A Question

In Berlin, the year's best art exhibition had been the work of a Vienna-born American named Henry Koerner (TIME, April 28). In Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week, Koerner stole the show again. The Whitney's Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting was largely a dance of painted shadows: pictures that were either flatly abstract or academically pictorial. By contrast, Koerner's dramatic microcosm of modern life, which he called Vanity Fair, had the power of a compressed reality.

The works of 32-year-old Artist Koerner, who served in the U.S. Army and later with the U.S. Military Government in Berlin, reminded critics of the post-World War I satires of Germany's George Grosz, but, says Koerner, "there's a difference: I do not accuse." One picture in his Berlin show, My Parents, was more than an accusation; it was a memorial portrait of his parents, painted in the Vienna woods, with their backs turned. (They had died in a Nazi concentration camp.) That was a picture which Europeans could best understand.

Koerner now lives in Brooklyn, painting full-time to get ready for his first one-man show in a Manhattan gallery next month. He feels sure that Americans as well as Germans will understand Vanity Fair, which Koerner describes as "the end-product of the things I saw and painted in Germany. It might be called 'Everybody,' because everyone is in it--America too. The picture describes how we all live, separated."

Vanity Fair is constructed like a revolving stage, where city & country and night & day whirl drunkenly together. In the foreground, a naked figure leans out of his window to peer through the gloom at Cain killing Abel in the sunlit distance.

The gloom between begins with a Manhattan street at night and an old couple on their darkening porch in Virginia, sweeps across London's Petticoat Lane, where people eat and try on clothes with the same grubby boredom, to Berliners dancing by a stagnant pool and a Viennese carnival in the background. Says Koerner: "Who is guilty, the man who kills or those who turn their backs? It's a sort of question."

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