Henry Koerner

Viennese émigré Henry Koerner found the motivation to develop his artistic talents in the wake of World War II. His elaborately crafted and often surreal paintings spoke to the complexity of memory and kindled a sense of the fantastic. Koerner was born to Jewish parents Fanny and Leo in 1915. Growing up in Austria his emerging interest in art was fueled by his father’s work as an amateur draftsman and his aunt Sofie’s career as a post-impressionist painter and etcher. Koerner enjoyed the macabre of writers Edgar Allen Poe and Oscar Wilde, in addition to the artistic styles of Hieronymus Bosh and Pieter Bruegel the Elder. His artistic talents were put to use by his brother Kurt, who charged Henry with the design of posters and handouts to support his Communist activities. 

Koerner was educated in commercial art at the Graphic Academy of Applied Art in Vienna. After learning practical working methods in lettering and design he earned a position with influential Viennese graphic designer Viktor Theodor Slama. When Austria came under Nazi rule in March of 1938 Koerner left for Italy. With an affidavit from his great uncle Rudolf Theumann, he traveled to New York in the spring of 1939. He married Viennese girlfriend Fritzi Apfel and worked designing book jackets for detective and mystery novels at Maxwell Bauer Studios in Manhattan. He designed winning entries for the poster competition of the American Society for the Control of Cancer in 1940 and the Museum of Modern Art’s National War Poster competition in1942. 

Koerner joined the Office of War Information in 1943 designing graphic posters. Working alongside artists Ben Shahn and Bernard Perlin prompted Koerner to learn the techniques of egg tempera, gouache, casein, and eventually oil. His parents, whom he had now lost contact with, served as inspiration for his first completed painting. Once he became a US citizen enrolled in the army, Koerner moved to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. In 1944 he was reassigned to London, and constantly sketched his surrounding. Inspired by current events, he became committed to working directly from life. At the war’s end Koerner was transferred to Germany. Having proved himself as an efficient draftsman he was selected to portray the war criminals of the Nuremberg trials.

Upon his demobilization Koerner made his return to Vienna and received confirmation that his family had died in a Nazi extermination camp. He photographed the war-torn city, beginning to search and collect images that would inspire his paintings. Speaking of his return, Koerner described a “feeling that I would not come back to that life I had left behind…Reality had turned into surreality…‘normal’ life into existentialism.” [1] This perspective informed the works of his first exhibition held in 1947. Hosted by the Haus am Waldsee in Berlin, it was both the city’s first major art exhibition and the first display of an American artist postwar. The standout work was perhaps My Parents, in which the isolated figures of his mother, father, and a locket containing images of himself and his brother are pictured in a desolate Vienna wood where the family once walked. The picture’s reunited family offers a humble yet powerful resolution for a tragic narrative. These early paintings showed Koerner’s unfolding interest in plays of proportion and perspective, and the essentiality of juxtaposition to create meaning from the memories and experiences of life.