DOROTHY KOPPELMAN

“A description of what impelled me in the plane crash paintings is in Eli Siegel’s essay ‘Art As Rightness’: ‘Art gives a chance for everything to be right, by being seen right.’ These paintings were done from photographs of the Brooklyn plane crash, New Year’s, 1961. Here, space became terrible, immediate, and snugness was shattered. The idea demanded large blank spaces directed by incisive black lines…. My belief that beauty can be found in ugliness would never have existed had I not met Aesthetic Realism. Half of my perception would not exist had I not been taught to see that the terror of the world has some real coherence with its beauty.” —DK

CHAIM KOPPELMAN

“In Napoleons on Alligators the high and mighty are comfortably riding the lowest and most primitive of beings, and the alligators feel they’re doing useful work…. Napoleon Bonaparte is a subject I keep digging into….It began when I drew a profile of him in my geography book when I was nine years old. In an Aesthetic Realism Art Inquiry, Eli Siegel described an intention I had had for many years….I was dealing with the problem of the individual and democracy. Napoleon, he said, represented the pushing sense of one's individuality, the Emperor in oneself, and also the desire for democracy.” —CK