William N. Copley ”RAIN”. 1973

Acrylic on canvas. 97,7 × 130,7 cm (38 ½ × 51 ½ in.). Signed and dated upper left: CPLY 73. Inscribed and titled on the stretcher: 22 RAIN. There also bears a label for the 1974 New York exhibition (see below).. [3189] With artist's framing We would like to thank Anthony Atlas, William N. Copley Estate, New York, for kindly providing additional information. Acrylic on canvas. 97,7 × 130,7 cm (38 ½ × 51 ½ in.). Signed and dated upper left: CPLY 73. Inscribed and titled on the stretcher: 22 RAIN. There also bears a label for the 1974 New York exhibition (see below).. [3189] With artist's framing, We would like to thank Anthony Atlas, William N. Copley Estate, New York, for kindly providing additional information. Estate of the artist / Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired from Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, in 2010), Estate of the artist / Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia (acquired from Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, in 2010), X-Rated. New York, New York Cultural Center, 1974 / William N. Copley. New York, Kasmin Gallery, 2010, ill. p. 47 / William N. Copley. Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda; Brühl, Max Ernst Museum Brühl des LVR; Hanover, Stiftung Ahlers Pro Arte, Kestner Pro Arte, 2012/13, ill. p. 139 / William N. Copley. Milan, Fondazione Prada; Houston, The Menil Collection, 2016/17, cat. no. 413, ill, Exh. cat.: William N. Copley. Paris, Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1981, ill, William Copley’s RAIN: An American Dream in Fishnet Stockings Barely born, William Nelson Copley was left on the doorstep of a New York foundling home. Two years later, in 1921, he was adopted by a media magnate, making the young boy an heir to a fortune. When Copley was twenty-nine, his father died and he gained access to his inheritance. Over the following decades, he spent so much on art projects, five divorces and his lifestyle that by the end of the 1970s he had exhausted his fortune. The sale of his extensive collection of Surrealist and Pop Art works, however, restored his financial liquidity. The foundations of his art collection had been laid in Los Angeles in 1948, when he opened a gallery representing European émigrés such as Max Ernst, René Magritte and Man Ray. The venture proved a commercial disaster, and Copley eventually bought the works of his artist friends himself. The Surrealists shaped his visual imagination and inspired him to take up painting. Marcel Duchamp is said to have dispelled his initial self-doubt with the question, “Why don’t you go on painting?” Copley later wrote that this encouragement had been all he needed to devote his life to art. Duchamp also advised and encouraged him in his activities as a collector and dealer. Copley, who often signed his works CPLY, was self-taught and is said to have received only a few pointers from his brother-in-law, a Disney artist, and from Max Ernst. Following his first solo exhibition in Los Angeles in 1951, he left his wife and two children and moved to Paris. In stark contrast to the abstract art that dominated the period, he developed a highly individual style, combining humour and eroticism with the visual language of comics. His home became a meeting place for the Surrealist community. It is striking that, rather than adopting the painting style of classical Surrealism, Copley gravitated towards Pop Art at an early stage, with his banal imagery, bold presentation, deadpan manner and irony. When he returned to New York in 1962, artists such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg immediately found in him a supporter and collector. The closeness of these relationships is illustrated by an entry in the diaries of Warhol, who was always keen to hear the latest gossip: “Vincent told me that Copley’s wife Marjorie, whose portrait I just painted, had left her husband. She’d gone to Tiffany’s, done some serious shopping, and then cleaned out the bank account […]. Remember her? She used to be a madam.” Sexual obsessions are the central theme of Copley’s art. His outlook had much in common with that of the American writer Philip Roth, whose humorous and provocative novel “Portnoy’s Complaint” (1969) inspired Copley to paint a work of the same title in 1973. Germano Celant, who curated the most comprehensive retrospective of Copley to date at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2016, saw him as an artist whose uninhibited self-narration anticipated the practices of feminist and queer artists. In 1974, Copley presented a series of paintings under the title X-Rated, depicting brothel scenes and explicitly erotic poses. In preparing the works, he had examined hundreds of pornographic magazines. The present painting, “RAIN”, belongs to this series. It depicts a naked woman posing on a chair with a Vienna straw seat and back, wearing a suspender belt and fishnet stockings, staples of erotic male fantasy. As so often in Copley’s work, visual irony creates an absurd tension between the woman, rendered in a few stylised, sweeping lines, and the precisely depicted woven pattern of the chair’s backrest, which introduces an atmosphere of bourgeois cosiness into the scene. Here, the artist has perfected his deliberately naïve, untrained style. His aim was never to paint pleasing pictures, but rather to create images that were intentionally bad and ugly. “My life is a search for the ridiculous image,” he once said. Here, he has found it in its most perfect expression. Ute Diehl

Stima:€90,000

Vedi tutti gli oggetti diGrisebachoArte, Pittura e Arti Grafiche