Henry Koerner
American artist (1915-1991)
Henry Koerner (born Heinrich Sieghart Körner; August 28, 1915 – July 4, 1991) 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.
Early life
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. His aunt on his father's side, was the painter and printmaker Sophie Körner (later Sophie Figdor). Studying graphic design at Vienna's Graphische Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt (1934–36), Henry Cover worked in the studio of Viktor Theodor Slama, designing posters and book jackets. Following Hitler's annexation of Austria in 1938, he escaped (by air September 16) to Italy (Venice and Milan), in 1939 to the United States, settling in New York. In 1940 he married 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).
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.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Henry Koerner” as american artist (1915-1991). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5724446. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1991, 1879 and 1942.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henry Koerner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.