Joseph Leo Koerner (born June 17, 1958, Pittsburgh, PA) is an American art historian. The Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard, he is best known for his work on German art. After teaching at Harvard from 1989 to 2000, he moved to London, teaching at University College, London and the Courtauld Institute before returning to Harvard in 2007.
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Son of the Viennese-born American painter Henry Koerner, Koerner was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Vienna, Austria. Attending Yale University, he received his B.A. in 1980. His senior thesis, published in 1983 in German as 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. After an M.A. in English at Cambridge University (M.A. 1982) and a year studying philosophy at Heidelberg University (1983), Koerner received his Ph.D. in art history at U. C. Berkeley in 1988. In articles written in graduate school, on topics ranging from early Chinese bronzes through Renaissance painting to contemporary art, Koerner focused on problems of meaning and developed his distinctive technique: fine-grained analysis of the effect images have on the beholder. Koerner used this 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.[1]
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), treated Protestant iconoclasm and its aftermath. 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 Great Britain, Koerner is known for his work as writer and presenter of the Northern Renaissance (2006) and Vienna: City of Dreams (2008). A popular speaker, Koerner has delivered the Slade Lectures at Cambridge (2003)], the Getty Lectures at USC (2005), the Bross Lectures at University of Chicago (2007), and the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery (2008). Koerner’s most recent publications concern the theme of enmity in the art of Hieronymus Bosch. In 2003 he married Margaret Koster Koerner, also an art historian; a previous marriage had ended in divorce.[2]
In 2009, Koerner was one of three recipients of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award.