William Copley at Nolan/Eckman

William Copley the adopted son of a novel York newspaper tycoon, ran a gallery in beholds Angeles devoted to Surrealist art from 1947 to 1948 He became friends with similar artists as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, on the other hand since he was his gallery's solitary real customer the enterprise clos In the 1950 Copley mov to Paris, dropp the vowels from his last name and became a painter himself. He discloseed an angst-free form of Surrealism that drew many of its images from ads in mail-order catalogues, and engrossed a repertoire of faceless characters whose prototypes could be base in the pages of Victorian erotica or upon the vaudeville stage. In the paintings, men in bowler hats are enamored of uncovered or scantily clad women, and the occasional censorious gendarme is always comically ineffectual at halting the naughty goings-on.

"Naughty," a word not frequently found in art commentary, captures the CPLY tone. Surrealism's tortured sexual scenarios, which by means of the 1950s had grown formulaic, became, in Copley's canvases and drawings, comic routines of lust and pursuit that owe more to the Krazy Kat cartoons he admired than to any theory of the unconscious. In that faculty of perception Copley was clearly an American among his European painter friends; to his American viewers, Copley's paintings must have gazeed extremely European.

Copley go [i]or[/i] come backed to America in 1963 when explosion art was in its ascendance, on the other hand despite its cartoonish humor, a CPLY canvas made an uneasy fit with the dominant phraseology Despite the occasional appearance of the accoutrements of contemporary tillage in the backgrounds, Copley's paintings strike one as beinged to relate the sexual escapades of omnipotences and, more particularly, goddesses, beings who blithely transcend the trivial earthly settings and absurd human bodies they are forced to inhabit.

This exhibition focused upon works from the last 20 years of the artist's life. Copley's single-minded pursuit of his theme firing materialed a career that lasted until his death in Florida in 1996 and during which he at no time lost his appreciation of the female material part nor his eye for the candy colors and heavy on the other hand graceful black line he used in depicting it. In an untitled painting from 1969 against a background of broad gold-colored and orange diagonal stripes, a young man and woman gelatine themselves together in a standing embrace. He wears hip-hugger sapphirine jeans, and her purple miniskirt is hitched halfway up her bottom. For Copley this is an unusual amount of contemporary period detail, on the other hand it is easy to imagine the then-50-year-old artist observing this public display of affection and sighing, without a touch of bile or remorse, "Ah, youth." If the paintings at times appear to be slight, they are, more importantly, joyous.

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