Joseph Leo Koerner (born June 17, 1958) is an American
art historian and filmmaker. He is currently the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and, since 2008, Senior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of high ...
. Specializing in
Northern Renaissance
The Northern Renaissance was the Renaissance that occurred in Europe north of the Alps. From the last years of the 15th century, its Renaissance spread around Europe. Called the Northern Renaissance because it occurred north of the Italian Renais ...
and 19th-century art, Koerner is best known for his work on
German art
German art has a long and distinguished tradition in the visual arts, from the earliest known work of figurative art to its current output of contemporary art.
Germany has only been united into a single state since the 19th century, and defining ...
and
Early Netherlandish painting. After teaching at Harvard from 1989 to 1999 (as Professor since 1991), he moved to Frankfurt, where he was Professor of Modern Art History at the
Goethe University
Goethe University (german: link=no, Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main) is a university located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealt ...
, and to London, where he held professorships at
University College London
, mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward
, established =
, type = Public research university
, endowment = £143 million (2020)
, budget = ...
and the
Courtauld Institute
The Courtauld Institute of Art (), commonly referred to as The Courtauld, is a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art and conservation. It is among the most prestigious specialist coll ...
before returning to Harvard in 2007. His feature film ''
The Burning Child'', a documentary combining personal and cultural history, was released in 2019.
Education
Son of the Vienna-born American painter
Henry Koerner
Henry Koerner (born Heinrich Sieghart Körner; August 28, 1915 – July 4, 1991) was an Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer best known for his early Magical Realist works of the late 1940s and his portrait covers for Time magazi ...
, Joseph Koerner was raised in the
Squirrel Hill
Squirrel Hill is a residential neighborhood in the East End of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The city officially divides it into two neighborhoods, Squirrel Hill North and Squirrel Hill South, but it is almost universally treated ...
area of
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
,
Pennsylvania
Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...
, and in
Vienna
en, Viennese
, iso_code = AT-9
, registration_plate = W
, postal_code_type = Postal code
, postal_code =
, timezone = CET
, utc_offset = +1
, timezone_DST ...
, Austria. He graduated from
Taylor Allderdice High School
Taylor Allderdice High School is a public high school in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It opened in 1927 and is part of the Pittsburgh Public Schools district. It was named for industrialist and Squir ...
in 1976. He attended
Yale University
Yale University is a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Sta ...
where he received his
B.A.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four yea ...
in History, the Arts, and Letters in 1980. His senior thesis, published in German by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1983 with the title ''Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth'' ("In Quest of the Labyrinth"), treated the myth of
Daedalus and Icarus from
Ancient Greek art and literature through
James Joyce
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He contributed to the modernist avant-garde movement and is regarded as one of the most influential and important writers of ...
, with chapters on
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for t ...
,
John Milton, and
John Keats. An early deconstructive analysis of literary history, the book argued that the story of Daedalus's maze, and the escape from the maze by flight, concerned the problem of time as understood existentially and aesthetically. At Yale he worked for four years as research assistant for historian
Peter Gay while Gay was in training as a
lay analyst. After a
Master of Arts
A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Th ...
in English Literature at
Cambridge University
The University of Cambridge is a Public university, public collegiate university, collegiate research university in Cambridge, England. Founded in 1209 and granted a royal charter by Henry III of England, Henry III in 1231, Cambridge is the world' ...
(M.A. 1982), where supervised by
Frank Kermode
Sir John Frank Kermode, FBA (29 November 1919 – 17 August 2010) was a British literary critic best known for his 1967 work '' The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction'' and for his extensive book-reviewing and editing.
He was ...
he wrote on Joyce's
Finnegans Wake
''Finnegans Wake'' is a novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It is well known for its experimental style and reputation as one of the most difficult works of fiction in the Western canon. It has been called "a work of fiction which combines a bod ...
, and then a year studying
philosophy and German literature at
Heidelberg University
}
Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, (german: Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg; la, Universitas Ruperto Carola Heidelbergensis) is a public university, public research university in Heidelberg, B ...
with
Hans-Georg Gadamer
Hans-Georg Gadamer (; ; February 11, 1900 – March 13, 2002) was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 ''magnum opus'', '' Truth and Method'' (''Wahrheit und Methode''), on hermeneutics.
