John Coplans

John Coplans (1920–2003) was a British-born painter, critic, curator, editor and photographer whose career moved between Europe and the United States. He first emerged as an abstract painter in post-war Britain before becoming an influential figure in American art criticism and museum culture, and later achieved international recognition for a body of photographic self-portraits begun in the 1980s.

Born in London and brought up partly in South Africa, Coplans served in the British Army during the Second World War, seeing active service in East Africa, India and Burma. After the war he studied art and worked as a painter in London, becoming associated with the development of post-war abstraction.

Coplans had an early connection with The Redfern Gallery and was included in its important 1957 exhibition Metavisual, Tachiste, Abstract: Painting in England Today. His Painting I of 1956 was shown there, placing him among a generation of artists exploring new forms of gestural and non-figurative painting in Britain. The work returned to the gallery in 2007 for the fiftieth-anniversary exhibition revisiting the original show.

In 1960 Coplans moved to the United States. Two years later he became one of the founding editors of Artforum, which developed into one of the most influential contemporary art magazines of the post-war period. He later served as its editor-in-chief and also held senior curatorial and directorial positions at institutions including the University of California, Irvine, the Pasadena Art Museum and the Akron Art Museum.

Around 1980, at the age of sixty, Coplans returned fully to making art and increasingly concentrated on photography. From 1984 onwards he produced the series of black-and-white Self Portraits for which he became best known, using his own ageing body as his sole subject. He deliberately excluded his face, photographing isolated sections of the body at close range and often at monumental scale. The resulting images move between figuration and abstraction, turning hands, feet, backs and torsos into unfamiliar forms.

Coplans exhibited widely in Europe and the United States. Major presentations of his photographic work were held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1988, followed by exhibitions at institutions including the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam.

His work is held in major public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Galleries of Scotland.