Meeting / Napoleon Seeing

c. 2000, pastel, 24 x 17 in.

John B. Ravenal, director of the DeCordova Museum & Sculpture Park, writes:

"Napoleon, Koppelman seems to suggest, is us….The general confronts his opposite, a pale mirage that illuminates his face. Napoleon is shown as a figure divided: into dark and light, worldly and otherworldly, and perhaps evil and good. The two sides are engaged but not united. The audacious plume of the helmet proclaiming the worldly figure’s assertiveness is missing from his other half. Instead the ghostly figure reflects back a kind of distilled essence, and the dark figure seems humbled in a moment of existential contemplation.”

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