John Coplans; Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Influential artist, curator and editor who found his greatest success as a
photographer, producing astonishing nude self-portraits
23 August 2003
St John Rivers Coplans, photographer, artist, writer and curator: born
London 24 June 1920; Director of the Art Gallery, University of California,
Irvine 1965-67; Senior Curator, Pasadena Art Museum 1967-70;
editor-in-chief, Artforum 1971-77; Director, Akron Art Museum 1978-80; twice
married (one son, one daughter); died New York 21 August 2003.
"When I photograph, I usually begin with some idea, and if a photograph
emerges, the idea becomes recognisable. I never really know where I'm going
in advance, and only recognise where I've been after the fact." John
Coplans' musings on his photographic methods could as well act as a
summation of his life. As artist, curator and editor, he followed
inspiration and intuition in a way rare in the structured hierarchies of the
art world. But at the age of 60, Coplans found salvation in photography.
For years he had regarded himself as a failed painter, caught up in the
teaching and promotion of other artists. As an editor, he was hugely
influential, and his catalogue essays contextualised the work of many
important artists. But as a photographer, producing large-scale, raw and
severe photographs of his own ageing, pouchy, hairy body, he delighted
audiences far beyond the art world. In Coplans' photographs, one could
glimpse a monumental sadness which went hand in hand with a delight in
exploring the forbidden. They have an honesty which is breathtaking, a
control of the medium of photography which puts them among the élite of
image-makers.
For those who became familiar with his ubiquitous and always astonishing
nude self-portraits during the Eighties and Nineties, his other lives are
intriguing and surprising.
Coplans was born in London in the summer of 1920. His father, Joseph, a
doctor and battle-scarred veteran of the Somme, was an artist, inventor and
eccentric. John Coplans' childhood was dislocated and troubled. When his
parents moved to South Africa, he was sent to boarding school and to stay
with his grandmother during holidays. Finally reunited with his parents in
Johannesburg, he failed even to recognise his mother, and saw his new sister
as an intolerable rival.
To the young Coplans, South Africa was a revelation. His family had
prospered there, and he lived the life of a privileged European. He fell in
love with his Scottish nanny and was fascinated and startled by the black
workers who laboured around his parents' home: "I can clearly see them and
am amazed; they are the colour of chocolate."
In the mid-Twenties, the Coplans family returned to London. Though his
relationship with his mother went from bad to worse, other interests were
developing which would dictate the course of his future career:
Art books abound in our living quarters, especially those on Leonardo,
Degas, Donatello and Rodin, all of which I look at many times. On the walls
of our house are reproductions of Van Gogh and other Impressionists. On
Sundays, we frequently visit the Tate Gallery and view its many Rodin works.
My father urges me to draw and paint and I do.
As well as directing him towards art, Coplans' father had a keen and
idiosyncratic interest in science:
We often visit the Science Museum in South Kensington, where my father
discusses with me the photographic devices, as well as the scientific
instruments on display, especially medical ones, many of which he believes
he can improve upon. Nothing is too small for his inventive bent - a
toothpaste tube, a bottle cap.
In 1931, Coplans was enrolled at St Marylebone Grammar School and it was
here that his lifelong interest in the physical form grew. He made a
miniature natural history museum in a friend's garden shed, even digging up
the family's pet cat to include a skeleton in the exhibit. He drew
butterflies and insects at the Natural History Museum, and even chipped a
fragment of bone off one of the museum's dinosaurs to add to his collection.
In the meantime, his father had been experimenting with photography. He had
begun to made 3D films and had made a substantial collection of 19th-century
stereo cards. When John took some of his father's collection to school
(typically softly erotic female nude studies) he had his first intimating of
the power of photography. He was expelled from school, and remembered that,
after this incident, "the question of pornography hangs over my head for
quite a few years."
By the mid-Thirties, the Coplans family were on the move again, back to
Johannesburg. John Coplans attended a succession of schools, boarding when
the family were in funds, a day boy when finances ran low. At 16, disrupted
and confused, he left school and became an office junior, but his ambition,
as war in Europe loomed larger, was to join the RAF.
