Abstract
At the same time that Aby Warburg was assembling his library and organizing his Bildatlas Mnemosyne, art critics and writers theorized late nineteenth-century collecting in Paris in metaphoric terms. Over and again, art collections were described as a bouquet, a conversation, a book, or indeed as a painting in and of itself put together by an ‘amateur’. By creating an ensemble, the amateur proposed a metaphorical mode of knowledge similar to that celebrated by Aby Warburg. This article considers the ways in which the arrangement and spaces of the late nineteenth-century amateurs, as seen in newspaper articles, sales catalogue essays and other texts and photographs, positioned the collector of paintings, but also of drawings and prints and rare books, in contradistinction to the development of the museum and proposed alternative modes of viewing and of knowing. The interdisciplinarity of Warburg’s focus on image, word, orientation and action is paralleled in many private collections.
Highlights
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At the same time that Aby Warburg was assembling his library and organizing his Bildatlas Mnemosyne, art critics and writers theorized late nineteenth-century collecting in Paris in metaphoric terms
By creating an ensemble, the amateur proposed a metaphorical mode of knowledge similar to that celebrated by Aby Warburg
Summary
At the same time that Aby Warburg was assembling his library and organizing his Bildatlas Mnemosyne, art critics and writers theorized late nineteenth-century collecting in Paris in metaphoric terms. Both the concept of combinatory thought and the intuitive process are echoed, albeit in a less thorough way, by many private collections of the late nineteenth century, those years in which Warburg was developing his ideas That both place and space change the meaning of pictures is crucial to understanding the Bildatlas and the importance of the arrangements of the amateurs.. In one account after another, the viewer ambles, like a flâneur, from artwork to artwork in an unexpected path The contrast of this kind of meandering stroll with a walk down a straight path whose end is in sight as one progresses, corresponds to the differing ways that the public collection of the museum and the private collection of the amateur were arranged at the end of the nineteenth century. Keeping with the metaphor of flowers with which we began the discussion of color, I will turn briefly to a guide to gardens
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