Word: koerner
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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Warm Ashes. If the abstractionists were mostly dry, the more traditional painters were soggy. Even the much-admired ones often succeeded by mere competence. Henry Koerner's blend of banality and obscurity, Fire on the Beach, was an ashen canvas warmed by brilliant drawing alone. John Koch's The Monument was curious in content and cottony in color, but it had a complexity and depth of composition that few moderns could bring off. Isabel Bishop's Nude Bending (one of the show's few nudes) was so dimly painted it looked like a fading wraith...
ARTHUR J. A. KOERNER Waco...
...American pictures catch the eye in a flash, but they are empty." Said the Sunday Observer: "This term 'symbolic realism' is found to embrace the phosphorescent skeleton paintings of Pavel Tchelitchew; a horrific problem picture by Alton Pickens, of the crowning of a dyed ape . . . and Henry Koerner's surrealist picture [TIME, March 27] of a barber playing the violin to his shrouded customers and a monkey-an entertainment which no doubt explains the increased cost of hairdressing in American establishments. Most of these paintings have been worked over again and again with fine and feeble brushstrokes...
...think I know what Henry Koerner's barber-shop picture means: it is what happened to the Jews in Germany. The rabbi should never be in the barber shop at all. He sits pale, immobilized, and with eyes fixed on the barber, who is "fiddling while the Jews burn"-only it is a funeral dirge. The barber's costume is like a butcher's. Soon the rabbi will be in the position of the customer in the other chair, horizontal...
...does Koerner say that the barber might be himself . . . ? He feels guilty of the death of his parents-he alone escaped . . . The tiles, etc. represent German efficiency and attention to detail. I have not counted them, but they represent six million murdered Jews. They are clean, like in a butcher shop...