Aby Warburg: obrazy w ruchu
Aby Warburg: Paintings in Motion

Summary/Abstract: Warburg. Panorama recepcji – this volume published by słowo/obraz terytoria includes Warburg’s reflections on a current of studies about representation and expression, revealing a number of paradoxes ascribed to the German researcher. The latter’s work appears to be suspended between two poles: that which is logical collides with that which is emotional, mania (personified by nymphs) confronts depression (a Greek water deity). Nonetheless, those tensions did not limit Warburg’s research imagination but activate it. While dealing with paintings Warburg did not aim at the construction of interpretive tools serving the establishment of control over the senses but was interested rather in mutual relations between paintings and their wanderings, the uncoordinated motion of paintings and images which change in time, migrate between countries, and absorb new meanings. The Warburgian conception of the painting vividly reveals the performativeness of images comprehended predominantly as the iteration of the painterly gesture and the intentionality of deciphering it, as a dynamic of representation and abstraction. Warburg was interested in the bodily expression of emotion or perhaps the “painterly revelation of the body”: on the one hand, the expression of states and emotions by means of gestures, grimaces, and motions and, on the other hand, the transformation of the body into a painting within the creative process.

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