Throughout 2026 events are taking place internationally to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of André Malraux, the adventurer, writer and first French Minister of Culture.
The Warburg Institute, School of Advanced Study, and the Courtauld Institute, University of London, together with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, are celebrating this occasion with a conference to be held on 4-5 December 2026, preceded by a film screening of Malraux’s Espoir, Sierra de Teruel (1940) at Birkbeck on 3 December 2026.
Aby Warburg, André Malraux and Pablo Picasso were fascinated in their lifetime by the persistence and metamorphoses of images and the inheritance of world art. Today, Malraux’s musée imaginaire, or ‘museum without walls’, extends to the virtual universe. The conference aims to foreground new research on these overlapping themes, while also Warburg, Malraux and Picasso as individual figures who profoundly shaped the meaning and reception of art. Bringing together an impressive range of international speakers, it will advance critical responses to their work and cover topics ranging from their relation to theatre and performance to the re-interpretation of their writings and archives as well as their continuing relevance for contemporary art and present-day image circulation in the age of AI.
Convenors: Professor Sarah Wilson, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Courtauld and Dr Devika Singh, Senior Lecturer in Curating at the Courtauld.
French Art and Thought research cluster, Courtauld Institute, University of London, in partnership with The Warburg Institute, Musée national Picasso-Paris, The British Museum, Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, Institut Français and the Service enseignement supérieur, recherche et innovation, French Embassy, United Kingdom, Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée (CNC) and the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) UK.
Programme
Conference: Day One
The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB
9.00 Registration opens
9.30 Welcome
Bill Sherman, The Warburg Institute
9.40 Conference Introduction
Sarah Wilson and Devika Singh
10.00 Session 1
Chair: Hans C. Hönes, University of Abderdeen
Wu Yanwu (China Academy of Art)
Tracing Astrological Metamorphoses: East Asian Cosmology and Warburg’s Bilderwanderung in Northern Italy
Silvia Loreti (The American University of Rome)
Romeing. On Timescapes in the Album-Atlas-Archive
Youxi Chen (University of Cambridge)
Serpentine Thinking, the Power of Rhetoric in Warburg’s Kreuzlingen Lecture
Giulia Zanon (Università Iuav di Venezia)
Gabriele d’Annunzio, ‘Dealer of Ecstasy’: Warburg’s Kriegsliteratur lecture (1915) and the Battlefield of Image Survival
Discussion
11.30 Refreshments
12.00–13.00 Keynote 1
Georges Didi-Huberman, FBA (EHESS)
From Archive to Atlas, from Images to Denkbilder
13.00 Lunch
Provided for speakers only
14.00 Session 2
Chair: Flora Dennis, The Warburg Institute
Marie de Testa (Princeton University)
Apparitions and Apparati: The Import of the Theatrical Stage in Aby Warburg´s conception of Art History
Zoe A. Keller (Goldsmiths)
From Archetype to Anarchetype: Recalibrating Knowledge in the Eranos Archive
Martina Mazzotta (The Warburg Institute)
Aby Warburg and Max Ernst: Beyond the History of Art – with Picasso and Malraux
Yimin Xiang (Glasgow School of Art)
Panel, Box, Table: A Genealogy of the Container after Warburg
Discussion
15.30 Refreshments
16.00–17.00 Keynote 2
Glenn Lowry (Director emeritus, The Museum of Modern Art, New York)
The musée imaginaire in the 21st century: A Contemporary Response
18.00 Evening programme
For speakers only
