Henry Koerner
Henry Koerner (born Heinrich Sieghart Körner; August 28, 1915 – July 4, 1991) was an Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer best known for his early Magical Realist works of the late 1940s and his portrait covers for Time magazine.
Following Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938, he escaped (by air September 16) to Italy (Venice and Milan), in 1939 to the United States, settling in New York.
In 1943, the Office of War Information hired Koerner in its Graphics Division in New York, where he worked alongside artists Ben Shahn, Bernard Perlin, and David Stone Martin.
Shahn's pictorial style, along with the photography of Walker Evans and German Neue Sachlichkeit painters (e.g., Otto Dix), inspired Koerner's painting, which began with a rendering of his family home in Vienna (My Parents I, 1944).
Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was ordered in 1944 to the Graphics Division of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C., where he made war posters, including Save Waste Fats and Someone Talked, the latter winning an award from the Museum of Modern Art.
In Berlin, having joined on March 27, 1946 the Graphics Division of the U.S. Military Government, he painted his first major works, including My Parents II (Curtis Galleries, Inc., Minneapolis), The Skin of Our Teeth (Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska), and Mirror of Life (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York).
[3] Auschwitz had been liberated less than two years earlier, and a generation later artists would base their undertaking on the exploration of problems of historical trauma, memory, and amnesia, American art critics complained of what they perceived as Koerner's unwarranted "bitterness" and "hysterical I-told-you-so path," advising him to look forward, not back.
[6][7] Inspired by the structural logic of Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel, Koerner created in 1948–49 a new series of paintings—all in the same scale and viewpoint and focused on the American scene—that absorbed fantastical elements into the fabric of everyday life.
The artist took some inspiration from the handcrafted, vernacular surrealism of Coney Island ghost rides and fun houses, which he painted as uncanny conduits to the Prater amusement park of his childhood home in Leopoldstadt.
Because he refused to work from photographs, all Koerner's sitters, including Maria Callas, John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, Paul Getty, Jimmy Clark, and Barbra Streisand, posed for many hours for their portraits, usually during the most eventful times of their lives; but this method gave their likenesses an immediacy meant to outdo photographs, which were increasingly featured on Time's covers as it confronted an ever more competitive market.
My Parents II figures in Frank O'Hara's 1950 "Poem" (The flies are getting slower now): "Here, as in the/ gallery, Henry Koerner’s parents/ say goodbye forever."
