15 Facts About Joseph Koerner

Joseph Leo Koerner was born on June 17,1958 and is an American art historian and filmmaker.

Joseph Koerner is the Victor S Thomas Professor of the History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University.

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.

Joseph Koerner graduated from Taylor Allderdice High School in 1976.

Work undertaken at Yale, Cambridge, and Heidelberg on Caspar David Friedrich, and a friendship with Frank Schirrmacher inspiring study of the German hermeneutical tradition, shifted Joseph Koerner's focus to the history of German art.

Joseph Koerner developed his characteristic technique most extensively in the opening chapters of his first art history book, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, written while the author was a Junior Fellow at Harvard's Society of Fellows.

At Berkeley, Joseph Koerner began an association with the journal RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, where he published numerous articles and editorials and served as the Associate Editor.

Joseph Koerner has curated exhibitions of his father's work, including a 1997 retrospective at the Austrian National Gallery.

Joseph Koerner has published book and exhibition reviews in The New York Review of Books and autobiographical non-fiction in Granta Magazine, anthologized in The Best American Essays.

Joseph Koerner has written and taught on modern and contemporary artists, including Lucian Freud, Francesco Clemente, Vivienne Koorland, Luc Tuymans, and, most extensively, William Kentridge.

In Great Britain, Joseph Koerner is known for his work as writer and presenter of the three-part Northern Renaissance and the feature-length Vienna: City of Dreams, both produced in Scotland by the BBC and first broadcast on BBC Four.

Joseph Koerner received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his research on Reformation art and has served as visiting professor at the University of Konstanz and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz.

In 2009, Koerner was one of three recipients of the Andrew W Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award, which funded an academic and creative project on homemaking in Vienna from Otto Wagner to the present day.

Joseph Koerner has been primary advisor of some twenty-five doctoral dissertations completed at Harvard, the Courtauld Institute, University College London, and Frankfurt University.

Joseph Koerner serves currently as Chair of Harvard's Department of History of Art and Architecture.