Chaim Koppelman (November 17, 1920 – December 6, 2009) was an American artist, art educator, and Aesthetic Realism consultant. Best known as a printmaker, he also produced sculpture, paintings, and drawings. A member of the National Academy of Design since 1978, he was president of the Society of American Graphic Artists (SAGA), which presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004. 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, DC, 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.
Early life and education
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.
Aesthetic Realism and artistic development
In 1940 Koppelman began attending poetry classes with Eli Siegel, the American poet and critic who first came to national attention in 1925, when his poem, "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana" won the esteemed poetry prize of The Nation. This poem, Siegel later stated, arose from a way of seeing that in 1941 became Aesthetic Realism, the philosophy that reality is aesthetic, and that "The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art." In Koppelman's opinion, Siegel was "the most important philosopher of the 20th century – perhaps of all time".
In Aesthetic Realism classes and lessons, Koppelman learned that ethical problems are also artistic problems. He felt his work suffered from a fight between rigidity and flexibility. He learned he could go after precision in the studio as penance for being careless at other times, wanting to get away from things. As freedom and order, truth and imagination became more integrated in his life, his art became more imaginative. "I had always had a classical bent in my work," he wrote. "But there was also a wildness in me that had not come into my work sufficiently or gracefully." As a result of his study, Koppelman noted, "Tightness and abandon, the classical and the wild, even the conservative and the rebel seemed to be working better together" resulting in art that was "more imaginative, freer in concept". Boldness of imagination and an unerring sense of detail were two qualities Koppelman's work became noted for.