Henry Koerner

Henry Koerner’s Joan Nursing Stephanie reveals an elaborate new mode of expression that evolved out of the artist’s earlier Magic Realist style toward an Impressionist approach defined by fluid brushwork and painted from life. Koerner’s experiments in watercolor in 1953-55 led to the development of a light palette that characterizes his paintings of the period, of which the present work is one of the earliest examples. Executed in Pittsburgh, it is the first painting from life of an important new personal and artistic episode in Koerner’s development. In the lower center of the composition, Joan Koerner, the artist’s wife, nurses their first child, Stephanie Koerner, in their first apartment on Murray Hill Avenue in July 1954. Two other works by Koerner are displayed above the reclining figures. On the central back wall hangs a drawing of women fencing. In the upper right quadrant, Koerner included a detail of his painting The Sea (1949), which depicts a woman’s rescue by a police figure on Coney Island, creating a striking contrast of subject and style against the light palette and mother and child in the foreground. The year after this work was painted, Koerner produced over 50 covers for Time magazine between 1955 and 1967.