Estimate: $250,000 - $400,000
American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists
Auction: December 3, 2023 at 2 PM ET
Oil on canvas
61 x 50 in. (155 x 127cm)
Executed in 1978.
The Artist.
(Possibly with ACA Galleries, New York, New York).
Acquired directly from the above.
The Estate of Dr. Robert Craig, Monongahela, Pennsylvania.
“From Vienna in Pittsburgh: The Art of Henry Koerner,” Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, May 28-July 31, 1983.
“Unheimliche Heimat: Henry Koerner, 1915-1991,” Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria, June 25-August 31, 1997.
Unheimliche Heimat: Henry Koerner, 1915-1991, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, 1997, p. 127 (illustrated).
Offered at auction for the first time and seen by the public only at the occasional exhibition (the most recent dating to the late 1990s), The Station was the crown jewel of Dr. Robert Craig’s private collection in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—a city Craig shared with his dear friend Henry Koerner, who had arrived in 1952 and remained there until his untimely death in 1991. According to the artist’s son, “the painting is among the five most important that my father did” after 1953, a time when the artist started to adopt the broken brushwork of his later work. Its monumentality, rare in the artist’s work, commands its relevance, both in the artist’s oeuvre and within the history of American art.
Painted in 1978, The Station is a late, mature work by Koerner. Yet, it remains as poignant as the artist's earlier compositions, encapsulating the tension and ambiguity that characterize the best of his works. Audiences are offered a view of Bahnsteigdach Hadersdorf-Weidlingau, a railroad station on the western outskirts of Vienna that Koerner admired for its attractive turn-of-the-century architecture, and which according to the artist’s son makes for “the greatest of his Viennese paintings." The platform serves as the stage for the arrival and departure of countless travelers, their activities seemingly directed by the Stationmaster at left who, his back turned to us, acts as the choreographer of an everyday ballet, his red and green baton firmly in hand. As unusual as it was for the artist, the painting was executed on site in Vienna. Koerner set the canvas directly onto the platform and sketched both the structure and the Stationmaster (an actual employee at Hadersdorf) from life, adding each figure individually in Pittsburgh later, using friends and models who posed outdoors or at his home.
At first glance, The Station appears to be a mundane snapshot of urban life but upon closer inspection, and despite the known location of the station, it is a more complex image whose meaning is not readily apparent to the viewer. Here, as in many of his other works, Koerner plays with scale to imbue an undercurrent of anxiety. The Stationmaster is clearly oversized, dwarfing the surrounding people—especially the figurine-like passengers exiting the station through an underground staircase (which still exists today). This dichotomy was one of Koerner’s favored compositional tricks, which he called “reverse perspective” and which already appears in his earliest works executed in Berlin. The technique was also used by George Tooker, Koerner’s rival in the realm of Magic Realism, and can be seen on the left side of his painting The Subway (1950), now at the Whitney Museum. The present work is both a time-capsule and a time warp in that the very 1970s clothes contrast (in a very Koerner fashion) with the overall flattened perspective, which gives the scene an older, Byzantine look. While it evidently pays tribute to Koerner’s admiration for the Italian primitives Giotto and Masaccio, as well as the work of Hieronymus Bosch, it also contributes to the painting's unsettling duality, which combines elements of tradition and modernity. As in the work of the 16th-century Netherlandish master, the viewer is furthermore confronted with disturbing imagery, such as the lady without pants in the foreground, the distraught woman at left, or even the shining red suitcase abandoned in the middle of the composition, which seems to hold the answers to the painting’s entire mystery.
In The Station, Koerner creates a suspended narrative that arrests the viewer as they attempt to decode its meaning and interpret the artist’s choice of scenery and subject matter which, according to the artist’s son, is the key to understanding the importance of the painting. Here, the Stationmaster–grand, authoritative, and almighty in his anonymity–regulates train traffic, overseeing their comings and goings, and maybe even their destination. The figure is part of Koerner’s iconography of ordinary people entrusted with a bigger role, of a higher dimension. Here, the huge man serves as Fate itself, and the painting consequently stands as a metaphor for life's journey and ultimate final leg. While the trains and wagons are not visible, the flow of travelers suggest movement, and make the station “a key site of emotion." Some characters wave longingly at loved ones on trains that have just left the station, others are caught in the heart-wrenching act of saying goodbye to the soon-to-be departed. A stream of passengers travels to and from the composition’s middle ground—the equivalent of a Purgatory. All appear at the mercy of the Stationmaster, who seemingly controls everyone’s destiny, and determines who stays and who leaves.
This underlying message is not altogether innocent given the artist’s personal history. At the time of his first solo-shows in Berlin and New York, critics enthusiastically compared Koerner to artists like Otto Dix and Max Beckman, who were known for drawing from history and their own lived experience to create their work. Born in Vienna in 1915 to Jewish parents who emigrated from the Northern regions of the Habsburg Empire, Koerner left his family behind and fled to the United States by way of Italy following Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938 (Anschluss). Although he always suspected it, it was not until 1946 that Koerner learned his entire family had been killed during the Holocaust. Knowledge of Koerner’s traumatizing past invites a different and darker reading of this station depicted. Situated in Vienna's Jewish district (Leopoldstadt), not far from the home of Koerner's parents–who witnessed and suffered from the Führer's rallies–Hadersdorf stood in the middle of WWII's horrors and beheld the flow of people seeking exile or those being transported to their deaths. It acted as both a beacon of hope and salvation, and as an omen of sorrow and suffering. Decades later, through the power of art and Koerner's artistic genius and resilience, the train station is transformed onto canvas as The Station. It assumes an emotional symbolic layer and carries an even greater universal power that commands viewers' solemn and ultimate respect.