Terrain Gallery

The story

The Terrain Gallery opened on February 26, 1955 with a question, not a manifesto: Eli Siegel's fifteen questions, published as "Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?" Painter Dorothy Koppelman directed the SoHo space from the start, grounding it in Siegel's Aesthetic Realism and his Theory of Opposites. A reviewer in Art News praised the "explicitly inquiring and venturesome spirit" at the opening show. Bennett Schiff in the New York Post wrote that there had probably never been a gallery like it — one that ties art to all of living through a single encompassing philosophic theory.