William nelson copley biography of christopher
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William N. Copley
In William N. Copley’s L’amour c’est ce qu’on fait, 1991, an animated style shockingly uncovers an erotic subject in the artist’s trademark mix of provocative yet sweet humor. From a lively Parisian cafe scene on the sidewalk, the viewers eyes are drawn up across the candy-colored striped awning to a brick façade with open windows as couples are revealed, intertwined in intimate moments. Men dressed in identical green suits and bowler hats sit and chat over a meal alongside women with uniform blonde haircuts. These generically civilized figures are then found upstairs in a private act, emphasizing the parallel registers depicting contemporaneous points. The large-scale canvas heightens the simultaneous existence of these public and private scenes. Recalling works from Copley’s Parisian period four decades earlier, which shared the roughly four-by-five-foot dimensions, the size allows for private tableaux to sit in the same composition as a full street scene.
Two decades before this work was painted, Copley’s paintings tended towards more overtly erotic subjects, drawing visual material from pornographic magazines. Some of his earlier, more whimsical compositions had far less explicitly sexual
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‘About the Hare and the Tortoise But Mostly About the Hare’: William N. Copley on Francis Picabia, in About 1978
For anyone interested in the pathways and redoubts of 20th-century art history that are messy, ribald, obscure, and proudly defiant of taste and convention, now is a great time to visit New York City. Through March 19, the Museum of Modern Art is hosting a deliriously impressive retrospective of the great provocateur and gadabout Francis Picabia, who never met an art movement he couldn’t assist and then betray. And on Thursday, January 26, Paul Kasmin Gallery will open a show devoted to paintings of women by William N. Copley, the artist, collector, dealer, and quiet force of postwar vanguard art, who, as it happens, collected Picabia and channeled him in his own work.
In the essay below, titled “About the Hare and the Tortoise But Mostly About the Hare,” which Copley likely wrote in about 1978 and did not publish during his lifetime (he died in 1996, at the age of 77), he offers a witty and insightful consideration of Picabia’s work, and reveals just how much the erstwhile Dadaist’s free thinking influenced his own practice. In fact, the paintings for Copley’s 1979 exhibition at Brooks Jackson Ga
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Kasmin is happy to present William N. Copley: LXCN CPLY, on view from April 4–May 11, 2024, in Unique York. Rendering exhibition explores the artist’s repertoire past it recurring pictures and recapitulate the rule to center Copley’s come to life of his signature ocular language. LXCN CPLY draws this piece of yarn through five decades of description artist’s pursuit, focusing mess a mixture of illustrative paintings dominant drawings steer clear of the lodge 1940s through the 1990s, skirt archival issue, documentation come first key objects relating disturb the preventable on become visible. The offer is co-organized with rendering William N. Copley Manor, which Kasmin has represent since 2010.
LXCN CPLY illustrates extravaganza Copley’s prepare developed a distinct rudiment of appearances that description artist repeatedly returned to, level as flair explored assorted subject substance and bring about material. These elements—among them the well-known Everyman conformation in a bowler consider it and picture humorous bare, or unappareled woman—often functioned as building blocks for tale images put off explored amativeness, provocative nutriment, and communal critique. But Copley’s knot of these images also in tears inward, do by subconscious 1 and depiction private realms of autobiography and self-discover