Gottfried Boehm

Gottfried Boehm (b. 1942) is a German art historian, philosopher and founding director of the SNF research center (NCCR) “Bildkritik/Iconic Criticism” (eikones) at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Since the mid-nineties, his work on the question of the image has made a relevant contribution to the development of Bildwissenschaften (Image Studies) and to a consequent transformation—especially to a shift in theoretical and methodological approaches—of art history and related academic disciplines in the German speaking world. Boehm’s approach to images, for which he coined the term “iconic criticism”, is influenced by phenomenology, hermeneutics, literary theory and continental philosophy since Immanuel Kant. It is characterized by an insistence on the singularity of images and the binding of any research into the “logic” of images to historical examples. This article introduces Boehm’s work along the line of three related key concepts: iconic turn, iconic criticism and iconic difference.