Henry Koerner Propaganda

Henry Koerner Is the artist I am going to use as my main inspiration having already looked at a few of his poster I decided to look a little bit deeper into him and his work including the one I am going to use as my main inspration. So after some research into him I found that he was originally born in Vienna he moved to the United States in 1938 as started out as a commercial artist. During world war 2 he created propaganda poster for the Office of War Information and the Office of Strategic Services his most famous piece being the someone talked poster I have already looked at which won an award at the museum of modern art. Most interesting to me is that he was considered the master of magic realism which completely contrasts his propaganda work. Although it is propaganda it is not even a little bit realistic on the most part featuring flying barrels, floating hands and giant fish. This imagery however whilst not realistic it is very strong which is something I really like about his work.

Another aspect of his work I really like was the backgrounds of his posters they almost always feature some kind of gradient background which is a nice touch and often makes the main imagery stand out more. For example the poster on the right has a gradient background which makes the soldiers on the side stand out against the black background and makes the text stand out against the red on the bottom of the poster whilst also being visually pleasing.

Another strong part of his propaganda work in my opinion is the slogans he usese in his work they are usually short, clever and get a strong message across. For example the slogan here of "Fish is a Fighting Food, we need more" is gets the message across to us but is also catchy with the three f's making alliteration feel to it making it stronger. Also often the typography on his work will feature more than one colour to make it stand out on the background and also highlight certain parts of his slogans to give them more impact.

(Parts of Henry Koerner's biography taken from - http://www.rogallery.com/Koerner_Henry/koerner-biography.html)