The following email came to me today, and I pass it on to you--it tells of an event I have good reason to know will be stupendous--not only is it filled with great music, wonderfully performed, it explains the reason for, and answer to "The Great Fight of Ego vs. Truth." As a performer with the company I want to personally invite you.

You’ll hear, through songs—including some of the most popular and beautiful songs—what the biggest fight is within every person and America herself. Eli Siegel, the great American critic, philosopher, and poet, founder of Aesthetic Realism, explained it. It’s the fight between contempt for the world and respect for it. It’s the fight of Ego—lying about the world to suit yourself—vs. Truth.

Songs about love, justice, people’s feelings—these will tell about that Great Fight of Ego vs. Truth as it goes on, sometimes humorously, and delicately, and intensely, in the dear self of each person.

We’re proud to sing and comment on them—and to give the following news: Whatever the subject, every good song tells the truth about what reality is and who we are! The reason is in this Aesthetic Realism principle— The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites.

Through this matinee, as you laugh and are stirred by songs, you'll know yourself and all people better. And you’ll find out why art and honesty are stronger than contempt and lies—no matter who’s telling them!

Cast: ANNE FIELDING • BENNETT COOPERMAN • CARRIE WILSON ANN RICHARDS • TIMOTHY LYNCH • DEREK MALI • KEVIN FENNELL ALAN SHAPIRO • MARION FENNELL • MERYL NIETSCH-COOPERMAN LYNETTE ABEL • CHRISTOPHER BALCHIN • SALLY ROSS BARBARA ALLEN, flute • EDWARD GREEN, piano ROBERT COLAVITO, percussion

www.AestheticRealismTheatreCo .org/mailinglist.htm

The Terrain Gallery is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a very exciting show: 52 artists--representing hundreds of painters, printmakers, photograhers and sculptors who have exhibited--including Will Barnet, Robert Blackburn, Lois Dodd, William King, Chaim Koppelman, Robert Motherwell, Clare Romano, Richard Sloat, George Stadnik and more! The show runs through September, and I hope you get to see it.  The address is 141 Greene St., just south of Houston St, in SoHo, and the hours are Wed.-Sat from 1 to 5 pm.

In the announcement, the original director Dorothy Koppelman writes of the thought that distinguishes the Terrain Gallery, making it important in the history of American art.  She says: "In 1955 the Terrain Gallery opened with the extravagant idea that 1) beauty could not only be talked about but defined; 2) that all the arts had something in common; 3) that art and life were integrally related.  All this was in the great philosophy of Aesthetic Realism as we had studied it with its founder, poet Eli Siegel. In America in 1955 the idea of talking about beauty was not au courant. We did it anyway."

At the opening, Lumia artist George Stadnik said, "I've been everywhere, and this is the only gallery I know that sees art for what it is."  And painter Clare Romano told Dorothy Koppelman, "This exhibition is electric. The Terrain Gallery has welcomed so many artists, such a variety of people. You'll go down in history."

That is true. Writer Alice Bernstein has pointed out: "TheTerrain pioneered innovations in curating and displaying art that are taken for granted today....The New York Times noted: 'The Terrain gallery held one of the first exhibitions honoring photography as fine art.'"  And about the 1965 all-silkscreen exhibition "Surface to Begin With," Times critic Grace Glueck wrote: "The Terrain even had a whole show of them." That show included work by Alex Katz, Roy Lichtenstein, Roslyn Drexler, Claes Oldenburn, Richard Anuszkiewicz, Steve Poleskie, and many others. Printmaker Chaim Koppelman became print curator in the early 1960's and had to do with organizing many fine shows.  And in every exhibition, there was informative comment about the reason why the work being shown was successful. In 1967, a benefit to aid napalm-burned children, "All Art Is For Life & Against the War in Vietnam," had work by 100 artists. 

The democracy and integrity of the Terrain have long been respected. Meanwhile, as Alma Vincent wrote in The Villager, in 2000: "While art critics praised early exhibitions in their reviews....[t]he one reviewer to write about he value of the Terrain's point of view was Bennett Schiff, then art critic for a major New York newspaper.  On June 16, 1957 he wrote: '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 by Eli Siegel...whose work has received growing recognition by such people as William Carlos Williams....It is a building, positive vision.'"

Bennett Schiff was certainly right. Terrain exhibitions in the 70's included "The Arts: They're Here!--Ten Arts and the Opposites." And "Art All Along" was described by Alice Bernstein as "unforgettable," because, she writes: "A 4th century Etruscan marble sarcophagus of a man and woman in an eternal embrace was near a Renoir painting of a couple dancing, and the viewer saw the relation of near and far, the intimate and the wide through the centuries in a stirring and memorable way."

