Joseph Leo Koerner

Chair of Department of History of Art and Architecture; Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture; Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Senior Fellow Society of Fellows, Harvard University. Primary area of interest is European Art 1400-present. In addition to teaching, has organized teaching exhibitions at Harvard on Early Netherlandish Painting (1990), German Renaissance Art (1993), Pieter Bruegel (1995) and Netherlandish prints 1550-1675 (1999). At the Austrian National Gallery in 1997, he curated a retrospective of the work of his father, the painter Henry Koerner. 2002-2021, he collaborated with Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel on four at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Books include Die Suche nach dem Labyrinth--Der Mythos von Daedalus und Ikarus (1983), Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (1990), The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (1993), The Reformation of the Image (2004), Bosch and Bruegel: from Enemy Painting to Everyday Life (2016), Dürer's Mobility (2022), and Art in a State of Siege (2024). Koerner wrote and presented the three-part series Northern Renaissance for BBC Television, as well as the feature-length documentary Vienna: City of Dreams, premiered on the BBC in December 2007. He wrote, produced, and directed the feature-film "The Burning Child (2019, released in new German version 2024). Koerner was awarded the Jan Mitchell Prize for the History of Art in 1992. He is a member of the American Philosophical Society (since 2008). He received the 2009 Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Achievement Award and the 2020 CAA Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing on Art. He has delivered the Slade Lectures at Cambridge University and Oxford University, the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery in Washington, the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge University, and the Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute.