Marina Kellen French Lecture

Art in a State of Siege:  Berlin, Kurinskij, Nuremberg, 1942-1947

Joseph Leo Koerner presents his new book, Art in a State of Siege (Princeton University Press, 2025). Using Berlin as a point of orientation, he explores how in extreme cases of collective experience art becomes a currency of last resort.

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, whose panicked gaze turned artworks into omens.

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.

Spanning half a millennium but urgent today, Koerner has written an art historical epic for dangerous times.

“[Art in a State of Siege is ] an engrossing ride. . . . [A] rewarding read.”—Kirkus Reviews

“The enemy surrounds us. The walls that we thought were secure are quickly breached. Even as the death count begins to rise, we rage not against the faceless, anonymous foe but against our own neighbors whom we now regard as the most lethal enemies of all. For thousands of years and throughout the world, such has been the recurrent nightmare of human societies. In this startlingly original book, weaving together brilliant interpretations of three major early modern, modern, and contemporary artists, Joseph Koerner provides a new and critically important theory of the function of art in a beleaguered world. Art in a State of Siege is essential reading for our time.”—Stephen Greenblatt

“Devastating and necessary, Art in a State of Siege illuminates the violent, political, and ethical underpinnings of art history. Koerner, one of the most important historians writing today, recognizes the impossibility of separating the process of history from our individual and collective traumas under siege.”—Caroline Fowler