JOHN COPLANS

By Amanda Hopkinson

John Coplans had a career in reverse. He was 60 by the time he established himself as a photographer, having already had a long and active life as a curator, editor, writer, artist and decorator. A pioneer of selfportraiture, he took large format black-and-white close-ups of his bare body that sent ripples of shock, recognition and frequent praise through the international art world.

A major element in the fascination was an obsession with one of our few remaining taboos: the process of ageing and physical decrepitude. And with the anonymity of identity: in Coplans' words, "To remove all references to my current identity, I leave out my head." The blow-ups of sagging flesh, creased folds, odd protuberances and body hair of an old man become the documentary tale of the decline of Everyman.

Born in London, Coplans was pulled out of his English boarding school to join parents he no longer recognised in Johannesburg. He lived up to Mark Twain's observation about not letting schooling interfere with his education. His intermittent home life, and affinity with his doctor father, involved them in Sunday visits to art galleries after the family had returned to London; then there were his father's inventions and experiments in everything from redesigning toothpaste tubes to 3-D filmmaking. The boundaries between art and science were irrelevant - the external world was an eternal intrigue, ripe for exploration and exploitation.

Coplans attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Aged 18, and two years out of school, Coplans completed his RAF officer training, and won his wings in 1938. Then, unexpectedly disqualified from flying by an earlier rugby injury, he enlisted with the Scottish Rifles (the Cameroonians). Since he had lived in South Africa as a child, he was assigned to the King’s African Rifles in East Africa. He went on to be posted India and Burma, and served until the end of WWII.

Being demobbed in 1946 opened up the possibility of art school, which he soon rejected in favour of a decade spent immersing himself in the art scene. The burgeoning of abstract art, and the foundation of such experimental places as the New Vision Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, introduced him to dialogue with both artists and audience. He began showing his own paintings, and made a living by doing up apartments for friends. Almost tangentially, he graduated to buying, letting and selling the properties.

The work of US artists seemed to Coplans like a breath of fresh air. Captivated by the Hard-Edged Painting exhibition at the ICA in 1959, and the Tate gallery's New American Painting, he engaged in the dialogue around pop art and the creation of popular art forms, and, in 1960, left England for California. The move -and his decision to divorce his first wife - was also, curiously, influenced by his viewing of the post-nuclear war movie, On The Beach (1959).

After a brief spell teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 Coplans co-founded Artforum magazine and, for the next two decades, his career was to be as artistically various as it was financially precarious.

Artforum was intended to combat the anti-intellectualism Coplans felt he had encountered at Berkeley, and the notion that there was nothing to be said about art, since you either made it or looked at it. His whole background was in stimulating debate and awareness, at a popular rather than an elite level. Inevitably, as he later explained, "The thing was how to get the eastern establishment to read about west coast art". Within five years, the magazine was relocated to Manhattan, with Coplans acting as west coast editor.

As a museum curator, he enjoyed similarly shifting fortunes. His first project was a pop art exhibition at the Oakland art museum, and, in 1963, he became director of the university gallery at Irvine, organising an important show by Frank Stella. From 1967 to 1971, he transferred to the Pasadena art museum. Alongside established artists like Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, he gave Robert Irwin, Richard Serra and James Turrell their first shows.

In 1971, Coplans moved to New York to became editor of Artforum, and, in 1975, published his own version of events leading to the bankruptcy and takeover of the Pasadena art museum, “Diary Of A Disaster.” During his seven years at the helm, Artforum increasingly jettisoned the militant formalism with which it had been identified, and became a platform for the catholicity of Coplans' artistic tastes, including19th-century photography and contemporary European abstract art.

In 1978, the publisher gave Coplans the choice of buying the magazine or quitting. Not being in a position to do the former, he became director of the Akron art museum in Ohio, where, again, he combined curatorial work with launching a new magazine, appropriately named Dialogue. He also published books on photographers, ranging from Weegee to Brancusi, and started his own photographic experiments.

By 1980, Coplans was back in New York, and the following year had his first solo show at the Daniel Wolf Gallery. At last, he had found not only the medium but also the subject of his artistic expression. He called his works auto-portraits, and, created by means of a live-feedback video camera with an automatic shutter,they honed in on the physical landscapes of the body with all the sculptural focus - but without the distortions of the lens - of Bill Brandt's Perspective Of Nudes (1961). This was to become Coplans' constant subject matter.

In 1986, he had his first show of self-portraits at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York. Sandra Phillips, the long-time photography curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, immediately saw the importance of the work. His first major museum exhibition followed at SF MoMA in 1988, and the exhibition traveled on to the Museum of Modern Art in New York that same year. The work was rapidly acquired and shown by the J. Paul Getty museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art; in 1997 (the same year he remarried), a major retrospective was staged MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Centre in Queens. He published books of the work, principally the anonymous-sounding A Body, Body Parts and A Self-Portrait, and finally Provocations, which includes his photo-essays and criticism.

These publications, in context with catalogues and biographies on artists as diverse as Cézanne and Warhol,Lichtenstein and Ellsworth Kelly, are a testament to Coplans' creed of work. Coplans’s photographs have been collected by over seventy museums in the United States and elsewhere. He received the Frank Jewitt Mather award of the College Art Association in 1974, Guggenheim Fellowships in 1969 and 1985,National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships 1975, 1980, 1986 and 1992, and in 1998 an award from the International Association of Art Critics. In 2001 he received the award of Officier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government.

His conclusion seems to have come with the test of an exhibition, Self-Portraits, launched in 2001: "The principal thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly ... Just think of Rodin, how he dealt with people of all ages. I have the feeling that I'm alive, I have a body ... I can make it extremely interesting. That keeps me alive and vital. It's a kind of process of energising myself by my belief that the classical tradition of art that we've inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit."

Coplans has a daughter, Barbara, and a son, Joseph; he has two granddaughters. He was married four times. His fourth wife, photographer Amanda Means, is the Trustee for the John Coplans Trust in Beacon, New York.

Adrian Searle writes: “The vulnerability, stoicism and tenderness of John Coplans' photographs is all the more startling given his combative art criticism and reputation as a difficult man. His importance as a critic and curator, and founder of Artforum, should not be underestimated.”

He could be funny, too. He took great pleasure in having been expelled from school and in recounting,hilariously, his wartime service. His art criticism, collected by Stuart Morgan in Provocations, ends with along letter in which Coplans details, to his son Joseph, what he wants done with his ashes. "Package them somewhat like drug dealers do with grams of coke," he explains.

He goes on to describe how the ashes should be surreptitiously smuggled into Westminster Abbey -"There's no way I can get [there] by the front door" - and infiltrated into Egyptian pyramids, Mayan temples, the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon and various other sacred sites around the world. This may seem like hubris, but Coplans concludes that "the last thing I want when I'm dead is trouble”. His wishes are in the process of being accomplished by his son, Joseph and Amanda Means, throughout the years. Thus far the ashes have been spread throughout the world at Westminster Abbey, the Mayan Temple of Chichén Itzá in Mexico, Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, and at the prehistoric Great Serpent Mound in Ohio. The latter was performed by one of Coplans’ gallerists, Michael Solway.

In life, he rather relished it, but the letter, like his photographs, is as much as anything about the absurdity of pompous self-regard. A different kind of dignity was more his style.

John Coplans was born June 20, 1920 in London and died on August 21, 2003 in New York.

Amanda Hopkinson is a British scholar, writer, and literary translator. She is currently Visiting Professor in Literary Translation at City, University of London.

The original of this text was first published by the Guardian newspaper (UK) on Sept. 4, 2003.