Underneath the profuse and baroque imagery of Henry Koerner's painting lies that longing which surpasses physical desire--the longing for God's presence. Alexis Rannit, the Estonian poet, has called all art "nostalgia for God." Koerner has often said that his painting is "a hole through which I can see God." For Koerner , the creation is truly holy in all its aspects. For him, nothing is ugly. He has painted abandoned automobiles, weddings, skyscrapers, glaciers, children, old people, birds, space travel, and more--all with the same reverence. As we shall see, one of the most interesting aspects of Koerner's celebration of life is his love and his fear of women, an ambivalence that every religion intuits. The importance in Western religious tradition of images of Eve, Lilith, and Mary (Queen of heaven, Madonna and child, and Virign) attest to the need of religion to place the multifaceted problem of femininity within a structure of belief. Koerner's paintings of women are an integral part of his "nostalgia" for God, but the way in which they are portrayed is unique in contemporary art and forms an important part of his exceptional grasp of both the modern and the archaic consciousness.
Koerner, who was born in Vienna in 1915, has lived and worked in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, since the early fifties, but he returns to Vienna twice a year. The influence of his birthplace is evident in much of his work. Luckily, Koerner escaped from Vienna in 1938, but Hitler's forces exterminated his parents and brother in the flames of the Holocaust. Today Vienna still registers, for Koerner, a sense of palpable evil, which acts like a goad to keep him painting furiously, even now, in his seventy-first year. But dualism has never been a problem for Koerner. His triumphs and tragedies are all woven into a seamless totality.
Koerner's effort to portray this unity of experience through painting was established early in his professional career with such paintings as My Parents (1946-47, Regis Corporation Collection, Mineapolis) and Lebenspiegel (Life Mirror, 1946-47, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York), now well-known works. This search, which is a desire to touch the holy, persists throughout his oeuvre down to his latest work, an enormous altarpiece in which the cycle of Creation includes space-age imagery.
Just as in Bruegel's painting, which he admired as a child in Vienna, every element in a Koerner painting is the result of careful observation of the world around him. Koerner has frequently painted his own versions of the Fall of Icarus, combining fact and myth, as did Bruegel. His art can also be compared with the poetry of Wallace Stevens, who wrote about "the eye's plain version, the vulgate of experience." Koerner's "inventions," as he calls his fantasies, depict the reality of sensual and emotional experience through the process of fashioning meaning out of the stock of visual data collected and stored in his fertile psyche. His results, however, do not read as distortions. Daliesque grotesque encounters, or other abnormalities Koerner's gift rests in his ability to remain within the mundane while at the same time transporting the viewer into a timeless zone, an eternal present, where there are no shadows.
Koerner's fantasies about women--women he passionately loves and desperately needs--share none of the anger of Picasso, the perversion of Balthus, or the sweetness of Renoir. His clear eye and his worshipful spirit report to us the old news that women are powerful, dangerous, nurturing, vulnerable
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