Max Koss

Curriculum

Max Koss is an art and cultural historian from Berlin (East) whose work advances a historically grounded understanding of modern art as a product of media ecologies, material technologies, and transnational exchange. Rather than approaching artworks or periodicals as autonomous aesthetic forms, he analyzes the infrastructures that produced and stabilized them: technologies, supply chains, exhibition formats, collecting strategies, and systems of cataloguing and documentation.

His research brings together the material and technical history of art with questions of reception, taste formation, and cultural value. By linking close analysis of objects and media to broader networks of circulation and economic conditions, he situates modern art within the intertwined histories of production, distribution, and consumption.

Koss studied economic history (BSc) at the London School of Economics, art history (MA) at the Courtauld Institute and the University of Chicago, where he obtained an MA and PhD. His 2019 dissertation “The Art of the Periodical: Pan, Print Culture and the Birth of Modern Design in Germany, 1890-1900” presented the first English-language book-length study of the groundbreaking and historic art nouveau periodical.

His research has been supported with grants from the Max Planck Society, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the German Schiller Association, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Rare Book School at the University of Virginia, as well as the Edward A. Maser Fellowship and the Smart Family Foundation Fellowship from the University of Chicago, among others. Max has held internships in various roles at the Smart Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Kunstbibliothek of the Berlin State Museums. 

Dr. Max Koss is a Research Associate at Leuphana University Lüneburg and has been a member of the Provenance Lab since 2021. He is also a co-organizer of the Periodical Research Working Group.