Aby Warburg and the Politics of the Stamp

A Warburg MA Group Exhibition. 

Gallery Opening Hours:  
Tuesday - Friday, 10am-6pm 
Saturday, 10am-5pm
Summer Bank Holiday: closed Monday 25 August 2025

FREE ENTRY. NO TICKET REQUIRED.

Aby Warburg saw postage stamps as vital messengers of history and visual culture – their circulation and imagery blending art and memory to construct national and political identities. Aby Warburg and the Politics of the Stamp reveals Warburg’s fascination with stamps and uncovers how these small, everyday symbols carry large historical narratives about our world.

From early letters and archival lecture notes to Warburg’s own designs for a postage stamp, this exhibition explores how nations express their vision of a shared collective past and imagined future through stamp design.

It is no coincidence that Warburg’s ambition to write a ‘history of the stamp’ became most pronounced during the tumultuous decade of the 1920s, still bearing the scars of the First World War. In an era when nations seeing eye-to-eye was far from self-evident, Warburg recognized that the symbolism within stamp imagery held great potential for both political reconciliation and division. As compact, everyday symbols journeying through time and space, stamps epitomised Warburg’s notion of Bilderfahrzeuge, ‘image vehicles’ that carried and transmitted many of the grand political narratives of his age.

Through Warburg’s work it becomes clear that stamps are both a cultural mirror and a document of their time. As part of this scholarship, Warburg championed the importance of preserving a neutral space for reflection and critical thought – a principle as relevant today as a century ago. He believed the medium of the postage stamp held the symbolic potential to create this ‘room for thought’, or Denkraum – a concept central to his theories on the cultural transmission of images and a defining element of his intellectual legacy. This exhibition brings together, for the first time, the remnants of Aby Warburg’s interest in stamps to show how global narratives converge in miniature in these practical and overlooked images.

Aby Warburg and the Politics of the Stamp is curated by Celia Donoso Clemente, Francesca Vine, Laura Bennie, Ruairí Sheanon, Tess Hassan and Tessel Krijgsman.