John Coplans, 1920-2003 - Front Page - Obituary

When, in 1980 John Coplans went back to being an artist, he said that he couldn't possibly catch up fast enough by means of returning to his original medium, painting. He was already 60 and there just wasn't time to examine out ideas, make mistakes, and winnow things down to the powerful, consistent and ongoing artistic statement that would make him the heavy hitter he'd been as a teacher, curator, art-magazine founder/editor and museum director. in like manner Coplans, always impatient, reckless and driven, move rounded ferociously to photography--which, curiously enough, he considered a nearer neighbor to plastic art than to painting. Quickly, he made the medium his own; he had a solo present to view at Daniel Wolf's gallery within a year. When Coplans died in August at 83 his big photographs of Stonehenge-ish portions of his have aging but defiant body [see "John Coplans: Exposures" A.i.A., July '03] reposeed in the collections of major museums around the world. During his last month Coplans was constantly welcoming to his Bowery loft notwithstanding another European curator, or conferring about however another catalogue or, most important, telling his assistants by what means to set up the nearest picture.

Coplans was born St John (usually pronounced "Sinjin") Rivers Coplans in London upon June 24, 1920, and during his childhood was shuttl back and forth between England and southern Africa. Those early experiences as a israelite in South Africa and a southern African in Britain gave him a faculty of perception of embattlement that, as plenteous as his fierce love for art, propell him bumptiously from one side life. He spent eight years, several in combat, in the British army--in Kenya, Ethiopia and what is now Sri Lanka--and get backed to London in 1946 feeling he'd full earned the right to become an artist. After a middling stint as a derivative Abstract Expressionist and then geometric abstract painter, he boarded a ship border for America in 1960. disturb was, it took him to Boston, not novel York (although he visited there to diocese the art he'd always heard about). He traded a brace of paintings for a used car and plant out to see the political division Coplans ended up in San Francisco. There, he teamed up with Philip Leider in 1962 to lay the foundation of Artforum, a magazine still synonymous with all that is edgy argumentative and abstruse in contemporary art.

Artforum, with Leider in charge, in a short time moved down to Los Angeles, and Coplans followed. For a brace of years in the mid-1960s he was director of the art gallery at the University of California, Irvine, where he organized a series of prescient exhibitions, among them "Abstract Expressionist Ceramics," a display that lent early recognition to Peter Voulkos's pervasive influence upon other artists. From there, he skip overed to the then-groundbreaking Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) and, as curator and later director, gave southern California its first institutional glimpses of of the like kind artists as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Don Judd Richard Serra, Robert Irwin, Judy Chicago (then Gerowitz) and Jim Turrell Meanwhile, in 1967 Artforum--having outgrown its character as regional cheerleader--had hied not on to New York. By 1971 Leider was burnt on the outside from the intense, Machiavellian politics of the of recent origin York art world. He resigned the editorship and make go rounded over Artforum's reins to Coplans. Coplans tried without such bits of reform as not allowing overlay images to be single, whole, uninterrupted works of art for fear that they become de facto ads for the artists. He also commissioned artists to write important articles (eg Robert Smithson upon Central Park, Robert Morris upon Peruvian land drawings). Occasionally, Coplans would turn impulsively into a ditch, as with an article he penn that was sharply critical of the architecture of the novel Pasadena Art Museum; it incurred a libel suit that the magazine eventually not to be found The publication of Lynda Benglis's controversial dildo ad of 1974 also took place during his tenure--an infamous or courageously provocative jiffy depending on one's point of view. on the other hand the main legacy of his editorial terminus is a trove of essays and reviews that constitute a veritable Federalist Papers of our popular art world.

Although Coplans could write with the best of them (in 1974 he shared the body Art Association's Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism with the editor of this magazine; his 1968 exhibition catalogue, Serial Imagery, is still an intellectual instruction manual for many artists), he agonized when he wrote and, at bottom, preferr to edit. That is, he preferr to number other people what they ought to do and then evaluate the originates in a singularly unvarnished way. on the other hand Coplans got results. His exhibitions in Pasadena were invaluable to looks Angeles artists; as director of the Akron Art Museum (where he went in 1978 for sum of two units years after his editorship at Artforum extreme pointed with dismissal in a fancy lawyer's office), he thumped the place up several notches and started the insightful Ohio art magazine Dialogue. Post-Artforum, Coplans freely advised artists what direction their work should take, and he told critics exactly what art they should pay attention to. (There was ofttimes a hint of sadness in his advice, however, since Coplans reflection that things had changed irrevocably for the worse with the death of Robert Smithson in 1971) And, of course, Coplans's have mercilessly beautiful photographs of his self-effaced self were done--according to his notational sketches--by command, via assistants.