Life
Family ...
and Peter Pfaff (1983), Koerner received an M.A. (1985) and
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in art history at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
in 1988. In articles on topics ranging from early
Chinese bronzes through
Renaissance painting
Renaissance art (1350 – 1620 AD) is the painting, sculpture, and decorative arts of the period of European history known as the Renaissance, which emerged as a distinct style in Italy in about AD 1400, in parallel with developments which occ ...
to
Romanticism
Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate ...
and contemporary art, Koerner focused on problems of meaning and developed a distinctive technique: fine- grained, phenomenological analyses of the effect images have on the beholder, combined with historical accounts of how, when, and why this effect was created.
Career
Koerner used his characteristic technique most extensively in the opening chapters of his first art history book, ''
Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape'' (1990, Winner of the 1992 Mitchell Prize), written while the author was a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows. During this period, Koerner was a member of the research group Poetik und Hermeneutik in Konstanz in its later phase, 1987–1994, writing on the themes of festival and contingency, or accident. He is currently a member of the Krupp Reimers Forschungsgruppe.
''
Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape'' became the third volume of Koerner's trilogy on German art. The first volume, ''The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art'' (1993), studied
Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits and their distortion by Dürer’s disciple,
Hans Baldung Grien
Hans Baldung (1484 or 1485 – September 1545), called Hans Baldung Grien, (being an early nickname, because of his predilection for the colour green), was a painter, printer, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist, who was considered t ...
. The second volume, ''The Reformation of the Image'' (2004), focussed on works by
Lucas Cranach Cranach is a German-language surname. Notable people with the surname include:
*Augustin Cranach (1554–1595), German painter
*Hans Cranach (c. 1513–1537), German painter
*Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472–1553), German artist
*Lucas Cranach th ...
, and treated Protestant
iconoclasm
Iconoclasm (from Greek: grc, εἰκών, lit=figure, icon, translit=eikṓn, label=none + grc, κλάω, lit=to break, translit=kláō, label=none)From grc, εἰκών + κλάω, lit=image-breaking. ''Iconoclasm'' may also be conside ...
and its aftermath in painting and architecture. Among its claims was that, prior to Protestantism, Christian art had iconoclasm built into it, most centrally in the image of the ruined Christ as crossed-out God. While writing the latter book, Koerner collaborated with
Bruno Latour
Bruno Latour (; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries ...
and
Peter Weibel
Peter Weibel (; born 5 March 1944 in Odessa, USSR) is an internationally known Austrian post-conceptual artist, curator and new media theoretician. He started out in 1964 as a visual poet but soon jumped from the page to the screen within the sen ...
on the 2002 exhibition "Iconoclash" at the ZKM in
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe ( , , ; South Franconian: ''Kallsruh'') is the third-largest city of the German state (''Land'') of Baden-Württemberg after its capital of Stuttgart and Mannheim, and the 22nd-largest city in the nation, with 308,436 inhabitants. ...
. Subsequently, he curated "Earth Tidings," a collaboration between the ZKM and the
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe
The Staatliche Kunsthalle (State Art Gallery) is an art museum in Karlsruhe, Germany.
The museum, created by architect Heinrich Hübsch, opened in 1846 after nine years of work in a neoclassical building next to the Karlsruhe Castle and the ...
, in conjunction with Latour and Weibel's 2020-21 exhibition "Critical Zones." He also was a contributing curator to ZKM's exhibitions "Making Things Public" (2005) and "Reset Modernity" (2016). Koerner has also curated exhibitions of his father's work, including a 1997 retrospective at the Austrian National Gallery. In the 1990s, he was a frequent contributor to the ''
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
The ''Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung'' (; ''FAZ''; "''Frankfurt General Newspaper''") is a centre-right conservative-liberal and liberal-conservativeHans Magnus Enzensberger: Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen' (in German). ''Deutschland Radio'', ...
'' and ''
The New Republic
''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hu ...
''. He has published book and exhibition reviews in
The New York Review of Books
''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of i ...
and creative non-fiction in
Granta
''Granta'' is a literary magazine and publisher in the United Kingdom whose mission centres on its "belief in the power and urgency of the story, both in fiction and non-fiction, and the story’s supreme ability to describe, illuminate and ma ...
