11 - William Nelson Copley

William Nelson Copley Just say yes 1987 Acrylic and marker on canvas 127 x 254 cm. Signed, dated and titled 'JUST SAY YES CPLY 87'. - Minor traces of age. The present work is registered in the Estate of William, N. Copley, New York. Provenance Phyllis Kind Gallery, New York; Adam Baumgold Gallery, New York (2006); private collection, The Netherlands Exhibitions Paris 2022 (Kamel Mennour), Une Collection Hollandaise, foldout with col.illus. Maastricht 2009 (Bonnefanten-Museum), Exile on Main St., exhib.cat.no.18, unpag. with col.illus. “I started off wanting to be a writer, but after reading James Joyce I concluded that the problem with my writing was its lack of imagery. So I decided to try painting, just to see if I could stimulate myself along those lines. But I started liking it too much and never went back.” (Alan Jones, A Conversation with William Copley, in: Carl Haenlein (ed.), William N. Copley, Bilder, Paintings, 1951 - 1994, exhib.cat. Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover 1995, p.207) In William Nelson Copley’s large-format painting ‘Just say yes’ from 1987, images, shapes, and words intertwine. A partially completed crossword puzzle on the left, a comic titled ‘Crazy Mixed Up Kid’ on the right, with the silhouettes of famous nudes from art history lounging above: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’ ‘The Source’ (1820–1856), Diego Velázquez’ ‘Venus at her Mirror’ (1647–1651), and François Boucher’s ‘Resting Girl’ (1752). Their bodies appear flat against the patterned tapestry of copulating couples in various positions, with which Copley has replaced the rosy flesh. Out of the colourful bustle, the question “So What Is Wrong?” floats toward us in large, lilac-coloured letters. “Just say yes", urges the melon man in the hot-air balloon in the last panel of the comic. Typical Copley: He places the title, signature, and date right in the middle of the illustration—here, inside the man’s speech bubble. Fascinated by the shifts and distortions employed in Surrealist collage, and inspired by his brother-in-law, who introduced him to the techniques of animated film, Copley began, in the early 1960s, to transform the painting into a space in which figures, foreground and background, and cut-out image fragments could be freely arranged in relation to one another. (Cf. Germano Celant (ed.), William N. Copley, Fondazione Prada with The Menil Collection, exhib.cat., Milan 2016, p.20) Using cutouts from paintings by Ingres, Velázquez or Boucher, all artists of European absolutism and the aristocracy, Copley takes academically sanctioned nude painting as his starting point. He shifts it semantically and, quite literally, strips it of its institutional dignity. The full version of Copley’s question might thus read “What, after all, is wrong with sex, desire, and nudity?” “The visual vocabulary of Copley,” Roland Penrose wrote about his friend in 1961, “begins with the verb ‘I love’ and from there it leads through colourful adjectives and staccato interjections to the great crossword puzzle in which words and images simmer together in a process of distillation. […] His insight into life, which goes beyond his enjoyment even of its absurdities, gives him the vision to express himself as a painter, that is a poet in visual imagery.” (Roland Penrose, William Nelson Copley, in: Carl Haenlein (Hg.), William N. Copley, Bilder, Paintings, 1951-1994, op. cit., p.201f.)