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 Two
Courtauld Institute, Vernon Square, London WC1X 9EW, Lecture Theatre 2
9.30 Registration opens
9.45 Welcome
Mark Hallett, Courtauld Institute, Cécile Debray, Musée national Picasso-Paris, and Anne Malraux
Introduction to Day Two
Sarah Wilson and Devika Singh
10.00 Session 3
Chair: Sarah Wilson, Courtauld Institute
Damaso Randulfe (London Metropolitan University)
In the Garden There Are Images of You’: Antifascist Compositions with the Disappeared
Ana Redondo Plaza (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)
The Queen of Sheba, Piero della Francesca and André Malraux: The Copy of the Arezzo Fresco as a Device for the Symbolic Activation of the musée imaginaire
Jelena Stojković (Oxford Brookes)
The Sculptural Thinking of Japanese Avant-Garde in the 1950s
Nicholas Friedland (Courtauld Institute)
The Voices of Stridence: Malraux, Lyotard
Discussion
11.30 Refreshments
12.00 Session 4
Chair: Hugo Daniel, Musée national Picasso-Paris
Ed Kettleborough (University of Bristol)
Warburg as Maenad: RB Kitaj and the Fate of the musée imaginaire
Louise Bouver-Zieleskiewicz (Aix-Marseille University)
A Moving Atlas: Hollis Frampton’s Magellan and the Metahistory of Cinematic Images
Ada Naval (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
Line Dance Drawing. Drawing as Impulse in Warburg, Malraux, and Picasso
Discussion
13.00 Lunch
Provided for speakers only
Lunch-time screening of Malraux’s Shoes (2012). Single-channel video, 42 minutes
Written and performed by Dennis Adams
Directed by Dennis Adams and Paul Colin
14.00 Session 5
Chair: Darren O’Donoghue, Tate archives
Francisco Prado-Vilar (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Picasso in Exile: Guernica in the Warburg Hall and the Museum without Walls
Johan Popelard (Musée national Picasso-Paris)
Picasso and Exorcism
Alba Giménez Gil (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia)
The Nature of the Beast: Symbolic Afterlives of Violence in Guernica and the Spanish Cultural Imaginary
Response by artist Goshka Macuga
Discussion
15.30 Refreshments
16.00 Session 6
Chair: Devika Singh, Courtauld Institute
Mariabruna Fabrizi (ENSA Paris-Est, Université Gustave Eiffel)
Epistemics of Space: Spatialised and Distributed Cognition in Warburg, Malraux and Contemporary Digital Platforms
Emilie Goudal (Université de Lille)
‘A sign of the total eclipse of History’: Museum without walls, Algerian Atlas Mnemosyne and the voices of images.
Emily Butler (Courtauld Institute)
After the Imaginary Museum: Artists on Enclosure in the Age of AI
Guilherme Giufrida (MASP, Sao Paulo)
The Imaginary Museum’s Replica: Sandra Gamarra Heshiki’s Curatorial-Artistic Practice
Discussion
17.30 Drinks reception
Open to all
19.30 Exhibition M: A Re-Enactment by Goshka Macuga (2026). Performance, 40 min.
Swedenborg Hall, 20-21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1A 2TH
Please note this is a separately ticketed event
