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."