William Nelson Copley

(New York 1919–1996 Key West/ Florida)
A Man Had Ought to Consider His Mates in The Way He Goes and Dies (from “The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill”), 1967, signed and dated cply 67, titled on the reverse, acrylic on canvas, 115 x 147 cm, framed
The work is registered in the William N. Copley Estate, New York
We thank Anthony Atlas, William N. Copley Estate, New York for his scientific assistance in cataloguing this work.

Provenance:
Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, May 3, 1995, lot 330
Private Collection, Germany (acquired at the above sale)

The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill, by Robert W. Service (1907):

Ice, white ice, like a winding-sheet, sheathing each smoke-grimed wall;
Ice on the stove-pipe, ice on the bed, ice gleaming over all;
Sparkling ice on the dead man’s chest, glittering ice in his hair,
Ice on his fingers, ice in his heart, ice in his glassy stare;
Hard as a log and trussed like a frog, with his arms and legs outspread.
I gazed at the coffin I’d brought for him, and I gazed at the gruesome dead,
And at last I spoke: “Bill liked his joke; but still, goldarn his eyes,
A man had ought to consider his mates in the way he goes and dies.”

The American William “Bill” Nelson Copley is, in every sense, an exceptional artist. His trajectory, from adopted son of an industrial magnate and newspaper publisher, through his period as a gallerist representing leading Surrealists such as René Magritte and Max Ernst, to his decision in 1947 to become a painter himself, is decidedly unorthodox.

By the mid-1960s, in New York, he arrived at his distinctive style: a narrative pictorial language characterised by rounded, curvilinear forms, a contouring reminiscent of comic-strip drawing, and bold, saturated colours. The vocabulary of Copley’s visual language is simple and imbued with a subversively banal directness—sexy and playful, yet above all entirely devoid of moralism in its mode of representation. Increasingly, Copley draws upon set pieces from everyday American life, evoking cowboys and pin-up girls, erotic fantasies, and translating these into abstracted figures through which he constructs a highly individual pictorial world of exuberant colour.

With a certain cynicism, the artist engages with the erotic conventions of gender in all their facets. His works challenge the collective ethos, bourgeois propriety, and the conventions of high art. Copley brings the comic into close proximity with the idiom of the comic strip, staging erotic desire with a playful wit rarely matched before him. Throughout his life, he remained committed both to his idiosyncratic subject matter and to a deliberately orchestrated artlessness. A review of an exhibition in 1967 aptly described the artist as “Vuillard à la Wild West”
(Washington Post, 4 April 1967; quoted in: exh. cat. William N. Copley, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2016, p. 144).