William Copley (artist)

William N. Copley (January 24, 1919 – May 7, 1996) also known as CPLY, was an American painter, writer, gallerist, collector, patron, publisher and art entrepreneur.

[2] Copley was born in New York City in 1919 to parents John and Flora Lodwell; they died shortly after in the 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic.

[9] The two traveled to Mexico and New York, discovering art, meeting the artists behind the works, and grasping Surrealist ideas.

[12] However, Los Angeles had not yet caught on to the Surrealist scene as other locations such as New York City had done, and the Copley Galleries faced hardships in gaining popularity and sales.

[15] Their home in Longpont-sur-Orge in the outskirts of Paris became a central gathering place in the postwar era for a community of Surrealists to reunite after their dispersal during the war.

[22] Copley's paintings throughout the 1950s and 60s dealt with ironic and humorous images of stereotypical American symbols like the Western saloon, cowboys, and pin-up girls combined with flags.

[23] His works during this period were often considered a combination of American and Mexican folk art and melded in well with the new young POP movement occurring in America when he returned to New York in the 1960s.

Artists like Andy Warhol, Christo, Roy Lichtenstein and many others were frequent visitors at Copley's studio on Lower Broadway.

"[25] In 1967, after a divorce with his second wife, Noma, Copley and new friend Dmitri Petrov decided to publish portfolios of 20th-century artist collaborations with the abbreviation SMS (for "Shit Must Stop").

[26] Copley's Upper West Side loft became a meeting place for performers, artists, curators, and composers to work together on the open-ended collective.

The works included came from artists both well-renowned and obscure, including Marcel Duchamp, Roy Lichtenstein, Man Ray, Christo, Richard Hamilton, Claes Oldenburg, John Cage, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, Dick Higgins, Ronnie Landfield, Bruce Nauman, Meret Oppenheim, Neil Jenney, Yoko Ono and others.

[31] In 1992 he moved full-time to Key West, Florida, due to health issues and lived with his sixth and final wife, Cynthia Gooch.