ARTICLES BY CHAIM KOPPELMAN
Saint Gaudens deals with the conflict in war, and the ethics of a nation—ethics our country needs to learn from now—in the Shaw Memorial commemorating the first black regiment of the Civil War, and their white commander, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw….Like Shaw, Saint Gaudens also struggled with his ethics. read more
“This raucous engraving is a beautifully composed criticism of man’s desire to live in an ivory tower and have contempt for what he sees as different and beneath him. As the musician stands in his window with his hands over his ears, glaring at the people outside, the tumult of life makes him angry and he doesn’t see the beauty in its midst.” read more
“I have come to see a new relation between Munch’s earliest lithographs (1896), Anxiety and Death Chamber. They are both beautiful because the artist is courageously dealing with and showing a dramatic oneness of closeness and distance, presence and absence…” read more
“Aesthetic Realism and its critical principles have enabled me to see how two satirical works of art I have cared for are beautiful, show respect for mankind and also can teach us how to be kinder people….The artists looked at people one might easily have contempt for and instead had large respect.” read more
“The centaur, the satyr, and most importantly the minotaur—a oneness of man and bull—appear increasingly in Picasso’s etchings of the 1930s. These beings represent the duality in all men and in the artist himself; the opposing forces he wanted to put together as person and as artist.” read more
“Men and women all over the world, including artists, will love Eli Siegel, as I do, for the absolutely new and crucial distinction he made between two kinds of imagination: one that is for the world and art, and the other that is against both—and against mind itself.” read more
YouTube video: “When I first saw Henri Matisse's Harmony in Red it took my breath away. I felt it was one of the most joyous paintings I'd ever seen….I thought it was superficial to be happy. I learned how wrong I was in classes taught by Eli Siegel…” see video of talk here
A tremendous thing happened in my life when my father, Sam Koppelman, attended an Aesthetic Realism lesson with me, and Mr. Siegel taught us how to be kind to one another. read more
I am moved and honored to have designed and sculpted this memorial to Eli Siegel, with whom I began to study as a young artist in November, 1940….My idea began with a simple pencil sketch of a plaque mounted on a rock. read more
There is a power and beauty in the work of the noted American printmaker Chaim Koppelman that made this exhibition at the Beatrice Conde gallery unforgettable….“I want to show,” he writes, “the ethical drama of good and evil in ourselves, evocatively, starkly, subtly, humorously, and with mystery.” read more