A bear with a broad nose looks off in a haze, hunching over an opened book. Russian-born Benjamin Kopman’s work noticeably stood out in New York during the 1930s. One reviewer writes: “In Kopman’s work, one feels a brutal yearning for form… Hence the unexpected and electrifying gleam in some of the faces of his figures, the revelations of almost unseen, new begotten animals and people; often a mixture of animal and man.”