I'm proud to have been a curator for these and many other exhibitions. It was in the fall of 1968 that I first came to the Terrain Gallery and read Eli Siegel's 15 Questions about beauty. I found what I was looking for as I'd studied art history at Barnard College and elsewhere--a criterion true about all art.  In 1972 I became co-director.

In 1984, Ellen Reiss, who is Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism, suggested what because a 20 year series of weekly talks: Aesthetic Realism Shows How Art Answers the Questions of Your Life, new in art criticism, with talks such as "Can Exuberance Be Sensible?; or, Hans Hofmann's Rhapsody," by Bennett Cooperman; and "Logic & Emotion in Love and in the Shah Nameh"  by Barbara Buehler.

Now, in spite of a boycott by the press, including the art press--arising from their anger at unaccustomed, large respect for new knowledge--the Terrain Gallery has lasted and is flourishing.  And in the great diversity of works on exhibition, representing some of the most original and sincere work of these decades, "The criterion," as Dorothy Koppelman said last week, "blazes forth: In reality opposites are one; art shows this."

By accident I interrupted m y previous blog. Here is the remainder of what I intended to post.  This section has to do centrally with the art of painting. "All the Arts" continues:

   "To see the world as the oneness of opposites is to do what one can to like the world, for it is only as the oneness of opposites that the world can be truly liked--otherwise one likes the world because it has been "nice" to oneself, if not to others. That the principle of art or aesthetics is the same as sanity would, by now, have been seen by people had the press discussed the truth of Aesthetic Realism....

   "Control and passion are two opposites that interest everyone....A commonplace of art history is that Ingres and Delacroix represented two contemporary possibilities of painting. Ingres is seen as a person of control who has deep feeling in his work, anyway.  Passion has been found in Ingres's portrait of M. Bertin and his ever so popular La Source. In Ingres, then, we have control and passion with the more sedate opposite leading.  In Delacroix, we have control and passion with the less sedate opposites leading. Both opposites, it cannot be said excessively, are present as one in all painting.  Hieronymous Bosch has leering passion that is also control.  Piet Mondrian has control, with passion implicit. Titian has control and passion looking like each other, as well-behaved equals coming to the feast of visual possibility at the same time.

   "If we look at a desperate and controlled sea painting of Winslow Homer, we can see passion and control given to black muscles.  A landscape of Inness begins sedately with the outdoors of the United States fetchingly composed; but underneath the leaves and the quiet and the height, is the rapture of the American painter, George Inness."

How much people want to feel our own passions, intensity of feeling is together sensibly with our logic, our control, our sense of rightness! And how beautiful, and relieving it is to see that we can actually learn from art how to see in a way that makes us confident and proud in a true way. I'll post more of "All the Arts" in the future. 

   I promised I would be posting one of the most valuable writings on art I know, Eli Siegel's description of the oneness of passion and control in "All the Arts" --which is the subtitle of an issue of the periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known, published on April 20, 1977. So, here is the first installment of that document. He begins:

"Dear Unknown Friends:

   "Aesthetic Realism has tried to make two things clear, both of value to the life of man. The first of these is that all the arts, at their beginning, have something in common; and that this common thing in all the arts is the oneness of opposites, felt and worked with by an individual mind.  The second purpose of Aesthetic Realism has been the showing that what is in all the arts is hoped for by every person, for the oneness of opposites to be found in painting, music, poetry, drama, sculpture, the dance, photography, the cinema, and so on, constitutes sanity."

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I want to invite you to a wonderful event on Sunday, February 13th at 2:30 pm, presented by the Aesthetic Realism Theatre Company. The title is above, and it is a dramatic production of Eli Siegel's great 1951 lecture, with many scenes from Voltaire's hilarious and amazing novel.  We're in the final rehearsals now, and it's going to be wonderful--so funny and so meaningful at the same time. Here's the link. Hope you can come! http://www.aestheticrealism.org/events2.htm#Special_Event" title="http://www.aestheticrealism.org/events2.htm#Special_Event" target="_blank"http://www.aestheticrealism.o...

As a person who had studied painting and art history, and who was also an actress and singer, I had seen these arts, these aspects of my life, as very separate. I felt I had to put aside my care for painting in order to concentrate on my career in theatre. Then I began to study the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, and this statement  by its founder, poet and critic Eli Siegel: "All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."  In a class, he asked me, "Do you think the arts are more different or more the same?"  I answered, "I think I see them as more different." And he said, "The more you look, the more you will find they are the same."  I have come to see that this is true, and it unified my life. I want other people to benefit as I have from this great, new knowledge, and I'll be writing much more about this in future entires.

For instance, there is an issue of the international periodical The Right of Aesthetic Realism to Be Known titled "All the Arts," and in it, Eli Siegel writes about the opposites of passion and control as they are in music, poetry, and acting. I'll be quoting posting passages from this very soon.  So I hope you'll come again soon!

Meanwhile you can visit the links I have included, which I'll also be adding to, and find out more.