Magazine, anthologized (2020) in
The Best American Essays ''The Best American Essays'' is a yearly anthology of magazine articles published in the United States.Robert Atwan (ed.), Adam Gopnick (guest ed.). ''The Best American Essays 2008'', Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008. It was started in 1986 and is ...
. He has also written and taught on modern and contemporary artists, including
Lucian Freud
Lucian Michael Freud (; 8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewis ...
,
Francesco Clemente
Francesco Clemente (born 23 March 1952) is an Italian contemporary artist. He has lived at various times in Italy, India and New York City. Some of his work is influenced by the traditional art and culture of India. He has worked in various art ...
, Vivienne Koorland,
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans (born 14 June 1958) is a Belgian visual artist best known for his paintings which explore people's relationship with history and confront their ability to ignore it. World War II is a recurring theme in his work. He is a key figure ...
, and, most extensively,
William Kentridge
William Kentridge (born 28 April 1955) is a South African artist best known for his prints, drawings, and animated films, especially noted for a sequence of hand-drawn animated films he produced during the 1990s. The latter are constructed by ...
.
In Great Britain, Koerner is known for his work as writer and presenter of the three-part ''Northern Renaissance'' (2006) and the feature-length ''Vienna: City of Dreams'' (2007), both produced in Scotland by the BBC and first broadcast on
BBC Four. A popular speaker, Koerner has delivered the Slade Lectures at Cambridge (2003) and Oxford (2013), the Getty Lectures at USC (2005), the Bross Lectures at University of Chicago (2007), the
A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery (2008), the
Tanner Lectures on Human Values
The Tanner Lectures on Human Values is a multi-university lecture series in the humanities, founded in 1978, at Clare Hall, Cambridge University, by the American scholar Obert Clark Tanner. In founding the lecture, he defined their purpose as fol ...
at Cambridge (2012), the E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute (2016) and the Linbury Lecture at London's
National Gallery
The National Gallery is an art museum in Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, in Central London, England. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The current Director ...
(2022). His lectures as the Avenali Chair in the Humanities at U. C. Berkeley (2018) treated
Hieronymus Bosch
Hieronymus Bosch (, ; born Jheronimus van Aken ; – 9 August 1516) was a Dutch/ Netherlandish painter from Brabant. He is one of the most notable representatives of the Early Netherlandish painting school. His work, generally oil on o ...
and William Kentridge under the title, borrowed from Kentridge, "Art in a State of Siege." Koerner's most recent publications concern the theme of
enmity
An enemy or a foe is an individual or a group that is considered as forcefully adverse or threatening. The concept of an enemy has been observed to be "basic for both individuals and communities". The term "enemy" serves the social function of d ...
in the art of Bosch, including the book, based on Koerner's Mellon Lectures and widely reviewed, ''Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life'' (2016). In it, he revisited the dual-artist format of ''The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art,'' although with a different trajectory: from Bosch's artistry specializing in hatred to
Pieter Bruegel the Elder's art that predicts a modern ethnographic perspective on the human. Pioneering "a way out of the monograph," this framework accords with his conception of the work of art as "inherently doubled," at once embedded in its historical context and anticipating its later receptions. Koerner's recent work concerns art in extreme states and contemporary debates concerning of monuments, which he is currently pursuing partly in collaboration with Professor
Sarah Lewis.
A member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...
(since 1995) and the
American Philosophical Society
The American Philosophical Society (APS), founded in 1743 in Philadelphia, is a scholarly organization that promotes knowledge in the sciences and humanities through research, professional meetings, publications, library resources, and communit ...
(since 2008), and a Fellow of
Society of Antiquaries of London
A society is a group of individuals involved in persistent social interaction, or a large social group sharing the same spatial or social territory, typically subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Soci ...
(since 2021), Koerner has served on the boards of the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, which houses significant examples of European, Asian, and American art. Its collection includes paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It was found ...
, the
Yale University Art Gallery
The Yale University Art Gallery (YUAG) is the oldest university art museum in the Western Hemisphere. It houses a major encyclopedic collection of art in several interconnected buildings on the campus of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. ...