He worked his passage back to the UK and by 1938, just after his 18th
birthday, he received his pilot's wings and readied himself for the coming
air conflict. Coplans was never to be a serving fighter pilot. An injury on
the rugby field made him unfit to fly and, disappointed, he returned briefly
to civilian life. But he was determined to become a soldier, and eventually
was commissioned by the Scottish rifles and sailed with his battalion to
Mombasa: "Nothing to do but learn Swahili, exercise, drink and gamble."
Coplans served in Ethiopia and, though he rarely saw action, he was
inevitably party to acts of violence and depredation, attacking the Shifta
people and destroying their village and livestock in retaliation for
banditry. His stories of a soldier's life in east Africa are raucous, full
of detail of brothels and strange sexual encounters, mixed in with stories
of military action. Narrated by him, it is a kind of enjoyable Hades, a
shifting, menacing landscape of histories and events. He travelled to
Calcutta and then on to Burma to fight against the Japanese. After spending
some months in an Indian hospital, Coplans, just about to accept promotion
and join a new unit, heard of the US attack on Hiroshima. He was horrified
by the news - "All those years of fighting and it ends in mass destruction."
Coplans viewed peace with trepidation: "What on earth will I do after eight
years in the Army? The only thing I'm good at is barking orders." He took
advantage of the ex-soldiers' training grants available from the British
government and, returning to London, enrolled on an art course.
He found London austere and expensive: "One egg per week; it's miserable."
He boarded at the Abbey Art Centre, where he met the painter Alan Davie.
Davie introduced him to the work of Picasso and also to the notion of the
autobiographical in art.
Unable to find work as an artist, Coplans worked as a painter and decorator,
refurbishing government buildings. This work was plentiful and Coplans was
soon able to afford better lodgings, in the basement of the Hampstead home
of the poet William Empson. Soon Coplans became a landlord himself,
repairing and renting out apartments to, among others, the Canadian writer
Mordecai Richler.
But throughout this time, Coplans continued to paint. He showed with the
Royal Society of British Artists in 1950, and with the London Group in 1954.
The London art scene was re-emerging from the war with increased vigour and
new, dynamic personalities. Coplans became friendly with the artist Denis
Bowen who, famously, opened the New Vision Centre in London, dedicated to
the new and the experimental. Though a keen supporter of the (then)
community-based Whitechapel Art Gallery, in east London, Coplans had little
time for the traditional art world:
Artists were pretty much on their own, left to struggle as best they can. I
don't remember any grants or critical encouragement, and, when criticism
does take place, it is usually misplaced or ignorant.
Some salvation came for Coplans in the form of Lawrence Alloway and the
newly opened Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London. He attended many
of the discussion groups which Alloway put on for young artists. Here
Coplans became acquainted with Pop Art and became a part (albeit a
disgruntled one) of London's somewhat provincial art world. He was impressed
by the exhibitions which Alloway brought to the ICA from the United States,
notably "Hard-edged Painting" at the end of the Fifties, but most of all
with "New American Painting", shown at the Tate in 1959.
Discontented with the feyness and whimsicality which he saw emerging in
British painting, Coplans was determined to move to America. He saw that the
move would "change my life by giving me a way to finally find myself as an
artist . . . I feel I need a place that is disconnected from my past, one
where I can make a new beginning."
Though impressed by New York, Coplans decided to base himself in San
Francisco. He envisaged that it would be like Cape Town, warm, dreamy and by
the sea. He took a room above a bar and found a job at the University of
California at Berkeley, teaching basic design. With visiting artists from
New York (including Harold Paris and Julius Schmidt) Coplans showed
paintings at the Bolles gallery, run by Phil Leider and Jim Monte, both of
whom would become significant art world figures in the years to come.
Visiting Los Angeles, Coplans was impressed and intrigued by the work of
Andy Warhol, on show at the recently revived Ferus gallery.
