Portrait of photographer John Coplans, New York, New York, 2000.
Artist John Coplans in his New York City studio on April 13, 2002. He had published a book on portraits of his fingers.
New York, August 26, 2016: Visitors to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City view photographer John Coplans' 'Frieze, No. 2, Four Panels'. The museum, in Lower Manhattan's Meatpacking District, focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American art.
06 January 2019, France (France), Paris: A visitor looks at the photographs "Self Portrait: Crossed Fingers" by John Coplans. In more than 20 years Paris Photo has become the world's largest photography fair.
Portrait of photographer John Coplans, New York, New York, 2000.
Artist John Coplans in his New York City studio on April 13, 2002. He had published a book on portraits of his fingers.
New York, August 26, 2016: Visitors to the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City view photographer John Coplans' 'Frieze, No. 2, Four Panels'. The museum, in Lower Manhattan's Meatpacking District, focuses on 20th- and 21st-century American art.
06 January 2019, France (France), Paris: A visitor looks at the photographs "Self Portrait: Crossed Fingers" by John Coplans. In more than 20 years Paris Photo has become the world's largest photography fair.
(The fifteen full-color and thirty-two black and white wat...)
The fifteen full-color and thirty-two black and white watercolors presented here were originally assembled for a 1967 exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum by Curator-author John Coplans. Several of the watercolors included had not been published previously. Tracing the history of what is known about the more than 400 watercolors of Cézanne, John Coplans gives new insight into the artist's work in this medium.
https://www.amazon.com/C%C3%A9zanne-Watercolors-John-Coplans/dp/B001BQ0VV0/?tag=2022091-20
1967
https://www.amazon.com/Andy-Warhol-John-Coplans-1970-06-02/dp/B01K3IMY6Q/?tag=2022091-20
1970
(art book.)
art book.
https://www.amazon.com/Serial-Imagery-John-Coplans/dp/B000J2OVUO/?tag=2022091-20
1970
https://www.amazon.com/Ellsworth-Kelly-John-Coplans/dp/B000WW61V8/?tag=2022091-20
1972
https://www.amazon.com/Roy-Lichtenstein-John-Coplans/dp/0713903791/?tag=2022091-20
1972
https://www.amazon.com/James-Turrell-Occluded-Front/dp/0932499104/?tag=2022091-20
1985
https://www.amazon.com/Self-Portrait-1984-1997-John-Coplans-1997-09-02/dp/B01K3KGAWI/?tag=2022091-20
1997
https://www.amazon.com/Weegee-Naked-York-John-Coplans/dp/3823821229/?tag=2022091-20
1997
(While Coplans has published abbreviated versions of his n...)
While Coplans has published abbreviated versions of his nude portraits in catalogs and small format books, A Body is the first publication to present the full emotional impact of this important work in an oversized monograph that takes the viewer on a protean voyage through, inside, around, and all over the human body.
https://www.amazon.com/Body-John-Coplans/dp/1576871363/?tag=2022091-20
2002
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artist curator Photographer writer
John Rivers Coplans was born on June 24, 1920, in London. He was the son of Joseph Moses Coplans - a medical practitioner in London into a household with a passion for art, and Celia (Taneborne) Coplans. John moved between Cape Town and London throughout his childhood.
Aged 18, and two years out of school, Coplans completed his RAF officer training, and won his wings in 1938. Being demobbed in 1946 opened up the possibility of art school, which he soon rejected in favor of a decade spent immersing himself in the art scene.
The burgeoning of abstract art, and the foundation of such experimental places as the New Vision Center and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, introduced him to dialogue with both artists and audience. He began showing his own paintings and made a living by doing up apartments for friends. Almost tangentially, he graduated to buying, letting, and selling the properties.
The work of US artists seemed to Coplans like a breath of fresh air. Captivated by the Hard-Edged Painting exhibition at the ICA in 1959, and the Tate gallery's New American Painting, he engaged in the dialogue around pop art and the creation of popular art forms, and, in 1960, left England for California. The move - and his decision to divorce his first wife - was also, curiously, influenced by his viewing of the post-nuclear war movie, On The Beach (1959).
