Straightforwardness

Henry Koerner's meticulous realism strikes a lot of moderns as just a throwback to 19th Century genre painting. But since art moves in cycles, it may really represent an advance. Koerner obviously thinks so; the only question he asks himself is how to consolidate his advance.

Though he paints people and things he sees, Koerner assembles them to suit himself on carefully planned canvases. No one could fail to appreciate the competence of Koerner's last exhibition (TIME, March 27), but many complained of its tightness and dryness along with its general atmosphere of gloomy obscurity. His new paintings, on view in a Manhattan gallery last week, suffer less noticeably from such faults.

"This year," Koerner says, "I dragged my canvases everywhere to do everything on the spot. It's amazing how easily you forget reality, and how much richer reality is. Instead of painting just people I made them real portraits, I tried very hard for likenesses. Do you think Springtime for Henry looks like me?"

One of his few cheerful pictures, Henry does. It also shows Koerner's growing independence of involved, story-telling props. The children's airplane swing on which the figure poses might be taken to symbolize the young showoff side of any artist's make-up as well as the realist's happy lot--which is to go around looking. The jar of fish he totes with him might symbolize almost anything. But those two props do not make the painting, or even intrude on it too much.

Studying nature, not imitating modern masters, is Koerner's method, and straightforwardness, not forcefulness, appears to be his goal. In painting, that looks easy and comes hard.

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