Joseph Koerner


Joseph Leo Koerner 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. Specializing in Northern Renaissance and 19th-century art, Koerner is perhaps best known for his work on German art. After teaching at Harvard from 1989 to 1999, he moved to Frankfurt, where he was Professor of Modern Art History at the Goethe University, and to London, where he held professorships at University College London and the Courtauld Institute before returning to Harvard in 2007. His feature film The Burning Child, a documentary combining personal and cultural history, was released in 2019.

Education and career

Son of the Vienna-born Jewish-American painter Henry Koerner, Joseph Koerner was raised in the Squirrel Hill area of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Vienna, Austria. He graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1976. He attended Yale University where he received his B.A. in History, the Arts, and Letters in 1980. His senior thesis, published in 1983 in German titled Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth, treated the myth of Daedalus and Icarus from Ancient Greek art and literature through James Joyce, with chapters on Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Keats. After a Master of Arts in English at Cambridge University, where supervised by Frank Kermode he wrote on Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and then a year studying philosophy and German literature at Heidelberg University, Koerner received an M.A. and Ph.D. in art history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. In articles on topics ranging from early Chinese bronzes through Renaissance painting to Romanticism and contemporary art, Koerner focused on problems of meaning and developed a distinctive technique: fine-grained analysis of the effect images have on the beholder combined with historical accounts of how and why this effect was engineered. Koerner used this technique most extensively in the opening chapters of his first art history book, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape —written while the author was a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Society of Fellows. 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.
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, studied Albrecht Dürer’s self-portraits and their distortion by Dürer’s disciple, Hans Baldung Grien. The second volume, The Reformation of the Image, focussed on works by Lucas Cranach, and treated Protestant iconoclasm 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 and Peter Weibel on the 2002 exhibition Iconoclash at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. He 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 New Republic. He has published non-fiction in Granta Magazine and book and exhibition reviews in The New York Review of Books.
In Great Britain, Koerner is known for his work as writer and presenter of the three-part Northern Renaissance and the feature-lengthVienna: City of Dreams, both produced in Scotland by the BBC and broadcast on BBC Four. A popular speaker, Koerner has delivered the Slade Lectures at Cambridge and Oxford, the Getty Lectures at USC, the Bross Lectures at University of Chicago, the A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery, the Tanner Lectures on Human Values at Cambridge, and the E. H. Gombrich Lectures in the Classical Tradition at the Warburg Institute. His lectures as the Avenali Chair in the Humanities at U. C. Berkeley treated Bosch 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 in the art of Hieronymus Bosch, including the book, based on Koerner's Mellon Lectures in Washington and widely reviewed, Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life. In it, he revisited the dual-artist format of The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, though with a different trajectory: from an artistry specializing in hatred to one that predicts a modern ethnographic perspective on the human.
A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Association, Koerner has served on the boards of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Frick Art Reference Library, the Warburg Institute, Ralston College, and the American Academy in Berlin. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2006-7 and served as Guest Professor at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. In 2009, Koerner was one of three recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, which funds an academic and creative project on homemaking in Vienna from Otto Wagner to the present day. Based at Harvard, the project has produced the documentary film directed by Koerner, The Burning Child. In 2020 the College Art Association honored him with its 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art.

Personal life

In 2003, Koerner married Margaret K Koerner, also an art historian; a previous marriage ended in divorce.

Works