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Henry Koerner’s Pittsburgh
October 12 – November 12, 2009
Chatham University Art Gallery, Woodland Hall
Shadyside Campus
412-365-1232
Presented as part of Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project, Henry Koerner’s Pittsburgh is a three-part exploration of Koerner’s world post-Holocaust, curated by his son Joseph Koerner. This exhibit revolves around Henry Koerner’s tenure at Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) as artist-in-residence from 1952-1953 as well as the loss of his parents and brother during the Holocaust.
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About Henry Koerner (from The Frick Art & Historical Center)
Henry Koerner was born in 1915 in Vienna, Austria. He trained as a graphic designer at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsamstalt, Vienna and in the Viennese studio of Victor Slama, a well-known illustrator. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Koerner fled Vienna.
After emigrating to the United States in 1939, Koerner designed book jackets at Maxwell Bauer Studios in New York. Between the years 1942-1943 he worked for the Office of War Information (Domestic) with Ben Shahn, a leading social realist painter.
In 1943 he was drafted into the United States Army and then became an American citizen in 1944. Koerner was then ordered to go to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. After the war ended in 1945, Koerner was reassigned to Berlin as a court artist at the Nuremberg trials. Following his discharge from the Army in 1946, he returned to Austria and came face-to-face with the grim reality that his parents, brother and all his relatives were victims of the Holocaust.
Although Koerner characterized himself as a straightforward realist, his early paintings are best understood as a manifestation of the American movement of painting called Magic Realism. Artists who were associated with this movement, such as Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, Ivan Albright, and Philip Evergood, painted fantastic or strange subjects often representing a traumatic experience in a realistic manner. A sharply focused delineation of forms, minute rendering of detail, flattened perspective, and an absence of shadows are hallmarks of the style. According to Lincoln Kirstein, who admired the Magic Realists in the 1940s and organized exhibitions of their work in New York and London, magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed. Yet, despite the apparent order and rational basis of their work, Magic Realists sought to portray the chaos of post-war America, an intention they shared with Abstract Expressionists of the time.
Like many survivors of the Holocaust, Koerner was haunted by a sense of remorse at having survived while the rest of his family perished. Not surprisingly, his parents attained an iconic quality in his paintings. Resolved to memorialize them in the familiar environment of their home, Koerner painted My Parents No. 1 (1945).
In 1947, Koerner had his first solo exhibition in Berlin, to immediate acclaim. He was favorably compared to old masters Bosch, Brueghel and Goya. Upon his return to New York, he held his first American exhibition and was subsequently included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1949 annual exhibition, where he was hailed by Time as “one of the country’s most prominent young painters.” During the next decade, however, as abstract expressionism held sway, Koerner found himself increasingly relegated to the sidelines of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he maintained a lifelong commitment to figurative representation.
Koerner moved to Pittsburgh in 1952 to serve as artist-in-residence at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham University) and divided his time between his adopted home of Pittsburgh and his native Vienna. The Westmoreland Museum of American Art organized a retrospective of his work in 1971. In 1983, Carnegie Museum of Art mounted an even larger survey entitled From Vienna to Pittsburgh. On June 12, 1991, Koerner was hit on his bicycle outside Vienna, Austria and later died on July 4, 1991. His work was featured in a major retrospective exhibition at the Austrian museum Belvedere Palace in Vienna in 1997 and The Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh presented The Early Work of Henry Koerner in 2003. The exhibition featured 31 paintings created following the Second World War, after Koerner learned that his family had been killed by the Nazis.
About Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project
A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT OF THE HOLOCAUST CENTER OF THE UNITED JEWISH FEDERATION & PITTSBURGH BALLET THEATRE
The lessons of the Holocaust have often found their most powerful expression through the arts. Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre, in close partnership with The Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh, has created a project that extends beyond the stage, partnering with a broad spectrum of Pittsburgh organizations to create educational programming and inspire a community-wide dialogue about the Holocaust. Organizations and individuals who have come forward to support Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project realize that the Holocaust continues to affect our American culture and influence ongoing work to eradicate other violations of human rights in this generation.
For more information visit www.pbt.org/performances/light. |
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