Wasteland

The fame of 32-year-old Henry Koerner's harsh paintings had preceded him home from Europe (TIME, April 28). Critics expected his first Manhattan exhibition to be good. It was.

In Germany with the U.S. Army and Military Government, Koerner had painted ruins and ruined people. Now, back in Brooklyn, he concerned himself with a less apparent wasteland. Among the best of Koerner's new pictures was Subway, a familiar scene made into a nightmare of sharp realism. Koerner used one anti-realistic stunt: he vastly enlarged the head of the desperate man in the rear of the car (see cut). "That man wants to get out," Koerner says. "People would think he was crazy. But what about the woman across the aisle, who needs to be looked at and yet hates it, or that fellow playing solitaire? Maybe they are the crazy ones."

The fourth man in the car appears again in Monkey Bars, a painting of a sullen couple glaring dully and fixedly at each other through a jungle gym swarmed, over by batlike children. "I paint what I've seen," says Koerner, "and I've seen that look of animosity."

Such pictures made Koerner the find of the year. There were less successful paintings in his show, some nasty in color, some confused in content. Except for one oil, The Beach, Koerner had excluded nature almost entirely. "I'm a city man," says Koerner. "I really love to ride the subway. To me it's like going to the theater."

Koerner's work, too, is theatrical. He illuminates almost every scene with the pitiless white glare of stage lighting--never sunlight or moonlight--and his actors move and speak with exaggerated force. These devices, skillfully employed, make Koerner's paintings more arresting than those of such established U.S. realists as Philip Evergood and Ben Shahn. But they are not enough to explain his disturbing power. Koerner's storytelling art is one of implication, and its very theatricalism serves to imply that the "real" world which man has made is equally a fabric of illusions.

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