Sum of his parts: John Coplans (1920-2003).

To readers under a certain age (say, thirty-five), the name John Coplans probably conjures pictures of a hairy, schlumpy, climacteric bag of flesh. Turning his body into a living landscape tableau, Coplans became an internationally successful photographer over the last two decades by focusing his lens on this intensely personal yet oddly alien terra incognita.

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Photography was in fact the third full career Coplans, who died last August at age eighty-three, enjoyed. In his lifetime, the British-born, South African--raised figure never followed the straight trajectory. If it is rare to find an individual who flourishes in a new milieu when most are tidying up the achievements of a lifelong pursuit, "lateness" is hardly a conceit foreign to Coplans's biography. Indeed, his record is inflected both by the notion of belatedness and by its antonymic partner, prescience. As a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum in the mid-'60s, Coplans was among the earliest champions of Pop art and a vociferously sympathetic critic of the work of Roy Lichtenstein and especially Andy Warhol. (He organized a survey of Pop as early as 1963 and later was responsible for retrospectives of Lichtenstein and Warhol as well as the 1968 "Serial Imagery" exhibition.) But despite his reputation as a curator ahead of the curve, Coplans largely abandoned museum work until 1978, when he became director of the Akron Art Museum.

Coplans's early museum years are less remembered today than his career as a critic and his long affiliation with Artforum. He was there at the founding of the magazine, in San Francisco in 1962; he followed it, or it him, for sixteen years, down to Los Angeles, then, in 1967, to New York. With the departure in 1971 of Philip Leider, he became editor in chief, presiding over the tumultuous years that saw the core editorial group break apart into a handful of factions. Coplans's reign at Artforum, coming after the magazine's halcyon late-'60s run, entered lore long ago as a time of editorial catholicity, with the publication embracing any number of (at times) incongruous critical positions and approaches. But in doing so it mirrored a moment of expanding media, practices, and modes of engagement within contemporary art. Too often the strengths of the Artforum Coplans oversaw as editor are overlooked and undervalued.

To try and take the measure of John Coplans's multifaceted careers and personality, Artforum invited six people who knew him to offer their appreciations of the man and his work.

Irving Blum

Throughout our relationship, Coplans had a bulletproof bullshit detector. He was astonishingly direct about every issue. Not only that, but he could give voice to his feelings, which is rare. If he saw something he didn't like, he not only told you he didn't like it but rationally explained why. John also had an amazing clarity. I remember when I had the Warhol Soup Can show at Ferus in 1962. It was greeted mostly with either indifference or outright hostility, but John came in and spent a bit of time with the paintings. I could see that he was involved with the work, and so I left him standing there, looking. After a while--after quite a long time, as I recall--he walked back to see me in my office and blandly said, "You're going to buy all these, aren't you?" It was an idea I was entertaining but hadn't really articulated. So I said, "Well, I'm going to try and keep them together." And I called Andy, who said they were conceived as a series and he'd love for me to keep them together. Nobody other than Coplans saw that. Nobody else came even close to seeing that.

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After that, we became very friendly. I was enormously grateful to him for corroborating the little bit of activity that I was engaged in at Ferus. And I did everything I possibly could to persuade Artforum to relocate to LA from San Francisco: There was no criticism in the city until Artforum came down. The artists recognized this immediately. John would have the most extended and lively, fascinating dialogues with Jim Turrell, with Larry Bell, with Bob Irwin. He was able to give voice to what they were doing in ways that often astounded the community of artists in LA. Having seen the Soup Cans, for example, he made one connection after another and very soon hit on the idea of seriality, about which he organized a show at the Pasadena Art Museum. That was a very big idea that hadn't been explored until John laid it out. But because he always spoke his mind, artists adored him on the one hand and were leery of him on the other. It was not love-hate but love, because of his clarity, coupled with a kind of hesitation.

