page_title: Chaim Koppelman
section_title: Influence in the art community
hierarchical_section_title: Chaim Koppelman / Influence in the art community
caption_attribution_description: English: Chaim Koppelman, Robert Blackburn, Thomas Laidman and others in the workshop.
context_page_description: Chaim Koppelman was an American artist, art educator, and Aesthetic Realism consultant. Best known as a printmaker, he also produced sculpture, paintings, and drawings. A member of the National Academy of Design since 1978, he was president of the Society of American Graphic Artists, which presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. He established the Printmaking Department of the School of Visual Arts in 1959, and taught there until 2007.
  Koppelman was an early student of Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy founded in 1941 by Eli Siegel, which is based on the principle, "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves". This principle informed Koppelman's art, teaching, and his work as an Aesthetic Realism consultant. About the importance of this principle to art and life, Koppelman stated, "When Eli Siegel showed that what makes a work of art beautiful – the oneness of opposites – is the same as what every individual wants, it was one of the mightiest and kindest achievements of man's mind".
  Koppelman's art is noted for its originality, masterful technique, humor, and power.
context_section_description: In the early 1950s Koppelman was part of the Stanley William Hayter Atelier 17 in New York. Later he worked at the Printmaking Workshop founded by Robert Blackburn and Will Barnet. Blackburn credited Koppelman with saving the workshop when it faced financial difficulties in 1956, by transforming it into a seven-member artists cooperative with annual dues to keep its doors open.
  Blackburn, Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman, and Leo Katz–the head of Atelier 17 after Hayter–were among the artists who attended Beauty Conferences and Art Inquiries conducted by Eli Siegel, classes in which he discussed current work of contemporary artists with the artists present and participating. "The depth of the discussions that took place," Koppelman later wrote, "encouraged the artists to understand more deeply what their work was about, and what their intention was".
  In 1955, the Terrain Gallery opened with Dorothy Koppelman as founding director. She and Chaim Koppelman, as print curator, were responsible for major print exhibitions which included the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz, Ad Reinhardt, Fay Lansner, John von Wicht, Leonard Baskin, Robert Conover, Will Barnet, Harold Krisel, Vincent Longo and others. The motto of the Terrain was Siegel's statement: "In reality opposites are one; art shows this." The gallery held exhibitions of contemporary art, with works frequently accompanied by the artists' comments on Siegel's fifteen questions, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?, published by the Terrain and reprinted in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. After one-person shows at the Terrain, both Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman had work included in the 1962 exhibition "Recent Painting USA: The Figure" at the Museum of Modern Art.
  Koppelman opened his own studio and graphic workshop in 1964 at 498 Broome Street, pioneering the SoHo artists' community. The Broome Street Workshop remained open more than forty years, and was used and cared for by various artists, including Michael DiCerbo, Sally Brody, Carl Shishido, Reynolds Tenezias, and others.
  In 1967 the Terrain Gallery held an exhibition to benefit napalm-burned and crippled Vietnamese children.  Titled All Art Is for Life and Against the War in Vietnam, it included the work of 105 painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers. "Vietnam", a Koppelman aquatint originally in the Terrain exhibit, is included in The Indignant Eye: The Artist as Social Critic in Prints and Drawings from the Fifteenth Century to Picasso, by Ralph E. Shikes, which quotes Koppelman about his artistic intention: "I wanted a sense of a mother's dignity in the midst of tragedy."
  "Our Injustice, Vietnam", an embossed print with metallic paint on paper, described as a "stark political statement" in The New York Times, is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
  Koppelman was commissioned in 1968 to interview Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Clayton Pond on the relevance of the Siegel Theory of Opposites to their work.  Recordings of these interviews are part of the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. The following year, essays by Dorothy and Chaim Koppelman appeared in the book, Aesthetic Realism: We Have Been There – Six Artists on the Siegel Theory of Opposites (New York: Definition Press, 1969).
  After having tested his aesthetic concepts in literally thousands of works of different periods, in different styles, in different media, for more than twenty years, I say that Eli Siegel's Theory of Opposites is the key to what is good or beautiful in art. I have seen that the greater the work of art, the richer, more surprising and subtle the play and fusion of the opposing qualities in it. In a bad work of art, the opposites are present, but either they fight too much, or they are limply there ... Contempt is the greatest enemy of art ... Contempt, according to Aesthetic Realism, is the difference between what a thing deserves and what we give it ... Beauty can only arise from a mind that is just, wants to see things exactly and give
caption: Robert Blackburn workshop, Photo: Lou Dienes, 1959
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