AND OTHER DESCRIPTIONS OF WILLIAM N. COPLEY'S WORK >>>
While reading an article in the New York Times online a little sidebar caught my eye. It was a cartoon-like painting of a woman's face with a saucy expression. She was wearing a snazzy, red and green tartan cap. The caption was "Renegade Painters." Naturally, I couldn't resist clicking on the link. It took me to a slide show featuring art from two different exhibitions: William N. Copley's X-Rated paintings from 1973-74 at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Chelsea, and a 50-year survey of Peter Saul at Haunch of Venison in midtown Manhattan.
I've been a Peter Saul fan for a long time. I'd have a hard time justifying my enjoyment of his paintings by any established aesthetic criteria. I just like them. They're strange, funny and very colorful. Copley, on the other hand, evokes contradictory responses.
I've never heard of William N. Copley. That's the trouble with being an art lover far from any major art center. You miss out on too much. But that's a lousy excuse. I was living in New York in the late ‘70s and somehow missed out on him. His paintings are fascinating in many ways, especially when comparing those in the Times slide show with the ones pictured on the Kasmin Gallery Website. I loved some of the ones in the Times slide show but was not at all impressed with the Kasmin pictures. Ironically, the difference is due to the fact that the Times censored his paintings. It's a family newspaper. They can't show things like graphic sex and big bushy vaginas. And as much as I dislike censorship, it actually improved the paintings in this case. The painting of the woman with the tartan cap was actually a cropped section of a much larger painting of a harlot splayed open-legged on a couch and wearing nothing but the cap and matching socks. The pose was a knockoff of an odalisque by Matisse. But the Times used an installation shot taken in the gallery when a man happened to be standing in front of the painting blocking her breasts and crotch. Frankly, if the guy hadn't been standing there I would have probably been so mesmerized by the sex parts that I wouldn't have noticed her expression and the lively contrasts of patterns in her hat and socks, and the plaid couch and pillow and wallpaper.
Times critic Roberta Smith wrote glowingly of "the rigorous balancing of the erotic and the decorative." Another painting that used this balance to great effect was Rain, another naked woman, this one sitting on a caned chair with marvelous contrasting patterns of hair, fishnet stockings, chair caning and red and blue striped wallpaper. It reminded me a lot of recent Phillip Pearlstein paintings, only more comical and sexual.
The paintings shown on the Kasmin website are not censored, and at the risk of sounding prudish, they are pretty gross and crude. They're like some 12-year-old boy's idea of dirty pictures. They make sex anything but attractive, and the images all depict a decidedly male point of view.
Come to think of it, I liked only two of the Copley paintings, and I think Pearlstein is better than either of these guys.
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