This first publication after William N. Copley's death in 1996 gives a comprehensive survey of the so far scarcely known complete work that is however important for the tradition of Dada and surrealism in America as well as for pop art painting. For a short time owner of a gallery for surrealistic art in Los Angeles, Copley began to paint at the end of the forties. 1951 the American by birth went to Paris together with Man Ray where he lived about 13 years within the circle of the surrealists. Subsequently he worked in New York. In his work he is focusing on trivial motifs, induced by sex and eros, pin-ups or comic-like portrayals of American everyday's myths. To treat the symbols of state, such as flage, with irony is one of his subjects as well as the subtle persiflage of standard masterpieces of art.
There can hardly be a better introduction to modern art than this humorous yet insightful book by a contemporary personally admitted info this fascinating, occasionally bizarre world through his encounters with key figures such as Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and René Magritte. William Copley inherited a fortune as a young man and used his wealth to open a gallery in Beverly Hills shortly after World War II. Financially, the business was a flop, but Copley’s attempt to bring culture to the natives of Hollywood won him a place in the annals of art history. Copley himself was apainter and could well understand the work and thought processes of his heroes and coevals. This essay, written in 1976 for the exhibition ‘Paris-New York’, frankly and engagingly depicts episodes in the lives of Surrealist artists from the perspective of a younger colleague in a portrayal that is at once revealing and intimate. 0.
Essays and conversations from the unclassifiable American advocate for surrealism and predecessor of pop art, William N. Copley For readers interested in the extraordinary life, work, and artistic milieu of the great American surrealist and proto-pop painter William Nelson Copley (1919-96), this volume will come as a thrilling revelation and a long-awaited peek into the mind of one of 20th-century art's most influential yet least recognized protagonists. Though best known for his radical work as a painter--which he pursued under the name CPLY--Copley was also a talented writer and the texts gathered here present his most significant essays, articles and conversations. Among Copley's reflections on art and artists is "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dealer," a vividly humorous account of his brief tenure as a dealer in surrealist art in 1940s Los Angeles. Also included are key interviews and correspondence illuminating Copley's own practice and a selection of his newspaper articles, originally published in the 1950s and reprinted now for the first time.
Art Forum’s Best of the Year List A panoramic look at art in America in the second half of the twentieth century, through the eyes of the visionary curator who helped shape it. An innovative, iconoclastic curator of contemporary art, Walter Hopps founded his first gallery in L.A. at the age of twenty-one. At twenty-four, he opened the Ferus Gallery with then-unknown artist Edward Kienholz, where he turned the spotlight on a new generation of West Coast artists. Ferus was also the first gallery ever to show Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans and was shut down by the L.A. vice squad for a show of Wallace Berman’s edgy art. At the Pasadena Art Museum in the sixties, Hopps mounted the first museum retrospectives of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell and the first museum exhibition of Pop Art--before it was even known as Pop Art. In 1967, when Hopps became the director of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery of Art at age thirty-four, the New York Times hailed him as "the most gifted museum man on the West Coast (and, in the field of contemporary art, possibly in the nation)." He was also arguably the most unpredictable, an eccentric genius who was chronically late. (His staff at the Corcoran had a button made that said WALTER HOPPS WILL BE HERE IN TWENTY MINUTES.) Erratic in his work habits, he was never erratic in his commitment to art. Hopps died in 2005, after decades at the Menil Collection of art in Houston for which he was the founding director. A few years before that, he began work on this book. With an introduction by legendary Pop artist Ed Ruscha, The Dream Colony is a vivid, personal, surprising, irreverent, and enlightening account of his life and of some of the greatest artistic minds of the twentieth century.
Jan-Ole Schiemann (*1983) belongs to a young artist generation, subjecting painting to a critical actualisation. On the fringes of figuration and abstraction, he extracts fragments of advertisement, comics, architecture from their original context. Almost transparently, he interweaves and layers structures, logos, topographies, graffiti, and everyday textures. This complex surface mesh, always full frontal, yet equally deep, dissolves the fabric of reality as a flashing, constantly renewed and self-generating hyper-text, into which one can actively immerse oneself or trace the origins of individual elements. Exhibition: Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, USA (15.02.-13.03.2020).
What Nerve! reveals a hidden history of American figurative painting, sculpture and popular imagery. It documents and/or restages four installations, spaces or happenings, in Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit and Providence, which were crucial to the development of figurative art in the United States. Several of the better-known artists in What Nerve! have been the subject of significant exhibitions or publications, but this is the first major volume to focus on the broader impact of figurative art to connect artists and collectives from different generations and regions of the country. These are: from Chicago, the Hairy Who (James Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, Karl Wirsum); from California, Funk artists (Jeremy Anderson, Robert Arneson, Roy De Forest, Robert Hudson, Ken Price, Peter Saul, Peter Voulkos, William T. Wiley); from Detroit, Destroy All Monsters (Mike Kelley, Cary Loren, Niagara, Jim Shaw); and from Providence, Forcefield (Mat Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Ara Peterson). Created in collaboration with artists from these groups, the historical moments at the core of What Nerve! are linked by work from six artists who profoundly influenced or were influenced by the groups: William Copley, Jack Kirby, Elizabeth Murray, Gary Panter, Christina Ramberg and H.C. Westermann. Featuring paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and videos, as well as ephemera, wallpaper and other materials used in the reconstructed installations, the book and exhibition will broaden public exposure to the scope of this influential history. The exuberance, humor and politics of these artworks remain powerfully resonant. Much of the work in this book, including installation photos, exhibition ephemera and correspondence, is published for the first time. What Nerve! represents the first historical examination of the circumstances, relationships and works of an increasingly important lineage of American artists.