By the early Sixties, Coplans was out of work again, his Visiting
Professorship at Berkeley had ended, and he moved to Los Angeles, where the
West Coast art scene was rapidly expanding. With Phil Leider, Coplans
convinced an entrepreneurial print salesman, John Irwin, to finance a new
art magazine, based on the West Coast. Artforum was born. Leider contributed
the book reviews, and Coplans scouted for exhibitions to review. When
Irwin's money finally ran out, Coplans found a new sponsor in Charles
Cowles, a member of the family which published the successful mainstream
picture magazine Look.
Though Coplans was still painting and teaching, he was increasingly involved
in writing for Artforum. The magazine's sphere of influence spread to New
York, and soon, the brightest young critics were writing for Coplans and
Leider. In the meantime, Coplans began to write for other journals,
including ArtNews, Studio International and Art in America.
By the mid-Sixties, Coplans' voice was so influential that he was invited in
1965 to become Director of the Art Gallery of the University of California,
Irvine. The expansion of contemporary art museums on the West Coast in the
Sixties was phenomenal and Coplans found himself at the centre of a
revolution. He continued as West Coast editor of Artforum when the magazine
moved to New York and, as well as supporting a wide range of Californian
artists through reviews, exhibitions and advice, he staged important shows
by artists who included Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Richard Serra.
Influential as a director of the Pasadena Art Museum from 1967, Coplans
became part of a dynamic curatorial team for the new Californian museum
establishment.
In 1971, tired of the endless politics of the West Coast establishment,
Coplans took up the editorship of Artforum, and moved to New York. As
tireless as ever, he attended every museum opening, commissioned new writers
and visited every exhibition in New York. He designed the magazine, edited
the reviews, chose the illustrations and even did the layouts. The editorial
board which he set up to encourage a broad scope of views and skills caused
him much heartache.
Rival camps form and quarrels break out . . .It is often a miserable
existence for me . . . I must confess that I often see the work through a
haze. The pressures are terrible.
In 1980, Coplans, increasingly disenchanted with the rivalries of the art
world and pressed to repay Cowles's initial loan, left Artforum and New York
to take up the directorship of the Akron Museum in Ohio. After three decades
of intense and exhausting work, he found himself at 60 with "no money or
pension, with a job in the sticks, and a board of rubber-headed
vice-presidents trying to run a museum in Ohio".
Coplans turned to photography. He stopped writing reviews and catalogue
essays, gave up on the museum world and found a small apartment in New York.
His career as a photographer was to be his most successful yet. He
experimented with photography, took photographs of couples and worked out on
the street. Through his impeccable art-world connections, he soon found
himself a dealer, and went about the business of raising grants to support
his practice.
A memory of a photo session he conducted in Akron opened his eyes to the
possibility of the self-portraiture which rapidly established him as one of
the most successful, startling and influential photographers of our times:
I remember that in Akron I had taken photographs of myself in the nude with
a timer: it has taken me these couple of years, trying this and that subject
matter, to look at the nude self- portraits and recognise that I had already
struck gold and I didn't know it. I daydream. In one dream, I travel down my
genes and visit remote ancestors, both male and female.
Inspired by these journeys to the past, and earlier self-portraits, Coplans
began directing an assistant as she took photographs of his body.
To remove all references to my current identity, I leave out my head. I
don't know how it happens, but when I pose for one of these photographs, I
become immersed in the past. The experience is akin to Alice falling through
the looking glass. I use no props; I pose against a neutral, white
background, and before I know what has happened, I am lost in a reverie. I
am at somewhere else, another person or a woman in another life . . . the
process is a strange one. I never know, from one moment to the next, if this
power to time-travel will dry up, or what the next set of photographs will
be.
As a new photographer at the age of 60, Coplans' success was astonishing. He
exhibited all over the world in the most eminent museums, innovative
galleries and star-studded biennales.
His photographs were both a revenge against, and a vindication of, history,
experience, hopes and expectations. And life itself.
Val Williams