Art as omen in turbulent times

When Joseph Koerner first began teaching Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch at Harvard in the 1990s, he saw him as the “typical medieval artist” preoccupied with sin, chaos, and danger. But as Koerner uncovered more information about how Bosch’s works have been interpreted over the centuries by panicked people in times of political upheaval, the story began to shift.

“Now, one almost feels like one is looking to Bosch for what we are supposed to do under our own emergency situation,” he said. “Instead of being way back in the past, he seems to have become a cipher for the present and an omen for the future.”

Koerner’s latest book, “Art in a State of Siege,” seeks to capture “that feeling of looking at works of art as ‘omens’” by examining three images: Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights” (circa 1490-1500), Max Beckmann’s “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” (1927), and an animated drawing by William Kentridge of a dead victim of state violence disappearing into the South African landscape (1993). Koerner writes about the political situations that inspired these works, and how they captivated historical figures from the Spanish King Philip II to Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.

The book was partly inspired by a personal connection: Koerner’s father, the artist Henry Koerner, created works that addressed the trauma of the Holocaust. In this edited conversation with the Gazette, Koerner discusses shifting ideas of “the enemy” and other themes raised by the works.

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Where does the phrase “art in a state of siege” come from?

It was coined by Kentridge in 1986 at a moment in South African history when the white apartheid government decided the unrest that they perceived themselves to be facing was of such magnitude that they had to suspend the rule of law indefinitely. In its first meaning, “siege” is a condition in which a city or fort is surrounded by enemy forces. But in modern-state formations, leaders in times of civil war can declare a state of siege where you treat your own people as if they’re enemies. Every modern constitution has some loophole in it, by which laws, rights, and privileges can be temporarily suspended. The sieges that figure in my book are of the latter type. What I’m exploring is less about the artists, and what they made and how they responded to siege, than about what art looks like in states of siege. The book tries to grasp a relationship between viewers and works of art in which the artwork vacillates between something that’s very dangerous, and something that might give some signal of what to do in terrible circumstances.

What makes Bosch’s tryptic “The Garden of Earthly Delights” so intriguing?

Famously, no one knows how the central panel relates to the outside panels. Is hell (in the right panel) a punishment for the central scene, or is the central scene a continuation of the Adam and Eve scene (left panel), one in which the Fall never happened and everything’s happy? No one has been able to definitively decide that, and on that hinges the whole painting. The question is: Is the image positive or negative? Are we looking at a friend or are we looking at an enemy?

What kinds of enemies does Bosch depict?

He almost programmatically makes you not quite sure who the enemy is. Bosch wanted to magnify different siege conditions: the feeling that the self is besieged by sin; the feeling that Christian Europe is besieged by Islam; the feeling there’s a conspiracy of people called witches and heretics who are secretly occupying your town. Ultimately the enemy in Bosch seems to be the old enemy, Satan, who lies behind all devilry. But Bosch gives enough specifics that a person could take more concrete enemies and direct violence against them. In many of his paintings there’s a small, often slightly hidden, flag of the Ottoman Empire in the distance, as if to say, “This is what Europe will look like once the siege is over and the enemy has breached the gates.” There are also racial slurs and anti-Jewish slurs, and there’s even a sense that the poor in the city might be enemies.

You write about how viewers project their own experiences onto “Garden.” Could you talk about that?

In times when things are at their worst, Bosch suddenly comes into favor. One of the things I was fascinated by is how a group of right-leaning and Nazi intellectuals became obsessed with Bosch — there’s evidence from their letters. They realize they’re losing the war. They believe the crimes that they perpetrated are going to come back to haunt them. They already feel themselves to be victims. Carl Schmitt, Ernst Jünger, and Mircea Eliade are having these conversations, and they look to Bosch to give them a sign of what’s going to happen to them. I found a memoir that Schmitt wrote while he was in prison in Nuremberg for possible war crimes, in which he’s imagining in his cell Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights.” He sees the painting as the enemy because for him it’s liberalism, it’s free love, it’s a lawless world, a world in which every hell has broken loose. I found out that Schmitt was the first person to hear Wilhelm Fraenger’s crazy theory that “The Garden of Earthly Delights” is actually in favor of the pleasures that it represents, that it was painted for a secret group of free-love advocates called Adamites, ruled by a Jewish convert. So this idea existed that it was a Jewish work, and hedonistic. This scholarly error seemed very, very interesting to me.

What interested you about Max Beckmann and his self-portrait that’s at the Harvard Art Museums?

There’s almost no self-portrait in the history of art that is as boldly frontal as this huge self-portrait in the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Because it’s rather simple, the little details really start to get conversation going — like the cigarette in his hand, and the fact that he’s looking straight ahead. And the more you look at it, the more stuff comes out.

The painting was created at a moment when there was a break from the repeated failures as a parliamentary democracy in post-WWI Germany — a respite from the collapse into political chaos due to the fight between left-wing and right-wing paramilitarized groups. In 1927 Beckmann decides, in a moment of wild artistic optimism, to say, with the painting and an accompanying manifesto, that the artist is the one who creates balance and stops chaos by being the decider of the polity, and the decision that the artist makes is the work of art itself.

It’s not an unusual idea at the time that art is a power or force that can be weaponized. The Nazis, of course, famously weaponized art. It wasn’t by accident that Adolf Hitler was an aspiring artist, that Nazi leadership theorized Hitler and the Nazi movement as a “sculptor” using humans as their work of art. In 1937 the Nazi leadership mounted this very peculiar art exhibition to vilify, repudiate, and degrade works of art on display by calling that art “degenerate.” The idea was to put the enemy on display. In the aftermath of this “degenerate art” exhibition, Beckmann’s painting was put on auction and went via a Swiss dealer to Harvard Art Museums.

What is the value of studying art from times of political unrest?

Art has that characteristic of becoming relevant whether you like it or not. For the most part, people understand art in terms of victories: The artist is victorious over the problems that face them and becomes “the great artist.” And even the art historian, the person who shows how the artist won: In so doing, they win their own case in their book or article. My kind of art history is different than that. My art history is about art that comes up in times of trouble, in which there’s not victory but the potential for severe defeat. “Art in a State of Siege” is a way of showing, on a broader canvas, what art looks like, not under victory circumstances, but in troubled times.