John was often misunderstood, though. The saddest example involved the opening of the Pasadena Art Museum. John was curator there, and the person with the biggest influence was a trustee, Robert Rowan, who had asked Alan Solomon, then teaching at UC Irvine, to do a show about American painting. Alan agreed and they signed a contract. As he spent more time in California and got to know a number of the artists, however, Alan felt it was too unwieldy--he couldn't include friends he'd made out here. So he went to Rowan three months before the opening and said, "I cannot do an American painting show. It's got to be a New York painting show. We have to change the title to New York painting." Which is what they decided to do, until John said to Rowan, "It's impossible to open a museum here in California and do only New York painting. I will do a parallel California painting show."

Now, Alan had all the money. Alan had the expensive catalogue. Alan had the lion's share of the space--and so the West Coast people never looked more provincial. And they blamed John Coplans. They were incredibly critical of John, so much so that I think he was forced to leave the state. They never bothered to find out why there was a secondary California show or why it looked the way it did. They crucified John for having done it, when it was John who had felt that there had to be West Coast representation.

But the guy was chameleonlike. He had the ability to change careers. I think he started out as a contractor, refitting houses in England before trying his hand at sculpture and then painting--he made these geometric relief paintings. Then he turned to criticism, then curating, and then finally became a rather celebrated photographer, totally focused on his own activity, totally committed to photography. And not so many leave as important a legacy in photography as John has left. He found his niche and exploited it and drove it home. He was dogged. Not only bright but dogged and, in the end, terribly successful. The guy was a force. The world is somehow less engaging without his presence.

Max Kozloff

A few of us addressed him as "Bwana Devil," as a joke about his colonial past and because he was our boss. Underneath a certain bluster, John let slip an impression of being unsure about his standing with his writers. An editor cannot always be sincere, but they dissed him because he did grubby things in order to keep a financially troubled Artforum alive. To the black troops he commanded during World War II as a British officer in Burma, he claimed he spoke Swahili. With me, he took delight in being politically incorrect, sexist, mainly. Cantankerous, jocular, resourceful, impulsive, he loved to provoke those who he thought were either puritanical or misbehaved more than he did. They included people who abused their high positions in the art world, and everyone else with whom he differed. Though John insisted on professionalism and was always businesslike, his pose as an enfant terrible was maybe not a pose.

But he knew pathos, and it was illumined by a chilling story he told me, a tale about his memory of a face. In Central Park, he had hoped to photograph exhausted marathon runners as they crossed the finish line. When police barred his access to it, he took a picture, for no conscious reason, of an elderly man on a bench, a doleful, tweedy person with a walrus mustache. Sleepless that night, John developed the negative, printed the picture, and, at the sight of one who looked like a ghost from his past, began to weep.

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The scene changes: 1945, a military hospital in India. An icy water bath supplied by Indian troops revives him from near death by dehydration. (The rivers in the jungle at the front had been off-limits because polluted by dead bodies.) Now, as he recalled, he wanders the sun-shocked camp, energized by the recovery of some prohibited whiskey. He comes upon an old, done-in man, a brigadier with a large mustache, and offers him a swig. As they drink, news of Hiroshima is announced over the loudspeaker. It signals the end of the war and reports the incineration of over a hundred thousand human beings. The two men collapse together, beyond rank, in wet, uncontrolled lament.

To a man with this experience, what would the pickle at Artforum have amounted to? Quite a lot, as it turned out. It was not only the insolvent state of the magazine but also the suffocating pinch of its formalism with which he had to contend. At that point, he was a wide roamer, impatient with obstacles, and hair-triggered against authorities. His origin as a South African Jew must certainly have contributed to this itchiness. In contrast to his exhausted predecessor, Philip Leider, he was undereducated and less focused, but much more cosmopolitan in background and closer to art. On the job, he was naturally riled by highfalutin language--"bullshitism," he called it. Armed with such phobias, he encouraged writers who gave him an alternative, and he opened himself to the divergence of their interests. So it was that Artforum engaged with--to an extent even spearheaded--the issues of the early '70s.

If you want to read early feminist art writing, attacks on institutional conflicts of interest, discussions of folk and tribal arts, anticipations of postmodernism, political critiques of contemporary and historical aesthetics, as well as attention to the problems of photography, you will find them in the articles John commissioned. Leider saw this policy coming--he considered it the ruin of the magazine and was glad of it. On the contrary, during John's tenure, Artforum did what it should. Its sustained investigation of new themes, often while under attack by entrenched interests, jolted the art world like a shot of 80 proof.

