Art: Painted Stones

“Painting,” says Vienna-born Henry Koerner, “is thinking, thinking, thinking.” Koerner’s thoughtful new pictures, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, struck some critics as shocking, shocking, shocking—and in some cases, pointless to boot.

In less than two years, Henry Koerner had become one of the most important and controversial figures in U.S. art* His allegories of postwar Germany and the U.S. had the robust realism of a modern Bruegel and often the satiric bite of Hieronymus Bosch. His colors might range from the muddy to the garish, and his compositions might tend to be needlessly cluttered, but each painting told a story and usually made it stick. Says Koerner: “Telling a thought-out story is the only way, by God, to inject life into this cadaver of modern art.”

The Hard Part. The details of Koerner’s painted stories are never made up; he includes only things he has seen, and usually he does it vividly enough to convince others of their reality. “The hardest thing for me is to find the right details. I do it just by thinking back. I’m depressed then, and my stomach aches. But sometimes a friend will call me and say, ‘Henry, I was out driving and I found the scene you used in such & such a picture.’ It’s never true of course, but it makes me happy.”

What made some people unhappy about his new show was that much of it bristled with sordid details (e.g., a couple embracing in a child’s bed, under a stuffed deer’s head), and that the stories Koerner told were unrelievedly grim. In one painting (The Tie) an ugly, starkly naked young couple stood back to back in a puddle, holding hands as if against their will, staring dazedly into the encroaching darkness. Draped around the husband’s weary neck hung a tie decorated with a pin-up girl. “Don’t think I am making fun,” says Koerner earnestly. “The fellow likes his tie—I happen to like schmaltzy music. We’re all the same. How can we say that something else is more important than our illusions?”

The Relaxing Part. At 33, Koerner is a neat, slight, cheerful-seeming man who belies the world-weariness and oppressive sense of guilt in his paintings. He lives and works alone in a studio near Brooklyn Heights, walks the city streets or rides the subway for relaxation—stopping every now & then to make a quick little pen sketch.

Tailor’s Dummies grew directly from such a sketch. It looked innocent enough until he began explaining it: “The children realized very much that these were bodies. The sight reminded me of a dummy my aunt had when I was a child, and that I always used to hit it, whirl it around. I wondered for a long time what I should put on the wall in the background. First I was going to make it a bandage ad, but then one day I saw it had to be the woman you see there, and I knew at once the whole story—which I do not want to tell you.”

*Until Koerner’s paintings were first exhibited in Berlin (TIME, April 28, 1947), his work was virtually unknown.