Storyteller

Five years ago Henry Koerner was a clever commercial artist, and nothing more. Today he is one of the most controversial figures in U.S. painting. Hfs fourth one-man show, which opened in a Manhattan gallery this week, was roundly praised and sharply damned, but it could not be ignored.

Koerner's art runs right against the fashion. Most of his contemporaries make "paintings," not "pictures" as Koerner does. To them there is something almost vulgar about the word "picture"--something that smacks of photography. Koerner, they complain, is a mere illustrator, born 100 years too late.

Actually Koerner never illustrates stories, he creates them, and they grow from his own life, not books. He has been booted about more than most men, he feels things strongly, and he puts his feelings into his art. It is not in his yeasty, positive nature to spend his working hours making decorative arrangements of squiggles and blobs of color, or pouring his soul into a painting of an empty wine bottle, a pipe and a guitar.

Modern Cadaver. Koerner's only similarity to most modern artists lies in his love of theorizing; he can talk as good a picture as he paints. His basic position is that painting has gone as far as possible toward abstraction, and must now return to storytelling: "Art must be a language, after all. I simply paint in each picture always the same story--the relationship of man to woman, man to man, man to his surroundings, man to himself. Of course in trying to tell a story the form might sometimes get lost, but this is the only way, by God, to inject life into this cadaver that has fizzled out in mannerist painting . . ."

Sometimes the form does "get lost" in Koerner's art. His colors lack decorative appeal, range from sweet to rancid. His compositions are often cluttered, usually static. His drawing is more able than inspired; his characterizations of people are sometimes so obviously strained that they verge on cartoon art. His use of shocking detail is often more calculated than convincing.

But in the end pictures cannot be judged by any taste test; it is their emotional impact that matters. Ponderous and muddy though Koerner's art can be, it has all the weight and bite of a steam shovel. Where, when and how did he develop the steam?

The answers reach much farther back than five years. Koerner's paintings are invariably based on what he observes, plus what he remembers. And his most persistent memories relate to his boyhood in Vienna. In his best work, he achieves a dramatic merger of the things he sees with his eyes and the memories he sees in his mind. The results are apt to be more meaningful than pictures by those who paint only from observation, and more convincing than the work of artists who paint just what they find in their heads.

Pierced Illusion. A case in point is Koerner's June Night (see color pages'). Emerging one evening from the Kings Highway elevated station in Brooklyn, Koerner came face to face with a scene very much like the scene in the painting. The mural ad (for a photographer who specialized in wedding pictures), the poster with the sleeping baby, and even the blimp, were all there. What first struck Koerner about the bride & groom on the poster was that they reminded him of his parents. His second reaction was that they represented a gigantic "illusion" of wedded bliss, superimposed on the brick reality of the apartment house, and pierced with glimpses into cramped, sweaty lives.

He returned time & again to the spot, made scores of sketches, slowly squeezed what he saw into the makings of a tight, striking, architecturally constructed picture. He captured, then dramatically heightened, the hot, wet, rosy light enveloping the scene. The blimp, when he saw it, carried a Goodyear sign; he substituted Socony's flying red horse "because I thought it was a nicer shape." The baby's head in the poster he enlarged considerably, and embellished with sinister rips. By its size and its leaden slumber, the baby dominated the picture; he might have been dreaming it all, and he might have represented Koerner himself.

The finished painting reflected both Koerner's beginnings in Vienna and his present life in Brooklyn; it told nothing of the long trail that connected the two. He was born 34 years ago into an affectionate, close-knit Jewish family: "My father was a shipping agent for a while; later he sold dental supplies. We always had a nice apartment and good living. He taught me to like light music and my mother taught me to like symphonies. We all used to go walking together--my brother and my parents and I--in the Vienna woods, and sometimes we'd go on boat trips up the Danube. I had a very happy childhood; all the suffering came later."

Timely Trip. Koerner hoped to be a carnival barker, cook, singer, and then an engineer ("I flunked the exam for engineering school, which was a blessing"), finally settled for commercial art. His art teacher in Vienna recalls him as a hard worker with a talent for parodying the German goose step. Koerner spent his summer vacations walking and sketching in Italy, France, Switzerland and Yugoslavia. At 23, he crossed the Alps into Italy for the last time. The Nazis had entered Austria.

His family stayed behind, "because they loved Vienna very much, and friends told them things would be all right later on ... A guilty feeling constantly comes up when I think of my family."

He spent a year in Italy, "drawing animals mostly. The monkey in The Barber Shop I drew first during that time. I hadn't any money. I remember looking in a candy-shop window and thinking that if ever I was rich I'd come back and buy some." At last a great-uncle who lived in Brooklyn succeeded in getting him to the U.S. He began making money at once at commercial art, and "in 1940 a girl friend whom I knew for many years in Vienna came over and we got married."

Throughout most of the war Koerner designed posters for the OWI and the OSS: among them the classic United We Are Strong. His Someone Talked won an award from Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. One of his OWI bosses remembers him as "a pleasant little guy who often pulled us out of a hole. He seemed a very good workman and not so temperamental as the others."

