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| workplaces = [[Harvard University]]<br />[[Goethe University Frankfurt]]<br />[[Courtauld Institute of Art]]<br />[[University College London]]<br />[[Oxford University]]<br />[[Cambridge University]]<br />[[Sciences Po]]<br />
| notable_works = ''Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape'' (1990), ''The Moment of Self-Portraiture'' (1993), ''The Reformation of the Image'' (2004), ''Bosch and Bruegel'' (2016)
| spouse = Margaret Koster Koerner (formerly Margaret Lendia Koster;
| awards = Jan Mitchell Prize (1992), ACE / Mercer's International Book Award (2005), Guggenheim Fellowship (2006), Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award (2009), CAA Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art (2020)
}}
'''Joseph Leo Koerner''' (born June 17, 1958) is an American [[art historian]] and filmmaker. He is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and
Specializing in [[Northern Renaissance]] and 19th-century art, Koerner is best known for his work on [[German art]] 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]], 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.<ref>Archived at [https://ghostarchive.org/varchive/youtube/20211211/KNsek-BWlCo Ghostarchive]{{cbignore}} and the [https://web.archive.org/web/20210908005632/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNsek-BWlCo Wayback Machine]{{cbignore}}: {{cite AV media| url = https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNsek-BWlCo| title = The Burning Child -- Official Trailer | website=[[YouTube]]}}{{cbignore}}</ref> A new German version titled ''Wohnungswanderung'' ('Home Wandering') will be released in 2024.
==Early life and education==
Son of the Vienna-born American painter [[Henry Koerner]], Joseph Koerner was raised in the [[Squirrel Hill]] area of [[Pittsburgh]], [[Pennsylvania]], and in [[Vienna]], Austria. He graduated from [[Taylor Allderdice High School]] in 1976.<ref>{{cite book|title=The Allderdice|date=1976|publisher=Taylor Allderdice High School|location=Seniors: Joseph Koerner|page=52}}</ref> He attended [[Yale University]] where he received his [[Bachelor of Arts|B.A.]] in history 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]], with chapters on [[Ben Jonson]], [[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. The relation between family time and chronological time remains a theme throughout Koerner's work. At Yale he worked for four years as research assistant for historian [[Peter Gay]] while Gay was writing his biography of [[Sigmund Freud]] and training to be a [[lay analyst]].
Receiving in 1980 a Mellon Fellowship for study at [[Clare College, Cambridge]], Koerner earned a [[Master of Arts]] in English Literature. Supervised by [[Frank Kermode]], he wrote a (M.A.) dissertation on the image of the book in Joyce's [[Finnegans Wake]]; this text became part of his 1992 book on [[Paul Klee]], co-written with [[Rainer Crone]]. On a one-year fellowship from the Deutscher Akademische Austauschdienst (1982–1983), he studied [[philosophy]] and German literature at [[Heidelberg University]] with [[Hans-Georg Gadamer]] and Peter Pfaff. Work undertaken at Yale and Cambridge on [[Caspar David Friedrich]], and influenced by a friendship with [[Frank Schirrmacher]], on the German historical tradition shifted Koerner's focus to the history of German art. He received an M.A. (1985) and [[Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D.]] in art history at the [[University of California, Berkeley]], in 1988. His dissertation on self-portraiture in the German Renaissance was advised by [[Svetlana Alpers]], James Marrow, and [[Stephen Greenblatt]].
==Career==
Koerner
''[[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]]. The second volume, ''The Reformation of the Image'' (2004), 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]]. Subsequently, he curated "Earth Tidings," a collaboration between the ZKM and the [[Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe]], 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).<ref>[https://zkm.de/en/person/joseph-leo-koerner ZKM]</ref>
Koerner has also curated exhibitions of his father's work, including a 1997 retrospective at the Austrian National Gallery. Work on his father's art prompted an autobiographical turn, first attempted in lectures delivered widely in the mid-1990s and captured in video "The Family Portrait"[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJmSmhnLi0U]. In these texts, Koerner explores a large portrait of him by his father in which the artwork's creator is discovered to be neither the artist nor the sitter but a loss preceding both. In the 1990s, he was a frequent contributor to the ''[[Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung]]'' and ''[[The New Republic]]''. He has published book and exhibition reviews in [[The New York Review of Books]] and autobiographical non-fiction in [[Granta]] Magazine, anthologized (2020) in [[The Best American Essays]]. He has also written and taught on modern and contemporary artists, including [[Lucian Freud]], [[Francesco Clemente]], Vivienne Koorland, [[Luc Tuymans]], and, most extensively, [[William Kentridge]]. He has also published over seventy scholarly articles, including in [[Critical Inquiry]], [[Representations]], [[October (journal)]], Word & Image, and [[The Art Bulletin]], where he was Book Review Editor in the 1990s.
