Word: koerner
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...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...
...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...
...Fort Pitt Bridge. The pier has the quality of an ancient monument, and perhaps the giant Negro who helped build it is descended from a builder of the Pyramids. His handshake sets the theme for the whole: friendship, love and earned reward. It is a surprisingly happy picture for Koerner, but more important is the fact that in an age when few even try to paint deep space, he has painted it so well as to bring even the most reluctant viewer straight inside the picture. In the foreground, like a sunny signature he has put his own self-portrait...
...wealth of sentiment, there is little sentimental about Koerner, and the America he pictures in kaleidoscopic fashion is more disturbing, all in all, than delightful. Future generations may well debate how much of this disturbing quality was in the man and how much in the nation...