Terrain Gallery
Encyclopedia
The Terrain Gallery, or the Terrain, is an art gallery and educational center in SoHo
SoHo
SoHo is a neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, New York City, notable for being the location of many artists' lofts and art galleries, and also, more recently, for the wide variety of stores and shops ranging from trendy boutiques to outlets of upscale national and international chain stores...

, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. It was founded in 1955 with a philosophic basis: the ideas of Aesthetic Realism
Aesthetic Realism
Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy founded by Eli Siegel in 1941. It is based on three core principles. First, according to Siegel, the deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis...

 and the Siegel Theory of Opposites, developed by American poet and educator Eli Siegel
Eli Siegel
Eli Siegel was the poet and critic who founded the philosophy Aesthetic Realism in 1941. He wrote the award-winning poem, "Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana", two highly acclaimed volumes of poetry, a critical consideration of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw titled James and the Children,...

. Its motto is a statement by Siegel: "In reality opposites are one; art shows this."

History

Under the direction of painter Dorothy Koppelman, the Terrain Gallery opened on February 26, 1955 with the publication of Siegel’s fifteen questions, Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? (subsequently reprinted in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism). Reviewing the opening exhibition, "Intersection '55", Parker Tyler
Parker Tyler
Harrison Parker Tyler, better known as Parker Tyler was an American author, poet, and film critic. Tyler had a relationship with underground filmmaker Charles Boultenhouse from 1945 until his death...

 wrote in Art News of the “explicitly inquiring and venturesome spirit” at the Terrain. Bennett Schiff in the New York Post
New York Post
The New York Post is the 13th-oldest newspaper published in the United States and is generally acknowledged as the oldest to have been published continuously as a daily, although – as is the case with most other papers – its publication has been periodically interrupted by labor actions...

wrote that "there probably hasn't been a gallery before this like the Terrain, which devotes itself to the integration of art with all of living according to an esthetic principle which is part of an entire, encompassing philosophic theory...Aesthetic Realism developed and taught by Eli Siegel".

From the beginning, the Terrain was simultaneously an exhibition space for contemporary art and a cultural center with "a lively and unconventional approach to aesthetic issues" where artists, scholars, and the general public could learn about and discuss principles of Aesthetic Realism
Aesthetic Realism
Aesthetic Realism is the philosophy founded by Eli Siegel in 1941. It is based on three core principles. First, according to Siegel, the deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis...

, such as "The resolution of conflict in self is like the making one of opposites in art."
Although exhibiting artists were not required to endorse Aesthetic Realism, many wrote comments on the Siegel Theory of Opposites in relation to their work, which were displayed with their art. Over the years, dozens of exhibition announcements, catalogues, and broadsides were printed and circulated by the Terrain, describing how the opposites in reality are central in art.

Artists whose work has been exhibited at the Terrain Gallery include Ad Reinhardt
Ad Reinhardt
Adolph Frederick Reinhardt was an Abstract painter active in New York beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the 1960s. He was a member of the American Abstract Artists and was a part of the movement centered around the Betty Parsons Gallery that became known as Abstract Expressionism...

, Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers
Larry Rivers was an American artist, musician, filmmaker and occasional actor. Rivers resided and maintained studios in New York City, Southampton, New York and Zihuatanejo, Mexico.-Biography:...

, Chaim Koppelman, Robert Blackburn
Robert Blackburn (artist)
Robert Blackburn was an African American artist, teacher and printmaker.Born Robert Hamilton Blackburn in Summit, New Jersey in 1920, he grew up in Harlem. He attended P.S...

, Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein
Roy Lichtenstein was a prominent American pop artist. During the 1960s his paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City and along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist and others he became a leading figure in the new art movement...

, Hans Namuth
Hans Namuth
Hans Namuth was a German-born photographer. Namuth specialized in portraiture, photographing many artists, including abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. His photos of Pollock at work in his studio increased Pollock's fame and recognition and led to a greater understanding of his work and...

, Dorothy Koppelman, Rolph Scarlett, Andre Kertesz
André Kertész
André Kertész , born Kertész Andor, was a Hungarian-born photographer known for his groundbreaking contributions to photographic composition and the photo essay. In the early years of his career, his then-unorthodox camera angles and style prevented his work from gaining wider recognition...

, Clayton Pond, Mark Di Suvero
Mark di Suvero
Marco Polo "Mark" di Suvero is an American abstract expressionist sculptor born Marco Polo Levi in Shanghai, China in 1933 to Italian expatriates. He immigrated to San Francisco, California in 1942 with his family. From 1953 to 1957, he attended the University of California, Berkeley to study...