In his posters Koerner avoided firsthand contact with reality: "I did them from photographs because I always felt my inefficiency at drawing." Then he became a G.I. Ten days on a troopship to England, in 1945, made him decide thenceforth to draw from life: "[There were] 8,280 soldiers, all in the same boat. Day in & day out, there was nothing else to do but stare into 8,279 faces. During those ten days I saw the human face for the first time . . ."

Stationed in London, Corporal Koerner sketched every day from the life around him, "not to make pictures but to get acquainted with the world." He filled thick notebooks with fountain-pen drawings of taxicabs and spittoons, of wallpaper patterns and chandeliers, of people talking, listening, eating, drinking, throwing darts, trying on clothes and scrubbing floors. From week to week his eye and his pen sharpened. After V-E day he was sent to Germany, sketched the Niirnberg trials for the U.S. Military Government.

The Hem of a Skirt. Not until he was demobilized, in the spring of 1946, could Koerner summon enough courage to go home to Vienna. He found the jagged, windowless walls of his old home. Sticking up from the rubble that choked it was part of an old shoe and the hem of a skirt, nothing more.

"On the corner of Am Tabor," he recalled later, "a grocery store was open--the only store spared in the whole street. Frau Busch stood in the door. It was she who told me what I had known all the time. Her voice was unmoved, it had an undertone of satisfaction, but tears formed in her eyes and rolled down her greyish cheeks." What Frau Busch told him was that his mother, father and brother had all been killed by the Nazis.

An overwhelming uprush of memories combined with his new capacity for clear observation to make Koerner paint. His first exhibition was held in Berlin. Among its standout pictures was one of his parents, their backs turned, in the Vienna woods (TIME, April 28, 1947). "I helped them to walk there once again," Koerner said. Another painting, The Prophet, was partly inspired by a soapbox orator he had watched in London's Hyde Park, and partly by postwar Berlin: "The speaker may be a demagogue or a statesman, and the man hanging might be a villain or a hero. The people must listen because they can do nothing else."

When he returned to Brooklyn in 1947, Koerner was surprised to find himself accepted as a serious artist. "I'm not yet sure it's true," he says. "I think that as long as I go on building my work will stand, but that if I ever stop it may fall like a house of cards." The chances of his stopping are slim; Koerner now lives largely for his painting and his Manhattan exhibitions have sold well enough (up to $3,000 for an oil) to keep him comfortable. Divorced, he lives alone in a railroad apartment in Brooklyn, the furniture painted with gay floral patterns by himself. On the living-room mantel is a female statuette from a drugstore win dow. The studio walls are covered with working sketches and reproductions of Giotto--"my greatest teacher."

Today, Koerner looks like a small-scale lifeguard (he is 5 ft. 4 in., weighs 147 Ibs.). Trim, deeply tanned, with long, wavy blue-black hair and hot brown eyes, he wears a sweatshirt and corduroy slacks at home, does his own cooking. He is a solitary sort, finds relaxation in walking and riding the subway and seldom goes to parties, but when he is with people he is voluble and friendly. Three-fourths of his waking hours are devoted to work.

Springtime for Henry. In the spring, Koerner's work is largely worry. By summertime he has worried into existence a dozen new ideas for pictures, sets out to find landscapes and models that correspond with what he has in mind. He sketches everywhere, with a fountain pen, often returns to make color sketches in gouache. By fall he is ready to start on the year's oils, which he finishes, all more or less together, in January.

If Koerner skipped the searching and sketching his work would be less laborious but no more "free." You can free yourself from the objective world, he argues, "only if you study it up to the last moment. So I go out looking for differences between what I remember and what exists. In crowded places like Coney Island I see how a man sits, how he looks at his children. On a trip south I see how a road turns. In Chattanooga last year I stood for two days in a filthy dump to paint a mule--my shoes are still in Tennessee."

Koerner found the steps for The Pigeons at Brooklyn's Borough Hall, "though the scene goes far back into my childhood." The Barker's Booth was a memory of an amusement park in Vienna, rediscovered at Coney Island. Like Monkey Bars and The Lot, with its engineless, wheelless car and painted palm trees, each of those pictures was what he calls "a balanced structure of contradictions" --a mingling of reality and illusion.

His new paintings on display this week were less dramatic than the old. "I don't make people so ugly or noses so big any more," Koerner says. "And I paint no more double images, ruins and posters. Just the straight realizing of everyday happenings. The emotion must come out of the organization."

Koerner's latest works were better organized than ever before, and free of obvious effect-making. But they could hardly be described as paintings of "everyday" happenings. His favorite was The Barber Shop, the picture that gave him the most trouble. Pointing to its molded walls & ceiling and tiled floor he says, "I will never do this again, never, never! I broke my eyes on it! What does it mean? Well, I know a barber across the street who plays the violin, but this one may be my father, or myself. Maybe that's my mother, listening under the hair drier. She always wanted me to learn to play . . . But the most inner secrets you do not give away in words. If you could, you wouldn't have to paint."

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