HENRY KOERNER, 44, is one of the nation's best living painters,*but he has long worked in the shadows of two masters, first Giotto and then Cézanne. His latest work still shows their influence, yet displays a new and surer synthesis that is unmistakably Koerner's own.
Vienna-born, Koerner came to the U.S. in 1939, lives in a Victorian gingerbread-style house in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill section. His new pictures deal, often harshly and always provocatively, with the basic human condition, especially in America. As pictures, they have beauty, but their content is seldom beautiful. "America's beauty," Koerner jauntily explains, "is in its ugliness."
Small, strong, passionate and fearless, Koerner says exactly what comes into his head and draws exactly what comes into his eyes. This "I gives his conversation and his drawings a startling immediacy. But his paintings are something else again: mysterious distillations "of long and apparently anxious thought. It took him two years to produce the 15 paintings of the present series, which will go on view next month at Manhattan's Midtown Gallery. The five reproduced on the following pages show the range and strangeness of his imaginings. ¶The Diver has as its setting a flooded rooftop on Pittsburgh's Polish Hill, with the Pennsylvania Railroad main line in the background. Key to the composition is the girl's arm, tenderly outstretched toward the skindiver. Koerner had in mind the sort of arduous wooing found in fairy tales, where the king sets a series of tasks for the princess' suitor. In this case, Koerner says, the king may be the lifeguard in the boat, and he may have flung a ring into the water for the youth to retrieve. The man with the shadow-casting device, such as moviemakers employ, may be attempting to frustrate the lover from afar.
¶ Junk Pile makes dramatic use of a favorite Koerner device: psychological perspective. The Negro workman looms twice the size of the Plymouth in the foreground, simply because he is more important. In fact, Koern says, he represents a god of darkness and regeneration, just as the fat man sunning his face with the aid of a metal reflector is a disguised god of light and life. The Plymouth will eventually join the junk pile, and, remelted, may yet become a bridge. The setting is the North Side approach to Pittsburg's Manchester Bridge, leading to the Golden Triangle.
¶The Flight is also a study in opposites. The young daredevil, or perhaps the your Leonardo, poises on the verge of trying his wings from a cliff top overlooking Pittsburgh's Bigelow Boulevard. He defies authority and rigid conservatism (which say it cannot be done), represented in only two dimensions by the safety poster. His mother, hanging out the clothes, doubtless regards her headstrong son with mixed emotions.
¶The Alley, Koerner says, "makes woman the real heroine of existence; man only pulls the ropes. But here we have the wrong scenery for the right occasion, for the great human experience of love and fruition.