Plane Crash paintings

Dorothy Koppelman commented on these powerful works:

“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, December 1960. Here, space became terrible, immediate, and snugness was shattered. The idea demanded large blank spaces directed by incisive black lines. What I was working with is in these further sentences from the same essay:

The repellent, while still existing, may be merged with something else. Art merges javelin with blue sky, while still sustaining the conspicuousness of javelin.”

You can read the essay “Art as Rightness” here.

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