Joseph Leo Koerner

This exciting, wonderful work, in the bibliography of Gabriel Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, caught my attention as I've long admired Caspar David Friedrich without figuring out why and was curious about his relationship to modernism. Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape demonstrates how these seemingly straightforward paintings, sometimes of disturbingly simple subjects, embody the human struggle with art itself. Along the way one learns enough of Friedrich's life and ideas to give a clear sense of his artistic and intellectual milieu and its likely effect on his work.

Koerner's writing is a pleasure to read, even when it reflects the complexity of his analyses.

And in a deeply respectful way, paintings to be discussed in depth appear on the page in advance with only identification of title, date, and location, allowing readers to enter each on their own, absorbing the image and let their minds play over it before Koerner begins his ideas.

Having no specialized art knowledge and little experience of art criticism, reading paintings as Koerner does is new and immensely pleasurable and rewarding. Here is part of his discussion about Fog, a painting now in Vienna that requires much looking and thinking. This reproduction, like most on the web, renders the pictorial elements much more visible than they actually are.

"...Fog implies within the represented scene the subjective process of perception and interpretation. And therefore, rather than regarding the landscape's haze or the picture's compositional disjunctions as, respectively, natural or artificial analogies to the human history of departure or death, it may be more appropriate to regard the painting's ostensible subject-matter -- ships departing from the shore, the soul's journey to eternal life, etc. -- as so many narratives explicating the picture's more basic plot, which is the difficult relation between subject and object, ourselves and the Vienna canvas."… (mais)