Joseph Leo Koerner. Kunst im Ausnahmezustand

Art in a State of Siege

Book presentation with Joseph Leo Koerner and Michael Ignatieff 

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.

Acclaimed art historian Joseph Koerner reaches back to the eve of iconoclasm and religious warfare to explore the most elusive painting ever painted. In Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Delights, enemies are everywhere: Jews and Ottomans at the gates, witches and heretics at home, sins overtaking the mind. 

Following a paper trail leading from Bosch’s time to World War II, Koerner considers a monumental self-portrait painted by Max Beckmann in 1927. Created when Germany was often governed by emergency decree, this image brazenly claimed to decide Europe’s future – until the Nazis deemed it to be a threat to the German people. 

For South African artist William Kentridge, Beckmann exemplified “art in a state of siege.” Koerner shows how his work served as beacon during South Africa’s racialist apartheid rule and inspired Kentridge’s breakthrough animations of drawings being made, erased, and remade.

Joseph Leo Koerner is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, and Senior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Harvard. His works include seminal books on Caspar David Friedrich, Paul Klee, and Albrecht Dürer. Koerner has also written and presented arts documentaries for BBC Television, and wrote, produced, and directed The Burning Child, a 2019 feature film on Viennese homemaking in the shadow of the holocaust. 

Michael Ignatieff is currently a professor in Central European University and served as President and Rector of CEU from 2016 to 2021. The recipient of 13 honorary doctorates, He has held academic positions at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard, and Toronto, and was leader of Canada’s Liberal Part 2008-2011. His many books include Blood and Belonging (1993), Isaiah Berlin: A Life (1998), and On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (2021). 

An event organised by the Secession Friends, in English

Please use the side entrance of the Secession.