Congratulations to Professor Joseph Koerner, who was recently elected to be a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Founded in 1707, the Society of Antiquaries is a learned society consisting of archaeologists, historians, anthropologists, and art historians “unified by their curiosity in the human journey through time.”

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In a recent episode of The Clark Art Institute's podcast, "In the Foreground: Conversations on Art & Writing", Professor Joseph Koerner spoke on the themes of history, trauma and wonder:

 "Caro Fowler speaks with Joseph Leo Koerner, professor of art history at Harvard University, who teaches and writes about the history of art from the late Middle Ages to the present day, with an emphasis on Northern Renaissance art. Joseph discusses his early focus on literary studies, psychoanalysis, and romanticism, and how his curiosity about the traumatic core of...

Joseph Koerner heard a familiar sound while on a trip to Washington, D.C., in May: the hum of billions of cicadas emerging after 17 years of dormancy.

The Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture felt unsettled by the eerie whine. But the cacophony also ignited a deep memory of cicada seasons past and lessons about the interplay between life and art, ideas he brings to his own teaching, particularly when working with students just learning how to make a personal connection to a work — something he will be doing in...

Joseph Leo Koerner’s curatorial intervention—“Earth Tidings,” a stand-alone exhibit featuring fifteen major paintings and drawings, including Joos van Craesbeeck’s remarkable Temptation of St. Anthony and two works by Caspar David Friedrich and —is finally on view in the large exhibition “CRITICAL ZONES: Observatories for Early Politics” at the Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe. Accompanied by a large catalogue just published by MIT (with three essays by Koerner), the show is largely the brainchild of Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel and concerns the science and politics of climate change...

Professor Joseph Koerner has been announced as the 2020 recipient of the Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art by the College Art Association.

Joseph Leo Koerner is the recipient of the 2020 Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award for Writing on Art. His achievements include four landmark books on sixteenth-century paintings: The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (University of Chicago Press, 1993), The...

Joseph Koerner’s film The Burning Child, released earlier this year, will be screened this autumn with Professor Koerner in conversation at the ...

Joseph Koerner’s film The Burning Child, released this year, will be screened this autumn with Professor Koerner fielding questions at: the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Sunday, September 22 ), the...

On October 18th, Joseph Koerner delivered the keynote lecture opening the international Hans Baldung Grien conference in Karlsruhe, Germany. His paper, titled “Der Fall Baldung” (“The Case of Baldung”) addressed the contemporary relevance of the artist (as portraitist of self and of enemies) in anticipation for the monumental Baldung exhibition opening in Karlsruhe next year. 

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On View
January 20, 2018–May 6, 2018
University Teaching Gallery, Harvard Art Museums

The history of art is usually presented as a forward march, with individual works studied as points along a path of progress to the present. This installation—matching the Harvard survey course it accompanies—reverses that familiar direction. The sequence proceeds from recent art back to the Renaissance. This retrospective history of art is meant to capture the point of view of artists themselves, who have, for generations, tried—variously—to preserve,...