Gottfried Boehm

Gottfried Boehm (ˈɡɔtfʁiːt ˈbøːm; born 1942) is a German art historian and philosopher. Boehm studied art history, philosophy and German in Cologne, Vienna and Heidelberg. He obtained his Promotion (doctorate) in philosophy in 1968 and his Habilitation in 1974 in art history. From 1975 to 1979 he taught art history at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. In 1979 he was made professor of art history at the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen. In 1986 Boehm moved to the University of Basel, where since 2005 he has also been director of the Swiss national research project "Eikones / NCCR Iconic Criticism". In 1993-94 Gottfried Boehm was fellow of the Wiener Institut für die Wissenschaften vom Menschen (Institute for Advanced Studies) and in 2001-02 fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since 2006 he is a corresponding member of the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften. In his work Gottfried Boehm is particularly influenced by hermeneutics and phenomenology and by the hermeneutic thought of Hans-Georg Gadamer. He has worked on the theory of art and perception in the Renaissance, the 19th and 20th centuries, on contemporary art and on general questions of modernity. Recently he has been particularly prominent for his contributions to the history and theory of images, initiating an iconic turn. Beyond this he has advanced the concept of iconic difference. Gottfried Boehm is regarded, along with Hans Belting and Horst Bredekamp, as one of the leading theoreticians of art in the German-speaking world. Boehm is a prominent figure in the field of Bildwissenschaft ("image-science"). His account of Bildwissenschaft draws on aesthetics and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Arthur Danto, Meyer Schapiro, Kurt Bauch and Max Imdahl. Boehm addresses questions around the phenomenology of viewing and pictorial representation and the question of medium. He also seeks to understand the cognitive processes involved in the presentation and perception of images, and their differences from linguistic processes.