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A Panorama of Pittsburgh
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Learn about Pittsburgh's past by viewing more than 130 printed views of the city.

Meissonier masterpiece
now on view at the Frick
1806, Jena is on view at the Frick through May 31, 2009.

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RADical Day at the Frick
Visit the Frick on 10/5 for a full day of activities and fun!

Rob Rogers discusses
political cartooning on 10/12
The Post-Gazette's award-winning editorial cartoonist will discuss his experiences covering the 2008 presidential campaign and conventions.

Music for Exhibitions
begins new season 11/18
Join Katherine Soroka and Chatham Baroque for an evening of memorable music.

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September 13, 2003 - November 9, 2003
August 15, 2003, Pittsburgh, PA — The Frick Art & Historical Center is proud to present an exhibition of paintings by former Pittsburgh artist Henry Koerner (1915-1991). A native of Austria, Koerner emigrated to the United States in 1939. The Early Work of Henry Koerner, which opens September 13, 2003 at The Frick Art Museum, features 31 paintings created following the Second World War, after Koerner learned that his family had been killed by the Nazis. Seeking to give form to his trauma, Koerner employed personal symbolic imagery and a realistic, highly-finished style that is often associated with the American movement called Magic Realism. A group of drawings selected by Mrs. Henry Koerner will also be on view. The Early Work of Henry Koerner is organized by the Frick Art & Historical Center and curated by Dr. Edith Balas, Professor of Art History at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Associate at the University of Pittsburgh. The exhibition includes paintings on loan from public and private collections in Pittsburgh and across the United States. The Early Work of Henry Koerner will be on view through November 9, 2003. Henry Koerner was born in 1915 in Vienna, Austria. He trained as a graphic designer at the Graphische Lehr und Versuchsamstalt, Vienna and in the Viennese studio of Victor Slama, a well-known illustrator. Following Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, Koerner fled Vienna. After emigrating to the United States in 1939, Koerner designed book jackets at Maxwell Bauer Studios in New York. Between the years 1942-1943 he worked for the Office of War Information (Domestic) with Ben Shahn, a leading social realist painter. The influence of Shahn’s strong contour lines and flattened spaces is evident in Koerner’s early paintings and can be seen in the exhibition work entitled In The Market (1945). In 1943 he was drafted into the United States Army and then became an American citizen in 1944. Koerner was then ordered to go to the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. After the war ended in 1945, Koerner was reassigned to Berlin as a court artist at the Nuremberg trials. Following his discharge from the Army in 1946, he returned to Austria and came face-to-face with the grim reality that his parents, brother and all his relatives were victims of the Holocaust. Although Koerner characterized himself as a straightforward realist, his early paintings are best understood as a manifestation of the American movement of painting called Magic Realism. Artists who were associated with this movement, such as Paul Cadmus, George Tooker, Ivan Albright, and Philip Evergood, painted fantastic or strange subjects—often representing a traumatic experience—in a realistic manner. A sharply focused delineation of forms, minute rendering of detail, flattened perspective, and an absence of shadows are hallmarks of the style. According to Lincoln Kirstein, who admired the Magic Realists in the 1940s and organized exhibitions of their work in New York and London, “magic realists try to convince us that extraordinary things are possible simply by painting them as if they existed.” Yet, despite the apparent order and rational basis of their work, Magic Realists sought to portray the chaos of post-war America, an intention they shared with Abstract Expressionists of the time. In Koerner’s painting Vanity Fair (Mirror of Life) (1946), for example, a naked man leans out of a room filled with light and security while, outside, the world churns with chaos and turmoil. Like many survivors of the Holocaust, Koerner was haunted by a sense of remorse at having survived while the rest of his family perished. Not surprisingly, his parents attained an iconic quality in his paintings. Resolved to memorialize them in the familiar environment of their home, Koerner painted My Parents No. 1 (1945). A more melancholy painting of his parents painted with their backs turned in the Vienna woods (My Parents No. 2, 1946) is an early triumph of Koerner’s career. In 1947, Koerner had his first solo exhibition in Berlin, to immediate acclaim. He was favorably compared to old masters Bosch, Brueghel and Goya. Upon his return to New York, he held his first American exhibition and was subsequently included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s 1949 annual exhibition, where he was hailed by Time as “one of the country’s most prominent young painters.” During the next decade, however, as abstract expressionism held sway, Koerner found himself increasingly relegated to the sidelines of contemporary art. Nevertheless, he maintained a lifelong commitment to figurative representation. Koerner moved to Pittsburgh in 1952 to serve as artist-in-residence at the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College) and divided his time between his adopted home of Pittsburgh and his native Vienna. The Westmoreland Museum of American Art organized a retrospective of his work in 1971. In 1983, Carnegie Museum of Art mounted an even larger survey entitled From Vienna to Pittsburgh. On June 12, 1991, Koerner was hit on his bicycle outside Vienna, Austria and later died on July 4, 1991. His work was featured in a major retrospective exhibition at the Austrian museum Belvedere Palace in Vienna in 1997. According to William B. Bodine, Jr., Director of the Frick Art & Historical Center, narrowing the focus of the Frick’s Koerner exhibition is an effort to document the formation of the artist through his experience of loss. “Koerner’s art is one of remembrance,” he says, “an art that shows us melancholy and despair through the seemingly realistic details and colors of the world around him. We are privileged to provide a larger audience for this distinct body of paintings by one of Pittsburgh’s most important artists.” The Early Work of Henry Koerner is accompanied by an 88-page full-color catalogue written by the exhibition’s curator, Dr. Edith Balas, Professor of Art History at Carnegie Mellon University and Research Associate at the University of Pittsburgh. The catalogue, which features all 31 paintings in color, will be available at the Museum Shop for $35 (hard cover) and $25 (soft cover). In addition to this exhibition of Koerner’s painting, a selection of the artist’s drawings chosen by Mrs. Henry Koerner will be presented concurrently in The Frick Art Museum. Among the drawings on view will be several he sketched of Nazi war criminals while he was a court artist at the Nuremberg trials. Renowned art historian Dr. Joseph Leo Koerner, the artist’s son, will give the lecture A Family Portrait on Wednesday, September 17, 2003 at 7:15 p.m. at The Frick Art Museum. The Early Work of Henry Koerner is supported, in part, by a generous grant from The Millstein Charitable Foundation. The Frick Art Museum Part of the Frick Art & Historical Center in Pittsburgh, The Frick Art Museum contains the fine and decorative art collection of Helen Clay Frick, daughter of Henry Clay Frick. In addition to exhibiting its permanent collection, which concentrates on Italian Renaissance and French eighteenth-century works, the Museum has an active program of temporary exhibitions. Admission to The Frick Art Museum is free. Frick Art & Historical Center The Frick Art & Historical Center is located at 7227 Reynolds Street in Point Breeze. Free parking is available in the Frick’s off-street lot, or along adjacent neighborhood streets. Hours of operation: Tuesday – Saturday, 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Sunday 12:00 – 6:00 p.m. Closed Mondays and major holidays. For information and reservations, please call 412-371-0600, 9:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Monday through Sunday. For further information or images, please contact Greg Langel at the Frick Art & Historical Center at 412-371-0600, ext. 524, or info@frickart.org. Click here for more information about special events and programs offered in conjunction with The Early Work of Henry Koerner.