Chaim Koppelman

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. He is represented in most major print collections, including New York's Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Metropolitan Museum, New York Public Library, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A retrospective exhibition at the Museo Napoleonico in Rome (2011–12) exposed his work to an international audience.

Chaim Koppelman studied at Brooklyn College. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is printmaking. Work by Chaim Koppelman is recorded in the collections of Museum of Modern Art, Print Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art and Michael C.

• Name — Chaim Koppelman • Born — 17 November 1920 • Birthplace — Brooklyn, New York • Died — 6 December 2009 • Place of death — Manhattan, New York • Spouse — Dorothy Myers • Field — printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing • Training — American Artists School, Art Students League, School of Creative Arts, Bristol, École des Beaux Arts, Amédée Ozenfant • Website — http: chaimkoppelman.net

• Illustration — 1929 sketch • Illustration — 1941, Untitled Guggenheim Collection Chaim Koppelman was born in Brooklyn, New York City, to Sam and Sadie Koppelman, whose images appear in several of his works. At the age of 9, he drew a profile of Napoleon in a geography book, and images of the Emperor would reappear throughout his long career. He began his study of art in Works Progress Administration (WPA) classes at the Brooklyn Museum in 1936, and continued at Brooklyn College, the Educational Alliance, and the American Artists School. He studied sculpture with William Koss, abstract painting with Carl Holty, and lithography with Eugene Morley. At the Art Students League, he studied sculpture with Jose de Creeft and etching with Martin Lewis and Will Barnet. In the early 1940s Koppelman worked at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting on 54th Street in Manhattan (which later became the Guggenheim Museum) with, among others, Jackson Pollock, Robert De Niro, Sr., Rolph Scarlett, Lucia Autorino, and Ward Jackson. Two of his early, abstract pen and ink drawings are in the Guggenheim collection. The first recorded exhibition of Koppelman's work was held in the Lounge Gallery of the Eighth Street Playhouse in 1942, and included drawings, paintings, and sculpture. The following year, he had a solo exhibition at the Outlines Gallery in Pittsburgh.

• Illustration — Meeting (2007) Pastel Throughout Koppelman's long career, the image of Napoleon is recurrent, and a retrospective exhibition of over eighty works and studies dealing with Napoleon was held at the Museo Napoleonico in Rome (October 11, 2011 – May 6, 2012). Titled Napoleon Entering New York: Chaim Koppelman and the Emperor, Works 1957–2007, it included paintings, pastels, drawings, collage, watercolors, intaglio etchings, linocuts, and many of the artist's notes on paper. The exhibition also included selections from a lecture Siegel gave in 1951, Napoleon Bonaparte: or, Orderly Energy, which Koppelman had attended and which he credited with inspiring much of the work displayed. • Illustration — Napoleon and Me (n.d.) Lithograph • Illustration — Napoleon Entering New York (c. 1957) Aquatint • Illustration — Napoleon Entering Coney Island (1957) Etching • Illustration — "Napoleon as an Indian" (n.d.) Gouache • Illustration — Napoleons on Alligators (1963) Etching • Illustration — Napoleon Entering Brighton Beach (1981) Pastel • Illustration — Napoleon and the Little Dancer (n.d.) Watercolor • Illustration — Napoleon Alone (n.d.) Acrylic and Oil Pastel In his review, "Chaim Koppelman's Napoleon Entering Brighton Beach, Coney Island", artist Richard Sloat, past president of SAGA, wrote: "In his art, Chaim Koppelman was a maker of stories about our inner self.... For Napoleon to be leading his army in retreat down the boardwalk of Coney Island is a bit heroic, a bit tragic, a bit funny, a bit absurd, but also glorious. Is this not a wonderful metaphor of our living this life?" In reviewing this exhibition, the Italian daily newspaper, Corriere della Sera described Koppelman as "one of the greatest American printmakers".

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• Illustration — Robert Blackburn workshop, Photo: Lou Dienes, 1959 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". • Illustration — Chaim Koppelman at the Terrain Gallery, NYC, June 1956 Photo: Lou Dienes 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. Chaim Koppelman is quoted, and his work 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. His works are 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).

Koppelman's prints were compared to William Blake and Francisco Goya. ARTnews wrote of his "superb use of allegory." Critics praised his work at the Terrain Gallery, the Kennedy Gallery, the RoKo Gallery, the Brooklyn Museum, the National Academy of Design, and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. "Koppelman's concern is man, good and evil... He is a superb technician whose work has grandeur and emotional impact," wrote Bennett Schiff. "Chaim Koppelman brings a totally new concept and technique to the field of graphic art," wrote critic and gallery director Sylvan Cole, Jr. "Siegel's Theory of Opposites has had a profound effect upon his work". Una Johnson, Curator Emeritus of Prints and Drawings at the Brooklyn Museum said, "He has harnessed his skills and his unblinking imagery to the troubled, often controversial problems of our times." Fellow artist Will Barnet said, "He was brilliant, both in printmaking and painting. His work has a sense of darkness and light that is unique... There was this profundity in him, and this sense of humanity. And it was developed through Aesthetic Realism". Koppelman received the SAGA Markel Prize in 1956, and Tiffany Grants in 1967 and 1969. He represented the United States in the Documenta II exhibition, Kassel, West Germany in 1969. In the SAGA annual exhibition of 1967, Koppelman's print "Exodus" was awarded the Vera List Prize. The following year, his work was shown and discussed on Channel 31, WNYC-TV. In 1976, he won a New York State CAPS (Creative Artists Public Service) Grant for a suite of lithographs titled Closeness and Clash in Couples and Domestic Life. In 1998, his charcoal drawing "The Dark Angels" won the Gladys Emerson Cook Award for general excellence from the National Academy. In 1992 Koppelman, Blackburn, and Barnet received a New York Artists Equity Award for their dedicated service to the printmaking community. Legends of the Printmaking Workshop, a 2011 exhibition at the LaGrange Museum in Georgia, featured prints of all three artists and Tom Laidman, selected by, and now part of, the collection of Wesley Cochran.,

Koppelman's work appears in major print collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan, Whitney, Brooklyn and Guggenheim Museums; Peabody Essex Museum, Yale University Art Gallery, the National Gallery, Pennell Collection-Library of Congress, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Los Angeles County Museum, the Walker Art Center, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Fine Arts Museum in Anchorage, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas. Both Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman kept "object books" begun in 1949, containing sketches of ordinary objects along with, at the suggestion of Eli Siegel, three descriptive sentences about each object. These sketches and notes continued to the year 2000, and some volumes are among the Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman papers in the Archives of American Art collection of the Smithsonian Institution. In 2000, a retrospective exhibition of Koppelman's works on paper was held at the Beatrice Conde gallery. Chaim Koppelman died on December 6, 2009, of natural causes at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, New York City. A memorial exhibition spanning seven decades of his work was held at the Terrain Gallery in 2010.