictable archives in the world, its collection foreshadows Google’s image search, interior designers’ mood boards and the postcard walls of student bedrooms. It has gathered around it whole other archives and collections (including those of Carl Jung and Ernst Gombrich) and a library which is unique in the world in its esoteric breadth. Its London home has just been exquisitely updated, rejigged and opened up to the city without losing an iota of its eccentric charm. Dubbed the “Warburg Renaissance”, the £14.5mn project is intriguing in part because the German art historian Aby Warburg’s archive has always had an arrangement of space at its heart; an understanding of the relationship of images and the transmission of culture in spatial terms, akin to a paradoxically physical memory theatre.Born into the wealthy banking family in Hamburg in 1866, Warburg’s ideas radically reshaped art history and, after his death in 1929, his institute and library continued to further his ideas. In 1933 it was moved to London, complete on one ship that sailed up the Thames, to escape the clutches of the Nazis. It first occupied part of Thames House (now home to MI5), before ending up in London University. The ellipse was pivotal to Warburg’s understanding of the cosmos, a shape with two focal points, embodying the notion that there is always more than one perspectiveArchitects HaworthTompkins have rationalised and opened up the building, which sits in a brick structure designed by Charles Holden, best known as the architect of some of London’s finest Tube stations and the looming Senate House nearby. The Warburg building dates from 1958, a couple of decades after Holden’s heyday and a time when money was tighter, but it was always a good, solid piece of municipal design, albeit one which had been clogged up over the years and which never quite recovered from initial compromises: it is shared, slightly uncomfortably, with the Slade School of Fine Art. Entering from Woburn Square, you are guided by the sight of a Coade stone frieze, a remnant from the houses that occupied this site before it was bombed in the second world war and eventually demolished. It is a remarkable inheritance, a copy of a part of a second century AD Roman sarcophagus in the Louvre depicting the muses, the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. And it was Mnemosyne, goddess of memory, to whom Warburg dedicated his most admired experiment: the 1927-1928 “Bilderatlas Mnemosyne”, a series of constantly shifting arrangements of images that he pinned to black hessian-covered wooden panels, intended to illuminate the connections between cultural artefacts. The original wooden “Mnemosyne” sign from Warburg’s library in Hamburg surmounts the new door.This striking cultural, temporal and topological coincidence, which seems almost too good to be true, gives way to the new Kythera Gallery, the Warburg’s first space for exhibitions open to the public. In January 2025, its inaugural show will explore the evolution of Tarot (which director Bill Sherman calls “the most perfect representation of Warburgian ideas”) and includes part of the Sola Busca, the first known pack of tarot cards, and designs by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frieda Harris.The gallery culminates in a curious white box with some scrawled and smudged text on its outside. It looks like it may be an incomplete installation; a reflection, perhaps, on the inevitably incomplete nature of this collection? This is, appropriately, “library of exile”, donated to the Warburg by the artist and ceramicist Edmund de Waal. Created for the 2019 Venice Biennale, its porcelain-painted walls are inscribed with the names of the great lost libraries of the world. Inside were more than 2,000 works by authors in exile that de Waal recently donated to Mosul University Library in Iraq, after it was bombed and looted by Islamic State militants. The Warburg is now recreating that library using his list of authors and titles, while also finding new ways to activate the library’s shelves, including a reading room on the history of the Institute and supporting materials for individual temporary exhibitions.The other major addition to the building is a 140-seat public auditorium characterised by an elliptical concrete ceiling feature — a reference to the form of Warburg’s reading room and echoing exactly the proportions of its central skylight. The calculation of these proportions was helped along by Warburg’s friend Albert Einstein, whose wonderfully modest sketch (based on the elliptical path of the planet Mars through space) is on display in the gallery. The ellipse was pivotal to Warburg’s understanding of the cosmos, a shape with two focal points, embodying the notion that there is always more than one perspective, things always connect to each other. Beyond this the changes are subtle but many. Views out to the street and deep into the building have been opened up so that the structures seem connected rather than isolated; white-glazed brick courtyards have been turned into reading rooms and archives; libraries accommodating the 360,000-strong (and expanding) collection of books are airier and lighter; a new external facade is executed in subtly modelled brick, in reference to the architecture of 1920s Hamburg — one of the epicentres of the brief burst of Expressionist architecture and the style in which Warburg’s original institute was built in 1926. Pivotally, the library has reclaimed Warburg’s intended order, its floors arranged vertically by Warburg’s themes: image, word, orientation and action/orientation, one above the other.Despite the long-standing presence of his archive in London, Warburg’s legacy has tended to be more highly valued on the Continent. A reconstruction of his Bilderatlas at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in 2020, however, revived interest and provoked a ripple of excitement through an art world still in thrall to Warburg’s expansive and inclusive vision. This considered, careful and restrained renaissance at the library’s home might just make it a little more visible and, perhaps, a little more appreciated in its not-so-new home. ‘Memory & Migration: The Warburg Institute 1926-2024’ is at the Warburg Institute until December 20. ‘Tarot: Origins & Afterlives’, January 31-April 30 2025, warburg.sas.ac.uk Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
