Aesthetic Realism: Honest, Scholarly, & Thrilling
I believe Aesthetic Realism is the knowledge most needed by the world. Studying it makes for ever-increasing respect for the Earth we live on and for humanity. It has the deeply satisfying logic that meets our greatest hope—to like the world on an accurate basis.
I grew up in Ohio near Cincinnati, and after college moved to New York City, where I first attended an Aesthetic Realism seminar. What the speakers said about art and their own lives was surprising, logical, and thrilling. On this site is some of what I’ve learned through studying Aesthetic Realism including in classes I had the honor to attend with its founder, the poet and critic Eli Siegel, and now with Aesthetic Realism Chair of Education Ellen Reiss. I’m also studying in other Aesthetic Realism classes about the visual arts, anthropology, music, poetry, and film via video conferencing.
What Is Aesthetic Realism?
Aesthetic Realism was founded in 1941 by the great American poet and critic Eli Siegel. He stated these principles as its basis:
1. The deepest desire of every person is to like the world on an honest or accurate basis.
2. The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it….Contempt can be defined as the lessening of what is different from oneself as a means of self-increase as one sees it.
3. All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.
I recommend Self and World: An Explanation of Aesthetic Realism, and many other works on art, love, how to see people and more in the Aesthetic Realism Online Library.
Published here are articles I’ve presented publicly in Aesthetic Realism seminars. I tell about my life, the education that enabled me to be wiser and happier, and how we can learn from the lives and questions of notable women of the past and in literature and film.
TRO: The Technique of Poetry & Our Lives
The Rightness of Aesthetic Realism: A Periodical (TRO) #2176, Sept 2026, begins serializing a remarkable 1951 lecture by Eli Siegel, Technique and My Poems. Editor Ellen Reiss writes: “Eli Siegel is the critic who has explained poetic technique, with depth and fullness. And he has explained why the technique of an authentic poem matters—and does it ever matter!” read more
Terrain Gallery: The Honoring Eye: 18 Photographers Look at the World
Now at the Terrain Gallery / Aesthetic Realism Foundation, 141 Greene St., SoHo, NYC. Gallery Hours Wed, Fri, Sat 1-5 PM.
Chaim & Dorothy Koppelman Foundation
Paintings, prints, and pastels by Chaim and Dorothy Koppelman and a selection of their writings on Picasso, Pollock, Matisse, Magritte, Van Gogh, Munch, Velazquez, Hogarth, and more—based on their study with the great American poet, critic and founder of Aesthetic Realism, Eli Siegel. Dorothy Koppelman founded the Terrain Gallery in 1955.
Native Americans in Ohio—