, Will Barnet
Will Barnet
Will Barnet is an American artist known for his paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints depicting the human figure and animals, both in casual scenes of daily life and in transcendent dreamlike worlds.-Biography:...

, Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz
Richard Anuszkiewicz is an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.-Life and work:Richard Anuszkiewicz trained at the Cleveland Institute of Art in Cleveland, Ohio , and then with Josef Albers at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut where he earned his...

, Richard Artschwager
Richard Artschwager
Richard Artschwager is an American painter, illustrator and sculptor, born in 1923 in Washington, D.C.. Artschwager is best known for his stylistic independence; although he has associations with the Pop Art movement, Conceptual art and Minimalism....

, George Tooker
George Tooker
George Clair Tooker, Jr. was a figurative painter whose works are associated with the Magic realism and Social realism movements...

, Lois Dodd
Lois Dodd
Lois Dodd was born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1927. She was educated at the Cooper Union in New York City from 1945-48. She is an abstract expressionist painter. She was the only woman founder of the Tanager Gallery, which was integral to the Tenth Street-avant-garde scene of the 1950s where...

, Jim Dine
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is an American pop artist. He is sometimes considered to be a part of the Neo-Dada movement. He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, attended Walnut Hills High School, the University of Cincinnati, and received a BFA from Ohio University in 1957. He first earned respect in the art world with...

, John von Wicht, Elaine de Kooning
Elaine de Kooning
Elaine de Kooning was an Abstract Expressionist, Figurative Expressionist painter in the post-World War II era and editorial associate for Art News magazine...

, Steve Poleskie
Steve Poleskie
Stephen 'Steve' Poleskie is an artist and writer. The son of a high school teacher, Poleskie graduated from Wilkes University in 1959 with a degree in Economics. A self-taught artist, Poleskie had his first one-person show at the Everhart Museum, Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1958, while still in...

, Robert Conover, and Clare Romano. Pop artist Richard Bernstein, optical artist Arnold Alfred Schmidt
Arnold Alfred Schmidt
Arnold Alfred Schmidt, born in 1930 in Plainfield, New Jersey, lived most of his life in New York City. He graduated with an MA from New York's Cooper Union, and worked for years as an Art Director at the Gusso-Hyman Advertising agency on such accounts as Jonathan Logan and Misty Harbor fashions. ...

, photographers Louis Dienes, Nat Herz, Nancy Starrels, and others had their first one-person shows at the Terrain.

Location changes

First located at 20 West 16th Street, the Terrain Gallery moved in 1964 to 39 Grove Street in Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village
Greenwich Village, , , , .in New York often simply called "the Village", is a largely residential neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City. A large majority of the district is home to upper middle class families...

, where it continued to hold art exhibitions and dramatic presentations of Aesthetic Realism.

In 1973, the Terrain moved to the first floor of the not-for-profit Aesthetic Realism Foundation located at 141 Greene Street in Soho
Soho
Soho is an area of the City of Westminster and part of the West End of London. Long established as an entertainment district, for much of the 20th century Soho had a reputation for sex shops as well as night life and film industry. Since the early 1980s, the area has undergone considerable...

. There, the gallery featured a one-man show of drawings and silkscreens by Charles Magistro, and continued exhibitions such as "Big and Small" ("Art shows that nothing, however small, is without largeness and meaning"), and “The Arts, They’re Here!: Ten Arts and the Opposites," which included music and architecture.

"Art Answers the Questions of Your Life"

In 1984, the Terrain Gallery began a new series of weekly talks, free to the public, called Art Answers the Questions of Your Life. These talks discussed topics such as precision and abandon in Jackson Pollack's action painting, what mothers can learn about children from the art of Mary Cassatt, “Can Exuberance Be Sensible?: Hans Hofmann’s Rhapsody” by Bennett Cooperman, and "Logic and Emotion in Love and in the Shah Nameh by Barbara Buehler. In her book, The Gothic Vision, (Continuum, London & New York, 2002), Dani Cavallaro quotes Dorothy Koppelman's talk on Picasso's Guernica: "Even as it takes on the cruelty and seeming non-sense in the world, there is form, there is organization, there is something larger than man’s inhumanity to man.” Cavallaro also writes:
An overview of this series of more than 175 talks on art of diverse genres and periods was presented by co-directors Dorothy Koppelman and Carrie Wilson at the 31st World Congress of the International Society for Education through Art (Teachers College, Columbia University, 2003).

