Berlin's Best

Berliners, like all Europeans, know the face of sorrow by heart, and it generally leaves them numb. But this picture was haunting, and the gallerygoers kept returning to it. It was an autumn landscape in which two old people, their backs turned, appeared to be thinking things over (see cut); a painting which spoke the timeless reproach of the dead, of those who would never again turn to face their persecutors.

The artist was Henry Koerner, a Vienna-born Jew. The painting, which was good enough to make Koerner's first one-man show an important event, represented his parents, liquidated by the Nazis.

Koerner himself had escaped in the nick of time. In 1938 he went to the U.S. to seek his fortune as a commercial artist, and never again heard from his family. Now 31 and a U.S. citizen, he illustrates pamphlets for the U.S. Military Government in Germany. Although his war posters had earned him a reputation as a designer, the intensely serious young painter Berliners were talking about last week was still unknown in the U.S. Koerner intended to change that; he refused to sell any of the paintings in his Berlin show. He was saving them for one in Manhattan.

Koerner's paintings, at the Hau am Waldsee, were a high spot in Berlin's booming art season. Cheaper and easier to find than movies, galleries have become popular entertainment in Berlin. German painters can still buy canvas and brushes on the black market, and almost anyone can sell his stuff (paintings are considered a reasonably good hedge against inflation). But German art is still far below pre-Hitler standards. One good reason why: the painters Hitler had exiled have shown no inclination to hurry back. George Grosz has become a Long Island suburbanite; Lyonel Feininger is busy making watercolors of Manhattan skyscrapers; Max Beckmann broods in Amsterdam.

With few old favorites left to warm their adjectives over, German critics pounced on newcomer Koerner. Those who supposed that his work showed the trend of U.S. art proudly concluded that painting in the U.S. had gone German. Koerner's painting did have the heaviness, the harsh humor and the all-pervading weltschmerz which characterized German expressionism in the 1920s. Along with My Parents, the show's strongest painting was The Prophet (see cut), which reminded critics of Expressionist Grosz and also of Koerner's favorite Old Master, Peter Bruegel. (Of his bony, monkey-like Prophet, Koerner said that he "might be a demagogue or a statesman, and the man hanging might be a villain or a hero. The people must listen because they can do nothing else.")

Despite the critics' prompting, some Berliners--those who were too young to have seen the art that Hitler banned--frankly disliked Koerner. "Why," asked the conservative youths, "doesn't he paint things as they are?"

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