Squirrel Hill artist captured ‘magic realism’ of Greensburg courthouse at Christmastime
Many muses inspired the artwork of Henry Koerner, especially the gilded Baroque architecture of his native Vienna, Austria.
Among his later inspirations were the panoramic views and rolling hills of Pittsburgh, the city that seduced and adopted him when he arrived here in 1952 to teach at Chatham University, known then as the Pennsylvania College for Women. By then, he was 36 and Life Magazine had appraised a 1946 exhibition of his artwork in Berlin as “the most important paintings to come out of the war.”
In the latter half of his 75 years, Koerner embraced painting outdoors. A fine example is “Greensburg’s Courthouse,” which he sketched while standing near a bridge in Greensburg, the Westmoreland County seat.
The oil painting he made from that sketch in 1989-1990 is prominently displayed at the Westmoreland Museum of American Art in Greensburg. This year, it was chosen as the 17th local artwork featured at Christmastime in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
What led Koerner to paint the courthouse, built between 1906 and 1908? Its gilded dome likely drew his eye. Domes are a defining characteristic of the Baroque architecture of his Austrian hometown, where the young artist graduated from the Vienna Academy of Design. The building’s elaborately decorated facade was probably a factor, too.
Located at 2 Main St., Greensburg’s granite-faced courthouse has two domes —the larger one is often said to resemble the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.
These shining symbols of freedom were not lost on Koerner, who fled Austria after Adolf Hitler’s Nazis invaded in 1938, leaving behind his parents, Fanny and Leo. Koerner spent a year in Italy, then immigrated to New York City, where he illustrated the covers of mystery novels and drew posters for the U.S. military.
Koerner saw the Greensburg courthouse often as he traveled from his home in Squirrel Hill to visit his friend, Paul Chew, the Westmoreland’s first director, according to Jeremiah William McCarthy, who earlier this year became the museum’s chief curator.
“In 1971, Paul gave him a retrospective here with 231 works. They had another 100 watercolors and drawings. Even by today’s standards, it’s a massive, massive show,” Mr. McCarthy said.
In 1975, the museum’s board of directors unveiled a commissioned portrait of Chew by Koerner.
Mr. McCarthy recently walked down Main Street to see the courthouse from the artist’s perspective.
“This view is pretty intact from when Koerner painted it around 1989. It looks like he may have painted it from by the bridge, and when you stand there, the parking lot structure isn’t visible at all,” the curator said.
“The little row of storefronts, which I thought would have been another set that were removed ... are actually the ones visible across the street seen in the picture. It’s a bit of an optical trick that skips the larger courthouse grounds because of the grade of the hill. The steeple and the sculpture are all still visible,” Mr. McCarthy added.
The painting was in storage when Mr. McCarthy arrived.
“This work hasn’t been out on view in over a decade,” he said. “When I saw it in storage, I thought, ‘Oh, that’s just a picture of the courthouse.’ ”
A closer, longer look at the dancing, glittering wreaths changed Mr. McCarthy’s mind.
“It has these holiday wreaths. … They draw you back into the perspective. They are sort of unmoored and just floating through the picture.”
The artist used this technique frequently in later paintings.
“You think it makes sense and it’s immediately understandable,” Mr. McCarthy said. “The more time you spend with it, the more it unfolds and becomes something magical.”
In the painting, the winter sky blends ash gray with undertones of purple and pink.
“I love the sky, too. It seems like every time and no time. You can’t really tell what time of day it is. Snow cues the time of season. You don’t see any people,” Mr. McCarthy said.
It has “a kind of haunting but also romantic quality,” he said.
Mr. McCarthy divides Koerner’s work into two periods. His work in the 1930s and ’40s is “more sort of a realistic style which corresponds with a group of artists you might call magic realists.
“If you look at the earlier paintings, they have these highly finished surfaces that are delicately rendered with an emphasis on design and line. Those are popular with visitors.”
One example of Koerner’s earlier work was exhibited for several years in the permanent collection galleries of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Done in 1946, “The Mirror of Life” was recently taken down.
“It was a fan favorite,” Mr. McCarthy said. “There was always people there. Things in it are realistic, but it looks as if he has blown apart reality.”
Koerner “achieved a level of fame that was just sort of unprecedented,” he said, particularly after his work was exhibited in Berlin after World War II.
The artist’s arrival in Pittsburgh corresponds to a shift in style more influenced by Paul Cezanne — “this kind of much looser, more fluid, expressionist brush stroke,” Mr. McCarthy said.
Koerner’s portraits of famous people, commissioned by Time magazine, burnished his reputation. He refused to work from photographs and insisted his subjects sit while he sketched. This meant that he met everyone from Barbra Streisand to Nelson Rockefeller and Maria Callas to then-U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy.
“You don’t find a lot of artists with such a compelling story — spending his childhood where he does, coming here after the war, losing his parents and being able to translate all of that questioning and trauma and commentary into painting in a way that’s not didactic but leaves a lot of space for a viewer. It’s pretty remarkable,” Mr. McCarthy said.
“Even on his worst days, he’s better than 90% of other painters. He is tackling one of the fundamental questions for artists in the second half of the 20th century: How do you paint after one of the most difficult human tragedies that the world has experienced? If things like the Holocaust could happen, the world has no order. Why even make art?
“In recent years, major museums have started to collect him again,” Mr. McCarthy said, adding that the Arkansas-based Art Bridges Foundation, established by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, purchased a seminal Koerner painting titled “The Pigeons.”
“We actually have it on a longterm loan,” he said. “Beginning in the new year, after Jan. 18, we will reinstall our 20th-century galleries. People could come to see it in a new context. It will be featured prominently.”
The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, established in Los Angeles by filmmaker George Lucas, also owns a Koerner artwork.
“There is now a renewed interest in his work that you can see solely by the market,” Mr. McCarthy said.