In 2005, the Terrain Gallery held a 50th anniversary exhibition that brought together works by 52 artists, several of whom contributed statements about how the Aesthetic Realism of Eli Siegel influenced their work. A memorial exhibition for Chaim Koppelman, in 2010, included over six decades of the artist's prints, paintings, pastels, and sculpture, with critical comment.

Aesthetic Realism and the Siegel Theory of Opposites

The Terrain Gallery differed from other art galleries of the time in several ways. It held large group exhibitions that successfully combined diverse stylistic tendencies, such as realism and abstraction, when this was unusual. Painting, sculpture, watercolor, and graphics were brought together under the titles "Abstract and Concrete," "Depth and Surface," "Logic and Emotion," and "Rest and Motion". The Terrain Gallery also held “one of the first exhibitions honoring photography as a fine art” and silkscreens as major work.

The Seurat Art Club and the George Saintsbury Poetry Club

In 1955, the year it opened, the Terrain began a series of talks by the Seurat Art Club, working artists who spoke about the relevance of the Siegel Theory of Opposites to contemporary art and life.

Discussing both classical and contemporary work, club members considered the relation of composition in art and in life. They described art as having ethical implications, being "not an escape from life but a true picture of reality".

Existing records of one of the discussions held at the Terrain in 1961 indicate that many artists felt that while opposites were undeniably present in their work, the conscious awareness of them would "lessen, or somehow destroy, the 'magic,' the 'talent,' the 'je ne sais quoi'" of art. Others believed that "study of the opposites makes for an entirely new level of perception, a surer technique, a wider field of vision." Painter Rolph Scarlett wrote: "The Siegel Theory of Opposites, which is the motivating consideration of this gallery, is inspiring." Sculptor Barbara Lekberg, in an interview that appeared in the magazine American Artist, stated that Aesthetic Realism shows "not only that conscious knowledge can cause the unconscious to give up its riches, but also that this process of giving form to feeling has in it the principles of happiness for all people, not just artists."

In addition to talks on art, the Terrain held poetry readings and discussions by the George Saintsbury
George Saintsbury
George Edward Bateman Saintsbury , was an English writer, literary historian, scholar and critic.-Biography:...

 Poetry Club. The Terrain Gallery published Personal & Impersonal: Six Aesthetic Realists, a book of poems by Sheldon Kranz, Louis Dienes, Nancy Starrels, Nat Hertz, Martha Baird and Rebecca Fein and held an exhibition of work by 45 artists, including Leonard Baskin
Leonard Baskin
Leonard Baskin was an American sculptor, book-illustrator, wood-engraver, printmaker, graphic artist, writer and teacher.-Life and work:...

, Robert Andrew Parker, and Nathan Cabot Hale, inspired by the poems.

Response by art critics

Art critics generally praised exhibitions at the Terrain, but many ignored the philosophy behind these exhibitions, or wrote of it disparagingly. When Art News published an interview with Tiffany award-winner Chaim Koppelman, founder of the printmaking division of the School of Visual Arts
School of Visual Arts
The School of Visual Arts , is a proprietary art school located in Manhattan, New York City, and is widely considered to be one of the leading art schools in the United States. It was established in 1947 by co-founders Silas H. Rhodes and Burne Hogarth as the Cartoonists and Illustrators School and...

, an artist who considered Aesthetic Realism central to his work, the magazine omitted all mention of the philosophy, and even the word "opposites" did not appear.

In response to the art critics, Mr. and Mrs. Koppelman placed an ad in The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...

in which they asked critics and artists to be fair to Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel:
We ask you, personally, to be fair to Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel...Aesthetic Realism is not a cult. We find bizarre the tendency in artists and critics to call Aesthetic Realism a cult while using it—under cover of "common knowledge"—to crystallize their own thoughts and writing on art...We cannot consider any person a friend who does not want to be fair to Aesthetic Realism and Eli Siegel...


Dorothy and Chaim Koppelman both had one-person shows at the Terrain, and both were chosen for MoMA's 1962 exhibition "Recent Painting USA: The Figure."

Artists' protest against the Vietnam War

In his book, The Indignant Eye Ralph Shikes writes of how the Vietnam War brought many American artists into "active agitation". The Koppelmans were among hundreds of artists who signed their names to an ad in the New York Times protesting the war in Vietnam in 1962. In 1967, 105 painters, sculptors, printmakers and photographers participated in the exhibition All Art Is For Life and Against the War in Vietnam held at the Terrain to benefit napalm-burned and crippled Vietnamese children. Of Chaim Koppelman's print, "Vietnam", Shikes writes that the artist's "protest springs from the art and is not superimposed on it.”

External links

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