John Coplans, 83; art critic, photographer
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: Christopher Knight, LA Times Staff Writer
John Coplans, an influential art critic, magazine editor and curator who
successfully reinvented himself as a photographer at the age of 60, died in
his sleep Thursday in New York City after a long illness. He was 83.
Coplans co-founded Artforum Magazine in June 1962. Within five years it
ranked among the most important journals of new art, pushing older rivals
like Art News, Art in America and Art International to the side. In 1974
Coplans received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for Distinction in Art
Criticism from the College Art Assn.
John Rivers Coplans was born in London on June 24, 1920, and raised in South
Africa. He initially set out to be a painter. After service in both the
British air force and the British army during World War II, which took him
to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Burma (now Myanmar), he briefly studied
painting in London. Finding the schools inadequate, he instead frequented
the city's art museums. There he was influenced by such shows as "Four
Abstract Classicists," the first show in Europe of postwar art from Los
Angeles, and "New American Painting" at the Tate Gallery. Sensing that art's
immediate future lay in the United States, he began to consider a move.
The sight of post-nuclear-holocaust San Francisco in the 1959 science
fiction movie "On the Beach" reminded Coplans of South Africa; within a year
he had divorced his first wife and moved to San Francisco. Coplans taught at
UC Berkeley but, disappointed by what he regarded as the department's
anti-intellectual view of art, he began to consider starting a magazine to
initiate a dialogue. With salesman John Irwin as publisher and, soon after,
former gallery director and city welfare officer Phil Leider as editor,
Artforum was launched.
Faced with a conservative cultural milieu, and having exhausted its credit
options in San Francisco after just a few issues, the magazine soon
relocated to Los Angeles, where a market for new art was starting to
develop. Coplans was determined that Artforum would be influential on both
coasts. "The thing was how to get the Eastern establishment to read about
West Coast art," Coplans told an interviewer in 1975. To ensure that New
York would pay attention to Los Angeles, he began to include East Coast
writers in the magazine.
Coplans continued his involvement with Artforum, mostly as a writer, even
after it once again relocated -- this time to Manhattan -- in 1967. But his
title, editor at large, was mostly honorary, and he received almost no
income from the publication.
Having organized the first American show of Pop art at the Oakland Art
Museum, in 1963, Coplans accepted a job as director of the gallery at UC
Irvine. During the two-year stint he organized an important show of
paintings by Frank Stella. In 1967 he became senior curator at the Pasadena
Art Museum, where he mounted the influential exhibition "Serial Imagery,"
which proposed that artists' repetition of motifs reflected techniques
inherent in an industrially based culture. He also organized survey shows of
Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Donald Judd, and he gave Robert Irwin,
Richard Serra and James Turrell their first museum exhibitions.
Coplans left Pasadena for New York in 1971, as the troubled museum spiraled
into bankruptcy and became the focus of a takeover by industrialist and
collector Norton Simon. Coplans published a scathing account of these
events, titled "Diary of a Disaster," in the February 1975 issue of
Artforum, where he had returned to assume the editorship. He abruptly left
the magazine to become director of the Akron, Ohio, Art Museum in 1978.
Coplans later told The Times that he had been asked by the publisher to
either buy the magazine or quit.
Two years later Coplans was back in New York making photographs. At 60, he
embarked on the career as an artist that had eluded him as a younger man.
Self-portraiture was his focus, although his face rarely appears in his
work. The large-format, black-and-white, close-up images picture Coplans in
excruciating detail. He dubbed them "auto-portraits," partly because they
depict his own nude body and partly because they were made with the aid of a
live-feedback video camera and an automatic shutter. Folds of flesh became
mountainous landscapes, intertwined fingers assumed the proportions of
torsos and legs. Skin became the plane of conjunction between photographic
realism and painterly scale.
Coplans' photographs were the subject of a well-received 1997 retrospective
at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens. His work is included in the
collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
Suffering in recent years from macular degeneration that severely impaired
his eyesight, he began a series of pictures of fragmented body parts
inspired by the bombing of the World Trade Center, not far from his Bowery
studio. They were published last year in an oversize volume, titled "A
Body," and examples were shown in Los Angeles at Ace Gallery.
Coplans is survived by his wife, photographer Amanda Means; a son and
daughter from an earlier marriage, Joseph, of Wheat Ridge, Colo., and
Barbara, of Leeds, England; and two granddaughters, Stefania and Saskia.
GRAPHIC: PHOTO: Coplans specialized in what he called close-up
"auto-portraits," large-format portraits of himself in excruciating detail.
PHOTOGRAPHER: John Coplans Andrea Rosen Gallery PHOTO: JOHN COPLANS: Having
organized the first American show of Pop art at the Oakland Art Museum, in
1963, Coplans accepted a job as director of the gallery at UC Irvine. In
1967 he became senior curator at the Pasadena Art Museum. PHOTOGRAPHER: Gina
Ferazzi Los Angeles Times PHOTO: (no caption) PHOTOGRAPHER: John Coplans
Courtesy of Ace Gallery