Joseph Koerner: Difference between revisions

'''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]]. 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>

 

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, 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]], 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. 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]]. After a [[Master of Arts]] in English Literature at [[Cambridge University]] (M.A. 1982), where supervised by [[Frank Kermode]] he wrote on Joyce's [[Finnegans Wake]], and then a year studying [[philosophy]] and German literature at [[Heidelberg University]] with [[Hans-Georg Gadamer]] and Peter Pfaff (1983), Koerner received an M.A. (1985) and [[Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D.]] in art history at the [[University of California, Berkeley]] in 1988. In articles on topics ranging from early [[Chinese bronze]]s through [[Renaissance painting]] to [[Romanticism]] 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.