Close-Ups and Personal

NEW YORK--One of the art world’s renowned figures lives in the Bowery district of lower Manhattan in a grafittied building flanked by restaurant supply shops that park their industrial-strength refrigerators on the sidewalk. A buzzer springs open the front door, revealing John Coplans, a curator and director at the Pasadena Art Museum in the 1960s, a founding editor of Artforum magazine in the ‘60s and 1970s, and, since the mid-’80s, a photographer recently awarded the French Order of Arts and Letters, along with such luminaries as Meryl Streep and Beverly Sills.

Coplans, who is 81, stands with a slight stoop; his white hair and beard are closely cropped, and bright red suspenders hold up his khaki trousers. He comes close and tilts his head, brown eyes enlarged by thick glasses. “Let me take a look at you,” he says, explaining that macular degeneration is slowly eroding his vision. “I’m half-blind and can’t see you unless I’m very close.”

After the inspection, he explains, “It’s like a permanent night. The moon is out and you can see everything, but you can’t see details. You can see a face but can’t recognize the person.”

In his crisp English accent, he offers a cup of coffee, a cigarette and a seat at a long table stacked with books and photographs. He proceeds to put in his hearing aid. His wife of five years, Amanda Means, is out for the day. On the wall of his studio are two of his latest photographs: his own naked legs splayed at anatomically impossible angles. The effect is disorienting and bizarre, which is his intention.

“I did them after the bombing of the World Trade Center. The inside of my studio smelled like a funeral pyre from all the smoke and bodies. It depressed me intensely, so I started making this work. Then my eyesight started to go. I tried to go on making them, and to my surprise, I was able to. Which just goes to show you--seeing is not about the eyes, seeing is about the mind.”

A collection of Coplans’ photographs with his rollicking, autobiographical introduction has been published by powerHouse Books in an oversized volume called “A Body.” In conjunction with the book’s release, a selection of his large black-and-white photographs of hands and fingers are on view at ACE Gallery in Los Angeles.

Year after year, Coplans has photographed his aging body parts with a startling absence of sentimentality. His hairy back, his wrinkled legs, his gnarled toes and hands. At ACE, giant prints of his hands, cupped inward, show the stubs of the fingers. While these self-portraits never include his face, the photos expose Coplans with an intimacy that is not for the timid.

Coplans didn’t begin his photographic career until age 60. He had started his artistic life as a painter, but then put it aside and gained a reputation as a critic, editor and curator. In fact, Coplans has managed to have a life in three distinct acts, each as full of incident as a John Le Carre novel.

Coplans was born into a middle-class Jewish family in London, the son of a doctor who was also an amateur sculptor. His father’s wanderlust bounced the family between London, Johannesburg and Cape Town until, at 16, Coplans dropped out of school and two years later joined the Royal Air Force. A rugby accident grounded him, but in 1938 he joined the King’s African Rifles, taking part in the capture of Italian-occupied Somaliland and Ethiopia. Progressing to the rank of captain, he also served in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India and Burma (now Myanmar).

After eight years in the army, in 1947, Coplans returned to a bombed-out London. After reading a government pamphlet listing grants for further education, he decided there was nothing he was qualified for “except to become an artist, a job for which there are no real qualifications.” After a semester of study, however, Coplans dropped out. “I was 26 and had seen a lot of the world and was virtually unteachable.”

Coplans supported himself for years with odd jobs, teaching and occasionally selling one of his geometric paintings. He became a contractor and his standard of living improved, but he felt his painting was going nowhere. At the Tate Gallery In 1959, he saw “New American Painting,” featuring work by Jackson Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists. It so impressed him that he sold his belongings and moved to the U.S. in 1960.

He checked out the Museum of Modern Art in New York (“an amazing experience”), spent time in San Francisco and, after hearing Walter Hopps (who would later be Coplans’ boss at the Pasadena museum) deliver a lecture on the rambunctious art being produced in Southern California, moved to Los Angeles in 1961.

It was providential timing, as L.A. was fast becoming the most active center for contemporary art outside of New York. “There were all kinds of opportunities because of what was going on and the need to pursue them out into the bigger art world,” Coplans recalls.

By 1963, he had traded his painting, which he decided was “ordinary,” for writing (he co-founded Artforum in 1962) and curating.

How good was his eye? In 1962, he saw Andy Warhol’s 32 paintings of Campbell’s soup cans at Ferus Gallery and talked the owner, Irving Blum, into canceling the sale of three of them. “They have to stay together,” he told Blum. “They are a terribly important body of work.”

It was Coplans’ first critical coup. Blum slowly made payments over the years to Warhol to pay for the entire group; in 1996, he sold the suite to the Museum of Modern Art for $15 million.

There would be many other Coplans discoveries. He was, for example, among the first to spot the significance of the clay sculpture made by Californians Peter Voulkos and Ken Price. After becoming director of the UC Irvine art gallery in 1965, Coplans organized a groundbreaking exhibition that linked their work with Abstract Expressionism.

Hired as senior curator of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967, he organized the first solo museum exhibitions of soon-to-be international stars Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Richard Serra and, in 1970, the first Warhol retrospective in the U.S.

In 1971, as that museum was being subsumed into what is now the Norton Simon Museum of Art, Coplans moved to New York to take over as editor in chief of Artforum, which had moved from L.A. to the East Coast in the late 1960s. Evenings were spent doing “research” at the nightclub Max’s Kansas City, but the magazine remained at the forefront of its field. Seven years later, however, Coplans was out of a job. The publisher, he says, asked him either to buy the magazine or leave.

At 60, he took a post as director of the Akron Art Museum in Ohio and, away from New York’s nightlife, found himself with time on his hands. He began experimenting with creating art again, taking nude self-portraits using an automatic timer. Eventually, he decided to sell his collection of Carleton Watkins photographs to fund a full-time return to the life of an artist.

“It was an act of desperation,” he says of the opening of Act 3. “I certainly wasn’t going to stay in Akron for the rest of my life. I was enthralled by the photographic process and decided to spend what time I had left doing it.”

Coplans moved back to New York, and within a few years, despite the challenging nature of the work, the prestigious Daniel Wolfe Gallery was showing and selling his prints.

In 1981, he was given a show at the Art Institute of Chicago and received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the first of four.

The grant money enabled him to hire an assistant, someone to actually click the Polaroid camera, so that he could concentrate on what he calls “autobiographical” poses. “My mind, my memory wandered up and down my life, and would provoke the images that I would make,” he says of the process. “They all have to do with something that happened to me and often with humor.”

In the Village Voice, art critic Peter Schjeldahl praised his 1997 retrospective at New York’s P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, noting, “He has inserted into art history a type of work that was there to be done... : a mighty synthesis of photographic factuality and paintinglike qualities, conjoined in the metaphor of skin.”

These days, Coplans is happy to let others analyze his work. “When I make photographs,” he says, rummaging through a nearly empty pack of cigarettes, “I make them about seeing.

“When I was a painter, I was intellectual. Now I’ve reversed the procedure away from the intellectual and found a way of being completely intuitive and a new freedom to create.”

Then he expands on that explanation.

“As a critic, I know that what artists talk about most of the time in trying to explain their work is nonsense,” he says. “If they could say it, they wouldn’t need to paint it or sculpt it. It’s beyond language.”

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“A BODY,” ACE Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Dates: Through Aug. 31. Admission: Free. Phone: (323) 935-4411.

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Hunter Drohojowska-Philp is a regular contributor to Calendar.