Family portraits

The Early Works of Henry Koerner Through Nov. 9, 2003

The Frick Art ‘ Historical Center

7227… The Early Works of Henry Koerner Through Nov. 9, 2003

The Frick Art ‘ Historical Center

7227 Reynolds Street

Pittsburgh, PA 15208

(412) 371-0600

As a young man, artist Henry Koerner began a new life to, literally, save his life. Koerner fled his native Vienna in 1938, months after Hitler’s annexation of Austria, leaving his parents and older brother behind. “The Early Work of Henry Koerner,” an exhibit of Koerner’s work that recently opened at The Frick Art ‘ Historical Center, follows the artist in his formative years in the United States and conveys, through his paintings, the trauma of his discovery that only he survived his family’s destruction in the Holocaust.

The 31 paintings – on loan from public and private collections in Pittsburgh and across the United States – exhibit Koerner’s juxtaposition of a highly figurative style with abstract elements often called “magic realism,” a post-war American style influenced by European movements of the time. In a catalog accompanying the exhibit, curator Edith Balas, an art history professor at CMU and research associate at Pitt, recounts Koerner’s early critical recognition and success in the late ’40s with his first solo show in Berlin, as well as his inclusion in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1949 annual exhibition.

Trained as a commercial graphic artist in Vienna, Koerner worked designing posters in an illustration studio during the late 1930s. After escaping to the United States, Koerner found work in New York City designing book covers for popular detective fiction and mysteries. He won awards for designs of World War II posters, and, after being drafted into the U.S. Army in 1943, Koerner designed works for the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services, units partly responsible for creating now-classic American war propaganda. It was during this time that Koerner began to develop his painting skills.

After the war, Koerner was sent to Germany to document in illustrations the Nuremberg trials. Some of his sketches of the Nazi war criminals are included in the exhibit. While in Europe, Koerner returned to Vienna to learn the fate of his family from a former neighbor. This painful realization left a permanent impact on his work and his life. For years afterward, Koerner would return annually to Vienna, seeking subjects for his work.

Koerner’s painting style is rooted in his illustrative technique. In part, his studies and finished paintings reveal careful attention to realistic representation of his subjects. But Koerner’s artistic statements come out in composition – he radically distorts a scene or the features of faces, juxtaposes incongruous scenery, modulates the scale of elements and eliminates the shadows that would obscure his concepts. This is the point where his realism becomes “magic.”

In “My Parents no. 2,” painted in 1946 after his return to Vienna, Koerner resurrects his parents, depicting them visiting a forest outside the city. The textures of the trees and light-dappled, fallen, gold leaves are meticulously captured, but the power of the art is in its symbolic composition: father and mother are posed away from the viewer, departing from this world. A locket bearing a childhood photograph of the artist and his brother, Kurt, is shown abandoned on a tree, “where,” according to Koerner’s commentary, “their way parted.”

Kurt is the subject of a later painting, “My Brother,” that Koerner painted in oils following two years of study in watercolor. The style is a significant departure from his previous realistic works, owing to the influence of Cezanne, whose works guided Koerner in watercolor technique. In “My Brother,” the subject is painted twice, first as a numbered, black-and-white photograph that represents Kurt as a victim of Nazi extermination, and again as a James Dean-style, 1950s teenager, resurrected according to Koerner’s memory. This is a luminous work in wide strokes of complementary peach and aqua green. Koerner juxtaposed the colors to create impressions of light and contour.

After the mid-’50s, when abstract expressionism rose rapidly in the opinions of critics in New York, then the new center of the art world, Koerner continued to interpret and incorporate his observations from the world around him into his artistic visions of loss, remembrance, urban alienation and hope for the rest of his life, creating and refining a highly symbolic, yet accessible, oeuvre.

Perhaps Koerner’s dichotomous language of hyperrealism and distortion better expresses the contradiction of the intellectual progress and moral decline that characterized the 20th century. The artist’s tableaux appear crystal-clear, yet unfathomable.

“The Early Works of Henry Koerner” runs concurrently with “Hoka-Neni: Seven paintings by Valentin Lustig,” an artist born to survivors of the Holocaust.