ART-PREVIEW:William N.Copley-Women
William Ν. Copley creator of madcap narrative paintings, drawings, and installations, was both an insider and an outsider. Known by his pseudonym CPLY, he was a self-taught artist pushing the limits of art-world, as well as a collector, patron and connector of some of the most important artists of the 20th Century, in particular European Surrealists and American Pop artists.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo Paul Kasmin Gallery Archive
The exhibition “COPLEY: WOMEN” presents 20 paintings by William Ν. Copley that highlight the artist’s preoccupation with the opposite sex, which he employed as an endless source for inventive figurative and narrative paintings that explored eroticism, sexual politics and the pursuit of pleasure. The exhibition includes paintings from all stages of the artist’s career, beginning with works made after his expatriation from Los Angeles to Paris in 1951, where he worked at the Impasse Ronsin and Longpont-Sur-Orge until moving to New York in 1962 that became his home for the next two decades and works from the “X-Rated” series (1972-75). The adopted son of a wealthy newspaper magnate, Copley was the black sheep of his politically conservative family, embracing leftist causes and rebelling against convention. Introduced to painting and Surrealism by his artist brother-in-law, John Ployardt, he established contact with some of the most important international Surrealist artists then living in obscurity in the United States like: Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp. In 1948, Copley and Ployardt opened the Copley Gallery in Beverly Hills, and after it operated for six months, the gallery’s commercial failure became an important source for Copley’s personal collection. Over the years he amassed one of the world’s most respected Collections of Surrealist Art, which included Man Ray’s unforgettable image of large red lips floating above the landscape. In Paris in the early ‘50s, Copley developed a unique and ribald figurative style that bucked prevailing trends toward abstraction. As Copley was developing his distinctively guileless, heart-on-sleeve storytelling voice, his early works from the ‘50s and ‘60s took inspiration from Surrealist painting, Mexican folk art, and American cartoon and silent-movie imagery. Throughout his career, Copley repeatedly returned to subjects like nudes, cars, nationalism, and the doggerel poetry of Robert W. Service, the “Bard of the Yukon”. Later works illustrate Copley’s continual stylistic development and his interest in political and psychosexual themes. Stylistically diverse, these works also reflect an awareness of developments in contemporary art and his role as a link between Surrealist and Pop circles. Copley’s works in the ‘70s focused on his own understating of differences and challenges between men and women in romantic and sexual relationships. In 1974 he exhibited these new works in an exhibition titled “CPLY X-Rated”. The American public had difficulty with the material, for which Copley expressed, “Americans… don’t know the difference between eroticism and pornography. Because eroticism has always existed in art. And pornography has never necessarily been in art”. In 1953, Copley and his second wife, Noma Ratner, founded the William and Noma Copley Foundation that later was renamed Cassandra Foundation, which gave small grants to artists. The foundation also offered Marcel Duchamp’s last work “Etant Donnes” to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Copley had been one of the few people to see it before then, Duchamp had worked on it in secret for 20 years.
Info: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 515 West 27th Street, New York, Duration: 26/1-25/3/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.paulkasmingallery.com