After a brief spell teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 Coplans co-founded Artforum magazine and, for the next two decades, his career was to be as artistically various as it was financially precarious. Artforum was intended to combat the anti-intellectualism Coplans felt he had encountered at Berkeley and the notion that there was nothing to be said about art since you either made it or looked at it. His whole background was in stimulating debate and awareness, at a popular rather than an elite level. Within five years, the magazine was relocated to Manhattan, with Coplans acting as west coast editor.
As a museum curator, he enjoyed similarly shifting fortunes. His first project was a pop art exhibition at the Oakland art museum, and, in 1963, he became director of the university gallery at Irvine, organizing an important show by Frank Stella. From 1967 to 1971, he transferred to the Pasadena art museum. Alongside established artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd, he gave Robert Irwin, Richard Serra, and James Turrell their first shows.
In 1971, Coplans moved to New York to become editor of Artforum, and, in 1975, published his own version of events leading to the bankruptcy and takeover of the Pasadena art museum, Diary Of A Disaster. During his seven years at the helm, Artforum increasingly jettisoned the militant formalism with which it had been identified and became a platform for the catholicity of Coplans's artistic tastes, including 19th-century photography and contemporary European abstract art.
In 1978, the publisher gave Coplans the choice of buying the magazine or quitting. Not being in a position to do the former, he became director of the Akron art museum in Ohio, where, again, he combined curatorial work with launching a new magazine, appropriately named Dialogue. He also published books on photographers, ranging from Weegee to Brancusi, and started his own photographic experiments.
By 1980, Coplans was back in New York, and the following year had his first solo show at the Daniel Wolf gallery. At last, he had found not only the medium but also the subject of his artistic expression. He called his works auto-portraits, and, created by means of a live-feedback video camera with an automatic shutter, they honed in on the physical landscapes of the body with all the sculptural focus - but without the distortions of the lens - of Bill Brandt's Perspective Of Nudes (1961). This was to become Coplans's constant subject matter.
In 1986, he had his first show of self-portraits at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. The work was rapidly acquired and shown by the J Paul Getty Museum, the New York museum of modern art, and the Whitney Museum of modern art; in 1997 (the same year he remarried), a major retrospective was staged at the PS.1 Contemporary art center in Queens. He published books of the work, principally the anonymous-sounding A Body, Body Parts and A Self-Portrait, and, last year, Provocations, which includes his photo-essays and criticism. These publications, in context with catalogs and biographies on artists as diverse as Cézanne and Warhol, Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, are a testament to Coplans's creed of work.
Coplans was best known as a founder of the influential Artforum magazine and for his more recent career as a photographer of quirky self-portraits. Coplans’ most famed artworks consisted of a series of black-and-white photos depicting segments of his own naked body, but never his face.
The recipient of numerous awards and fellowships for his work, Coplans earned a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1992, and in 2001 he was named Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France.
(While Coplans has published abbreviated versions of his n...)
2002(The fifteen full-color and thirty-two black and white wat...)
1967(art book.)
1970Quotations: “So, I’m using my body and saying, even though it’s a 70-year-old body, I can make it interesting. I don’t know how it happens, but when I pose for one of these photographs, I become immersed in the past...I am somewhere else, another person, or a woman in another life. At times, I’m in my youth.”
A major element in John's fascination was an obsession with one of our few remaining taboos: the process of aging and physical decrepitude. The blow-ups of sagging flesh, creased folds, odd protuberances and body hair of an old man become the documentary tale of the decline of Every man.
He could be funny, too. He took great pleasure in having been expelled from school and in recounting, hilariously, his wartime service.
Quotes from others about the person
"The vulnerability, stoicism and tenderness of John Coplans's photographs is all the more startling given his combative art criticism and reputation as a difficult man. His importance as a critic and curator, and founder of Artforum, should not be underestimated." - Adrian Searle
Coplans was three times married. His first wife was Betty Little Coplans. They married in 1941, but their marriage ended a divorce in 1960. The couple had a daughter, Dr. Barbara Ann Rivers Coplans. His second wife was Carolyn Teeter Coplans with whom he had a son, Joseph John Coplans.
In 1997, Coplans married for the third time. His wife's name was Amanda Means, a New York photographer.