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 in the Fine Arts]] at the [[National Gallery of Art]] (2008), the [[Tanner Lectures on Human Values]] 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]] (2022). His lectures as the Avenali Chair in the Humanities at U. C. Berkeley (2018) treated [[Hieronymus Bosch]] and William Kentridge under the title, borrowed from Kentridge, "Art in a State of Siege." A book of this title will appear in 2024 at Princeton University Press. Koerner's most recent publications concern the theme of [[enmity]] 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).<ref>[https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/01/bosch-bruegel-joseph-leo-koerner.html Guardian lead review]</ref> 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.<ref>[https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/mitchell_b._merback_reviews_bosch_and_bruegel Critical Inquiry]</ref> Koerner's recent work concerns art in extreme states and contemporary debates concerning of monuments,<ref>[https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/693701?mobileUi=0 RES]</ref> which he is currently pursuing partly in collaboration with Professor [[Sarah Lewis (professor)|Sarah Lewis]].<ref>{{cite web | url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADjTHtfD4xc | title=Monuments: A new course with Sarah Lewis and Joseph Leo Koerner - YouTube | website=[[YouTube]] }}</ref><ref>{{cite web | url=https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/04/scrutinizing-narratives-behind-nations-monuments/ | title=Scrutinizing Narratives Behind Nation's Monuments| date=28 April 2022}}</ref> Koerner's most recent work, including collaboration on exhibitions on [[William Blake]] and [[Philipp Otto Runge]] at the [[Fitzwilliam Museum]] and [[Hamburger Kunsthalle]], and on Casper David Friedrich at the [[Metropolitan Museum of Art]] concern German Romantic art and visual representations of time.▼
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 Polonsky Lectures at Hebrew University (2001), the Slade Lectures at Cambridge (2003) and at Oxford (2013), the Getty Lectures at USC (2005), the Bross Lectures at University of Chicago (2007), the [[A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts]] at the [[National Gallery of Art]] (2008), the [[Tanner Lectures on Human Values]] 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]] (2022). His lecture and seminars as the Avenali Chair in the Humanities at U. C. Berkeley (2018) treated [[Hieronymus Bosch]] and William Kentridge under the title, borrowed from Kentridge, "Art in a State of Siege." A book of this title treating Bosch, Max Beckmann, Kentridge, with an introduction on [[Aby Warburg]] will appear in 2025 at Princeton University Press.
▲
A member of the [[American Academy of Arts and Sciences]] (since 1995) and the [[American Philosophical Society]] (since 2008),<ref>{{Cite web|title=APS Member History|url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Joseph+Leo+Koerner&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced|access-date=2021-04-28|website=search.amphilsoc.org}}</ref> and a Fellow of [[Society of Antiquaries of London]] (since 2021), 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 his research on Reformation art (2006-7) and has served as Visiting Professor at the [[University of Konstanz]] (1991) and the [[Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz]]. 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]] 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''.<ref>[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3783362/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1 IMDb][https://www.clarkart.edu/Research-Academic/Podcast/Season-3/Joseph-Koerner The Clark]</ref><ref>[https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/octo_a_00331 October Magazine]</ref> Koerner has been primary advisor of some twenty-five doctoral dissertations completed at Harvard, the Courtauld Institute, University College London, and Frankfurt University. In 2020 the [[College Art Association]] honored him with its 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art.<ref>[https://www.collegeart.org/news/2020/02/04/announcing-the-2020-awards-for-distinction-recipients CAA]</ref> He a member of the Executive Committee of Harvard's Center for Jewish Studies and currently (until 2027) serves as Chair of Harvard's Department of History of Art and Architecture.
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*''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. New German version ''Wohnungswanderung'' (2024)
==References==
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