William N. Copley

William Nelson Copley’s pioneering body of work is defined by humorous, erotic, and political figurative paintings that explore themes of fantasy, morality, and the inner realm of self and experience. A self-taught artist, and gleefully impervious to dominant trends in art, Copley engendered a singular style over the course of five decades, assembling a unique lexicon of poetic imagery rendered in vivid colors and flattened pictorial space. Employing a distinctive use of line, Copley developed an idiosyncratic visual language incorporating curvilinear figures and recurring motifs, drawing on his fascinations and obsessions. Working under the moniker “CPLY,” which Copley used as his signature, the artist also created numerous drawings, collages, sculptural objects, prints, artist’s books and multiples.

Critically and with wry wit, Copley’s work explores fundamental elements of the human experience—tragedy and comedy, desire and fear—through a wide-ranging repertoire of thematic subjects. Developing what he called a “private mythology”—a recurring cast of characters, situations, and personal images that provided crucial catalysts for his pictorial ideas across numerous artwork series—Copley imbued a poetic dimension to his paintings, indicative of his literary background. Though deeply influenced by the Surrealists, Copley’s contributions to art history ultimately defy categorization, and they cast a lasting legacy on contemporary art that continues to reverberate today. As artist Ed Ruscha, who knew Copley personally, has said of his work: “To his great distinction, his paintings are like no other paintings in the world.”

Rejecting the artistic orthodoxy espoused by modernist critics of his time, Copley remained committed to the narrative potential of painting. According to the late curator Germano Celant, the autobiographical aspect of Copley’s practice prefigures those advanced by a number of feminist and queer artists of later decades: “Copley’s self-narration was an anticipation of values stemming from the authenticity of experience, something that received no attention and found no expression in the history of art between the war and the 1960s.” Copley’s work simultaneously foreshadowed many developments in contemporary art: first with the advent of Pop art in the 1960s, and later with the return to idiosyncratic figuration in the 1980s and the turn of the millennium.

Upon his move to New York in 1962–63, in the heyday of Pop, Copley continued to exhibit his steadfastly personal work widely across the United States and Europe. Following a decisive change in medium from oil to acrylic, Copley advanced the critical position he cultivated in Paris. These years would see Copley working in a luminous color palette, experimenting with collaged lace on his painting surfaces; in later years Copley would add fetish elements such as women’s shoes and lingerie directly to his paintings. In the late 1950s, Copley began a decades-long professional relationship with gallerist Alexander Iolas, who would present significant bodies of Copley’s work at his New York and Paris galleries. These include the landmark series Projects for Monuments to the Unknown Whore in 1966, which riffed on war monuments to eulogize socially-marginalized sex workers, a subject Copley would revisit in a major installation at the New Museum in 1986. In 1974, Copley debuted his watershed X-Rated series of humorous and overtly sexual paintings and charcoal drawings at the New York Cultural Center; in 2010, Kasmin presented a large-scale recreation of the exhibition. A comprehensive retrospective of Copley’s work, curated by Johannes Gachnang, opened at Kunsthalle Bern in 1980 before traveling to the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, and the Badischer Kunstverein through 1981. By this time, Copley had moved part-time to Roxbury, Connecticut and began spending winters in the Florida Keys. He continued to work until his death in 1996.