Thursday, February 6, 2025
“Girl With a Pearl Earring,” Tracy Chevalier’s novel about a 17th-century portrait by Johannes Vermeer, dropped into bookstores in 1999, four years later becoming a film starring Scarlett Johansson.
Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch,” another novel about another Dutch painting from the same period, hanging in the same museum, the Maurithuis in The Hague, won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize. As a movie, though, it didn’t take off.
The art history blockbuster novel was “The Da Vinci Code.” Do you own a copy? Since its 2003 release, some 80 million have been sold. The earring and bird books petered out in the single-digit millions.
Speaking for culture snobs, I found Dan Brown’s Catholic-conspiracy thrillthe ride impossible to literally put down (pun intended). With a Harvard hero and “The Mona Lisa,” how could it miss?
In the 2006 film by Ron Howard, a money-maker despite mixed reviews, Tom Hanks played Robert Langdon, “Harrison Ford in Harris tweed,” a professor of religious iconology and the made-up field of symbology. Though he may not be a body double for Hanks or Ford, a real-life version of Langdon is coming to Politics and Prose.
This Saturday, Feb. 8, at the Connecticut Avenue store, Dr. Joseph Leo Koerner, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard — where he is also a professor of Germanic languages and literatures — will begin a conversation with Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee at 5 p.m. The topic: Koerner’s just-released book, “Art in a Stage of Siege.” The event is free, with first-come, first-served seating.
At least as complex as “The Da Vinci Code,” this dense, scholarly and wide-ranging work is a long way from “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and “The Goldfinch.” Its three main sections focus on “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Netherlandish painter Hieronymus Bosch, a 1927 self-portrait by German painter Max Beckmann and the animated drawings of 69-year-old South African artist William Kentridge.
Bosch’s notorious triptych — two of the panels set in a green landscape, the third in the darkness of (presumably) Hell — is thickly populated with humans, demons, birds and beasts. Even the peaceful “Eden” panel at left, depicting Jesus with Adam and Eve, includes fantastic constructions. These multiply in the thickly populated center and right panels, in which naked figures are cast in numerous bizarre scenes of pleasure (center) and pain (right).
Koerner, who refers to “The Garden of Earthly Delights” as “perhaps the most elusive painting ever painted” (an elusive superlative), explores in detail the sometimes obsessive attempts of scholars, artists and political figures to find the key to its meaning.
In 2016, Bosch’s hometown of ’s-Hertogenbosch marked the 500th anniversary of his death with a festival of parades, performances, murals, projections and 3D recreations, centering on an exhibition of 20 of the artist’s 25 surviving panels (but not “The Garden of Earthly Delights,” which stayed put in Madrid’s Prado Museum).
Born in Leipzig in 1884, Beckmann — who painted many self-portraits as well as several Boschean triptychs — is associated with Expressionism and New Objectivity. Acclaimed during the Weimar years, he was fired from his Frankurt teaching position in 1933 by the Nazis, who classified his work as “Entartete,” meaning degenerate. Leaving Germany in 1937, he spent 10 years in Amsterdam before finally getting to the U.S., where he taught in St. Louis and Brooklyn prior to dying of a heart attack late in 1950.
The Beckmann work on which Koerner focuses is “Self-Portrait in Tuxedo” in Harvard’s collection, which he discusses both in art-historical terms and as an educator who has introduced groups of museum visitors to this seemingly straightforward painting.
The third section brings Kentridge (from whom the book’s title is borrowed) into Koerner’s intricate tapestry. Kentridge’s parents, Jewish barristers in Johannesburg, represented persons oppressed by South Africa’s apartheid system. The first of his nine animated films — political satires with autobiographical elements, drawn, erased and redrawn in charcoal — was made in 1989, the year before Nelson Mandela’s release from prison.
In “Art in a State of Siege,” Koerner ranges across centuries of artistic creation, provenance (the sequence of ownership) and interpretation. While paying particular attention to the troubled decades of modernism, ultimately he has his eye on the politically charged present.
As he explains in the introductory chapter: “Beckmann’s art looked different in Johannesburg [to Kentridge] in 1986 than it had previously, just as it looked different in Germany in 1927 than it did in 1933 under Hitler. In this sense, ‘art in a state of siege’ is not primarily the work produced during, or addressing, the dangerous moment. It is rather a perspective on art arising in that moment — what Bosch’s triptych looked like to the Duke of Alba subduing rebelling in the Netherlands, or to [Nazi political theorist] Carl Schmitt in prison in Nuremberg, or to [art historian] Erwin Panofsky lecturing at Harvard. Or to us today, with some 200 million people around the world living in declared states of emergency, democratically elected officials contesting the rule of law, and the capital of the United States besieged and stormed.”
This ambitious and provocative book is a good choice for readers with a taste for tangled cultural webs who are looking to engage with a brilliant mind, whether or not they do so in person this Saturday.