Art & the Opposites

The Current Exhibition is great!

“The purpose of photography is to create an emotion about the world through what has been carefully seen and selected.” — Eli Siegel, Afternoon Regard for Photography

15 PHOTOGRAPHERS
Dale Laurin • John Reddy • David Bernstein Louis Dienes • Len Bernstein • Allan Michael Vincent Di Pietro • Steve Poleskie • Wayne MumfordAmy Dienes • Dan McClung • Harvey Spears Perry Hall • Doug Cox • Mary Fagan

The print by Chaim Koppelman, "Napoleon Entering New York," will be included in the 75th Anniversary exhibition celebrating the start of Art clases atthe Y. Chaim Koppelman was one of the early teachers there, conducting children's art classes under the then director William Kolodny. This was one of the artist's first teaching jobs where his study of Aesthetic Realism with its founder, poet, educator Eli Siegel, so successfully encouraged the art in children. The exhibition includes a very fine selection of work by past members of that illustrious faculty. Everyone is invited to the Opening in the Weill Art Gallery at the Y on May 12th. The show will be on for almost two weeks.

In the current exhibition "Alice Neel's Women" there is the artist's portrait of me done in my studio in 1944. At the opening of the show, on October 26th I was happy to tell to the filmmaker doing a documentary of Alice Neel's life and art, about the circumstances of this portrait. I have told about this when the portrait was shown at the Locks Gallery in Philadelphia last year. And I am so happy that I could say again how my early study of Aesthetic Realism affected our conversation and this painting.

I told about how I was beginning to learn from Mr. Siegel about the opposites in painting, and in a person. As I looked at the painting again, I saw more how that conversation got into the work; it is in the way Alice Neel showed me as a painter too.

The exhibition will continue until January 14th, and I hope other people will be moved as I was by the depth of seeing that comes through as one goes from one portrait to another. Alice Neel wanted to know women. What I was learning from Mr. Siegel affected Alice. It is, I think, in the way the light is in the painting, and in the way the leaves curl up the stretchers, on the back of the canvas. What is hidden and what is shown change places--there is an action here that is like conversation--as I see it. To the question I love so much, "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" I think this painting is an early answer: Yes.

The Great Fight of Ego vs. Truth: Songs about Love, Justice, & Everybody's Feelings! is going to be a terrific afternoon in which you will hear the cast of The Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company singing and performing on Sunday, October 23, 2005 at 2:30 PM in the Terrain Gallery of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene Street, New York, NY 10012 in SoHo, off W. Houston; call for more information 212.777.4490. To find out more click here for the announcement.

We'll see you there,

Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman

I first saw Arnold Perey's photographs, which he took in New Guinea, when he brought them to the Terrain Gallery. I saw that they had two qualities that impressed me enormously: 1) the people in the photographs did not look distant like "natives"--they were not foreign in their expressions. I could have met an expression like that on the face of a person walking down Grove Street near the gallery. 2) The next quality I saw was beauty, they put opposites together. There were figures softely curved carrying stiff limbs of trees and spears. The Terrain Gallery showed those photographs in an exhibition.

I have seen something new about the relation of a person born in Brooklyn, like myself, to someone born in New Guinea who doesn't speak my language. We have feelings that are akin. I thank Arnold Perey, my colleague as an Aesthetic Realism consultant for showing this in GWE. Here it is: http://www.gweofnewguinea.net/

*To draw, delineate, mark out, sketch in outline, or otherwise give visual expression to, as a conception or a plan, especially for the first time, or to serve as a pattern or model for a more finished study."

(This is the description of the exhibition's purpose; and on view are both the preparatory works and the finished pictures.)

Chaim Koppelman shows his early drawings and the finished "Portrait" --and the person being drawn is not stated. It is simply "portrait"--of an unnamed person. Several states of the aquatint were submitted, and then the final portrait. The artist says "I wrote on the proof suggestions of what I wanted to change, to do better, and worked with on the proof, before a final proof was taken, the final state.

The interplay of opposites, as Aesthetic Realism describes them, can be studied so valuably here because the unconscious impulsions, and the decisions--both unconscious and conscious--are on display. In the work of every artist there is a desire to welcome the unknown, and to join that with what is known--including techniques of the past and newly found. We look at some-thing mysterious and at the same time visibly "worked out," in the artist's mind and on the surface.



This exhibition opened on May 25th and will be on view through July 5th. It is a first of its kind and provides a view of how a work comes into being. The National Academy Museum is on Fifth Avenue and 90th Street.

THE TERRAIN GALLERY OPENED IN 1955 AND FOR THESE FIFTY YEARS THERE HAVE BEEN EXHIBITIONS BASED ON ITS SIGNATURE MOTTO--ELI SIEGEL'S STATEMENT: "IN REALITY OPPOSITES ARE ONE; ART SHOWS THIS.'

WE HAVE HAD EXHBITIONS SHOWING THE SCOPE, THE FRESH MEANING THAT CAN BE SEEN IN PAINTINGS, PRINTS, SCULPTURE, PHOTOGRAPHY, AS WE ASK "IS BEAUTY THE MAKING ONE OF OPPOSITES?"

THOSE FIFTEEN QUESTIONS ASKED BY MR. SIEGEL ARE THE GREATEST NON-EGOTISTICAL, ALWAYS DEPENDABLE, ALWAYS FRESH CRITERIA FOR SEEING THE VALUE OF A WORK OF ART OF ANY TIME, PLACE, OR MEDIA. WE CELEBRATE THEIR EXISTENCE AND ARE PROUD TO SHOW THE WORK OF THE 52 ARTISTS IN THE CURRENT EXHIBITION.

TO FIND OUT MORE CLICK INTO THE WEBSITE TERRAINGALLERY.ORG AND COME ON MAY 7TH!