ARTICLES BY DOROTHY KOPPELMAN
“Jackson Pollock’s famous action paintings exemplify his true ambition—to like this world—and they are a thrilling sight of a man loving the way weight and lightness, thickness and airiness, impediment and release are one in reality…” more
“This mural is great, as I have learned from Aesthetic Realism, because it shows, even as it takes on the cruelty and seeming non-sense in the world—that there is form, there is organization, there is something larger than man’s ‘inhumanity to man.’” read more
“Every person wants to feel he is the same person lying down as he is standing up, the same person at his job in the daylight as he was lying in bed. This beautiful painting in its shimmering and permanent oneness of opposites shows that it is possible.” more
“I have been greatly affected by the work of Philip Guston and I think his drawings, his paintings, and what he says about himself can be a means of understanding some of the largest questions artists, and all people have about ourselves.” read more
“In the paintings of Joseph Mallord William Turner, there is a light so blazing …one can almost be completely absorbed—and always, too, there is that blackness. I am exploring the meaning of those opposites…central not only in the work, but in the life, the very self of the artist.” more
Given in 2007 at the Piero della Francesca Foundation in Sansepolcro, Italy. “What is the large meaning of this work? I see every detail of it to be centrally about two opposites: high and low, or pride and humility—opposites crucial in every person’s life.” more (Also in Italian here)
“I was so struck by the impact of this man, roughly hewn, heavy, mute…. The artist has given us man, at the beginning both raw and noble, a brute with immense kindness—at once solidly on the earth and rising proudly in space.” more
“I am considering the work of Edouard Vuillard as a lesson in paint showing how deeply an artist has looked at women and their lives. The early paintings by Vuillard put together the opposites in every woman’s life—the intimate and the large, closeness and distance...” more
“When we are pleased by the bottles of Morandi as they are still and yet edgy, jumpy, even uncertain…we are pleased by that oneness of energy and repose which is what reality made us to enjoy in the first place. What pleases us in Morandi, in Piero, in all art, is the oneness of opposites.” more