Art in a State of Siege - Professor Joseph Koerner in conversation

Professor Joseph Koerner in conversation with Professor Alixe Bovey (Courtauld Institute) and Warburg Director professor Bill Sherman.

What do artworks look like in extreme cases of collective experience? What signals do artists send when enemies are at the city walls and the rule of law breaks down, or when a tyrant suspends the law to attack from inside? Art in a State of Siege tells the story of three compelling images created in dangerous moments and the people who experienced them—from Philip II of Spain to Carl Schmitt—whose panicked gaze turned artworks into omens.

Professor Koerner returns to the Warburg Institute where he delivered the 2016 E. H. Gombrich Lectures on the Classical Tradition. His trio of lectures entitled The Evidence of Images: Bosch, Beckmann, Kentridge eventually became Art in a State of Siege (Princeton, March 2025).
 
Joseph Leo Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and, since 2008, Senior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. His books include Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, The Reformation of the Image, Bosch and Bruegel: From Enemy Painting to Everyday Life, and Art in a State of Siege. Koerner wrote and presented the three-part series Northern Renaissance and the feature-length documentary Vienna: City of Dreams for BBC Television. He wrote, directed, and produced The Burning Child (2018) for cinema release. A new German version, Wohnungswanderung, was premiered in 2025.
 
From 2000-2007 Koerner was Professor at University College London and the Courtauld Institute, and he has delivered the Slade Lectures Cambridge (2003) and Oxford (2013), the Tomàs Harris Lectures at University College London (1995), the Tanner Lectures at Cambridge (2012), the E. H. Gombrich Lectures at the Warburg Institute (2016), and the Linbury Lecture (2021) at the National Gallery. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and Vienna, Austria, Koerner studied at Yale (BA, History the Arts and Letters) and Cambridge University (MA, English Literature) and Heidelberg University (German Literature and Philosophy). He received his Ph.D. in art history at the University of California, Berkeley in 1988. He currently serves as Chair of the History of Art and Architecture department at Harvard.

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