In Berlin, the year's best art exhibition had been the work of a Vienna-born American named Henry Koerner (TIME, April 28). In Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week, Koerner stole the show again. The Whitney's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting was largely a dance of painted shadows: pictures that were either flatly abstract or academically pictorial. By contrast, Koerner's dramatic microcosm of modern life, which he called Vanity Fair, had the power of a compressed reality.
The works of 32-year-old Artist Koerner, who served in the U.S. Army and later with the U.S. Military Government in Berlin, reminded critics...
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