page_title: Henry Koerner
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Henry Koerner / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Save Waste Fats for Explosives by Henry Koerner, 1943 Printed by the Government Printing Office for the Office of War Information NARA Still Picture Branch (NWDNS-44-PA-380)
context_page_description: Henry Koerner was an Austrian-born American painter and graphic designer best known for his early Magical Realist works of the late 1940s and his portrait covers for Time magazine.
context_section_description: Born in the Leopoldstadt District of Vienna to non-observant Jewish parents Leo Körner (1879–1942) and Feige ("Fanny") Dwora Körner née Mager (1887–1942), Koerner attended the Realgymnasium Vereinsgasse. Trained in graphic design at Vienna's Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (1934–36), he worked in the studio of Viktor Theodor Slama, designing posters and book jackets. Following Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938, he fled via Italy (Milan and Venice) to the United States, settling in New York and in 1940 marrying Viennese-born Fritzi Apfel.
  Employed as a commercial artist in Maxwell Bauer Studios in Manhattan, he achieved initial success as a poster artist, receiving first prize from the American Society of the Control of Cancer Poster Competition and two first prizes from the National War Poster Competition. In 1943, the Office of War Information hired Koerner in its Graphics Division in New York, where he worked alongside artists Ben Shahn, Bernard Perlin, and David Stone Martin.  Shahn's pictorial style, along with the photography of Walker Evans and German Neue Sachlichkeit painters (e.g., Otto Dix), inspired Koerner's painting, which began with a rendering of his family home in Vienna (My Parents I, 1944). That first painting is the subject of the film "The Burning Child" 
  Drafted into the U.S. Army, he was ordered in 1944 to the Graphics Division of the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. where he made war posters, including Save Waste Fats and Someone Talked, the latter winning an award from the Museum of Modern Art.  Shipped to London, he documented, in pen and ink sketches and photographs, everyday life during wartime.  After VE Day (8 May 1945), Koerner was reassigned to Germany, working in Wiesbaden and Berlin, and sketching defendants at the Nuremberg trials.
caption: Save Waste Fats for Explosives by Henry Koerner, 1943, for the Office of War Information
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