, the
Frick Art Reference Library
The Frick Art Reference Library is the research arm of The Frick Collection. Its reference services have temporarily relocated to the Breuer building at 945 Madison Avenue, called Frick Madison, during the renovation of the Frick's historic build ...
, the
Warburg Institute
The Warburg Institute is a research institution associated with the University of London in central London, England. A member of the School of Advanced Study, its focus is the study of cultural history and the role of images in culture – cro ...
,
Ralston College Ralston College is an institution of higher education that offers in-person degree programs as well as online programs. It began its first in-person offering, an MA in the Humanities, in autumn of 2022 with the authority to grant degrees. Its first ...
, and the
American Academy in Berlin
The American Academy in Berlin is a private, independent, nonpartisan research and cultural institution in Berlin dedicated to sustaining and enhancing the long-term intellectual, cultural, and political ties between the United States and Germany ...
. He received a
Guggenheim Fellowship for his research on Reformation art (2006-7) and has served as Visiting Professor at the
University of Konstanz
The University of Konstanz (german: Universität Konstanz) is a university in the city of Konstanz in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Its main campus was opened on the Gießberg in 1972 after being founded in 1966. The university is Germany's ...
(1991) and the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) is one of the oldest research institutions dedicated to the history of art and architecture in Italy, where facets of European, Mediterranean and global history are investigated.
Founded in 1897 by ...
. In 2009, Koerner was one of three recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, which funded an academic and creative project on homemaking (geographic, architectural, and psychic) in Vienna from
Otto Wagner
Otto Koloman Wagner (; 13 July 1841 – 11 April 1918) was an Austrian architect, furniture designer and urban planner. He was a leading member of the Vienna Secession movement of architecture, founded in 1897, and the broader Art Nouveau move ...
to the present day. Based at Harvard, the project produced the 2013 Slade Lectures series "City of Dreams" and the documentary film written, produced, and directed by Koerner, ''The Burning Child''. In 2020 the
College Art Association
The College Art Association of America (CAA) is the principal organization in the United States for professionals in the visual arts, from students to art historians to emeritus faculty. Founded in 1911, it "promotes these arts and their underst ...
honored him with its 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art.
Personal life
In 2003, Koerner married
Margaret K Koerner (born Margaret Lendia Koster), also an art historian; a previous marriage ended in divorce.
[He has four children.]
''New York Times'' story
/ref>
Books
*''Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth—Der Mythos von Daidalos und Ikarus'', 1983
*''Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape'', 1990; 2nd ed. rev. and expanded, 2008
*''Paul Klee: Legends of the Sign'' (with Rainer Crone
Rainer Crone (June 7, 1942 - June 2016) was a German art historian. He was University Professor emeritus of Contemporary Art and History of Film at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and a specialist in the art of Andy Warhol. He previously ta ...
), 1992
*''The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art'', 1993
*''Unheimliche Heimat—Henry Koerner'' 1915–1991, 1997
*''The Reformation of the Image'', 2004
*''Dürer’s Hands'', 2006
*''Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life'', 2016
*''Dürer's Mobility'', 2022
Filmography
*''Northern Renaissance'' (2006) Writer/Presenter, 3-part series, 180 minutes. Premier: BBC Four (2006).
*''Vienna: City of Dreams'' (2007) Writer/Presenter, 88 minutes. Premiere: BBC Four (2007).
*''The Burning Child'' (completed 2018, released 2019) Writer/Presenter/Producer/and Director (with co-director Christian Bruun). 111 minutes.
References
External links
Faculty Website
Vienna Project at Harvard
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Koerner, Joseph
1958 births
Living people
Alumni of the University of Cambridge
American art historians
Harvard University faculty
Harvard University Department of German faculty
Professors of German in the United States
Writers from Boston
Academics of University College London
Academics of the Courtauld Institute of Art
Writers from Pittsburgh
Writers from Vienna
Yale University alumni
Scholars of Netherlandish art
University of California, Berkeley alumni
Slade Professors of Fine Art (University of Cambridge)
Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Taylor Allderdice High School alumni
Historians from Pennsylvania
Historians from Massachusetts