SUNDAY, APRIL 3 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ EE E3
Art
BY SEBASTIAN SMEEI
n this 1948 painting by Hen-
ry Koerner (1915-1991), on
long-term loan to the Wads-
worth Atheneum in Hart-
ford, Conn., two children play
with tailor’s mannequins in an
urban snowscape. One of the
battered mannequins, or dum-
mies, is propped above a freshly
set fire, its base already chewed at
and charred by flames. The chil-
dren, a boy and a girl, have tied
string to the other mannequins.
With the exuberant inventive-
ness of children, they appear to
be using them as sleds.
The snow is streaked with dirt.
The trees are bare. Dead weeds
poke through the snow at right.
Butterflies of ash float from the
fire toward one child, while a
plume of smoke drifts from the
mannequin’s neck in a diagonal
stream that intersects with a
chimney.
The semi-obscured brick
buildings in the background
evoke Brooklyn, where the artist
was living. The rising contour
line of the snow pile in the
foreground continues into the
background hill, which itself
merges with the receding roof
line of the tallest building. All
this weirdly compresses the pic-
ture’s space.
The tall building’s facade is
covered by a mural of a woman
wearing a lovely blue dress and
hat. Despite her distance in the
painting’s fictitious space, her
actual size matches the burning
mannequin, encouraging us to
make a connection.
Koerner, who was Jewish, had
his first solo exhibition in Berlin
in 1947. It was the first exhibition
of modern American art in post-
war Germany and the first to
reflect on the Holocaust.
Koerner had grown up and
studied in Vienna, where he be-
gan his professional career as a
graphic artist. In his early 30s,alone among his family, he emi-
grated to America, via Italy. This
was in 1938, after Hitler’s a nnexa-
tion of Austria.
Toward the end of the war,
Koerner was drafted into the U.S.
Army. He made war posters for
the Graphics Division of the Of-
fice of Strategic Services (OSS) in
Washington. After V-E Day, he
was sent to Germany, where he
sketched defendants at the
Nuremberg trials.
It was only after he returned to
Vienna, still in the Army but on
furlough, that Koerner discov-
ered — after a period circling the
abyss of unwanted knowledge —
that his parents and brother and
almost all his relatives had been
murdered by the Nazis.
So it’s useful to know that the
woman in the mural in “Tailor’s
Dummies” is based on a photo-
graph of Koerner’s mother. And
that the upright burning manne-
quin evokes her murder. The
mannequins together might sug-
gest the corpses piled up in liber-
ated Dachau, photos of which
Koerner had seen, almost as soon
as they emerged, through his
work at the OSS.
But it’s the children who are
key to this painting. The ghastly
inference — that they are toying
with corpses — is overturned by
their innocence, their aliveness.
Their bodies’ gauche but vital
shapes put me in mind of Helen
Levitt’s contemporaneous photo-
graphs of children playing in the
streets of New York’s poorer
neighborhoods.
Wandering the heavily
scarred streets of London,
V ienna and Berlin in 1945-1946,
Koerner had been amazed to see
how the two things coexist: War
happens; children play. Their
survivors’ energy accompanied,
even depended on, an almost
willed obliviousness to the wid-
er debacle (a phenomenon we
are seeing again in footage of
families enduring the devasta-GREAT WORKS, IN FOCUSChildren at play,
but there is pain
tion in Ukraine).
Koerner’s Berlin show was a
tremendous success. He was
compared not only to Hierony-
mus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the
Elder (to whose wonderful paint-
ing, “Children’s Games,” “Tailor’s
Dummies” seems to nod), but
also to Francisco Goya and Otto
Dix, those unblinking witnesses
to war’s insanity.
Koerner’s first solo exhibition
in the United States followed
soon after. He was praised in Life
magazine for producing the “best
paintings to date that have come
out of the aftermath of war.”
When, the following year, he was
included in the Whitney Annualin 1949, he was described as “one
of the country’s most prominent
young painters.”
What happened thereafter is a
complicated story. American art
was swept up in the post-war rage
for abstraction. In 1952-1953, just
before “advanced” tastes
switched toward Pop art and
then minimalism, Koerner
changed his style from taut magic
realism to a distinctive take on
plein-air painting in the style of
Paul Cézanne. Critics lost inter-
est. But Koerner kept painting
and kept selling, and slowly, his
work is returning to the walls of
some of America’s great
m useums.ON LONG-TERM LOAN TO THE WADSWORTH ATHENEUM MUSEUM OF ARTHenry Koerner (b. 1915)Tailor’s Dummies, 1948
At the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn.A series featuring art critic Sebastian Smee’s favorite
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