As recently as a few years ago, many of the speakers recorded in Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, Amy Newman's oral history of the magazine, thought that its evangelist spirit of the '60s was a moment of triumph, whereas in reality it was a retrograde episode and a dead end for criticism. John couldn't be bothered by the orthodoxies of formalism, even those to which he had once subscribed. Without knowing it, he spoke to the future.

When he crossed the finish line a few months ago, at age eighty-three, this man of several phases had more than an editorial stint to be proud of. In his time, he'd been an aviator, an architectural restorer, a teacher, a museum director, a collector. As a writer, he sparkled most when he studied Weegee, who was perhaps more a model for him than just a colorful character. But to reinvent yourself as an artist in your sixties, with photographs that expose your wornout body, and then go on to international success--we don't know of anyone who did this. John Coplans lived on the edge, where he suffered pain as well as delivered it. I can almost fancy Bwana Devil toasting to the improbable fortunes of war, with that other old soldier, in the nether place.

New York--based critic Max Kozloff served in numerous editorial capacities at Artforum from 1964 to 1975.

Angela Westwater

I met John Coplans in 1970, some two years before I started working for him as managing editor of Artforum. My informal education about contemporary art and the current New York scene began then and accelerated with professional urgency during my three years at the magazine. This heady, highly productive time of artmaking was a formative period for me, and I could not have imagined a better mentor than John.

He was smart and incredibly well read, so he became a major resource for information, whether biographical, bibliographical, historical, or even culinary (John prided himself on his good cooking and hospitality). His intellectual commitment was fueled by his relationships with other artists, and this proved infectious (to me). He generously included me in his social circle, and in some cases his friends became mine--notably Bob Smithson, whose original, brilliant thinking contributed so much to Artforum's pages. Both men were feisty, tenacious, and irreverent, so arguments and debates went late into the night either at Max's Kansas City or at John's Seventy-ninth Street apartment over dinner. In retrospect, I wonder how I ever got to my desk on time.

John's passion and fast pace energized me; at the same time these attributes made for a highly charged atmosphere at the office--then a small, dingy suite of rooms on Madison Avenue occupied by a staff of five. He ran Artforum with an authority that occasionally resonated like the military. Given the other strong personalities on the editorial board (some with a doctrinaire stance), the rifts and denunciations that resulted may have been inevitable. Lynda Benglis's provocative dildo ad in the November '74 issue was the climax of the drama and led to the ultimate schism (the departure of several longtime editors), which signaled an end to the hermetic, purist position the magazine had occupied. In the process of opening up Artforum, John had encouraged writing about art outside the prevailing canon and always welcomed my suggestions. We were pleased to publish articles about artists hitherto neglected, such as Louise Bourgeois and the Bechers, and to devote greater attention to performance, dance, photography, and music. Those lessons I learned from John left me with valuable tools for the future--and any number of wonderful memories.

Managing editor of Artforum from 1972 to 1975, Angela Westwater is a partner in Sperone Westwater gallery in New York.

Mel Bochner

By the time John Coplans took over Artforum magazine in 1971, I had stopped writing, but he wheedled, cajoled, and finally lured me back with the offer to review Lucy Lippard's Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. Coplans was a demanding editor, going over the review word by word. We argued every point from both sides, searching for flaws in the logic, relentlessly forcing every issue to its inevitable conclusion. The editing session was contentious and abrasive but in the end helped to expand the piece from a book review into a critique of the politics of dematerialization.

My second article for Coplans began with a telephone call protesting the magazine's dismissive coverage of the great 1973 Malevich retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Coplans's response, typically, was to turn the tables. He offered me a chance to "speak my mind" on the subject through an interview with him. I should have anticipated, after my previous experience, that being interviewed by Coplans would be like being cross-examined by a prosecuting attorney. As the interview progressed, it became clear that what we were really debating was whether, after Conceptualism, anything new could be recuperated from the modernist tradition. Thirty years later, that question is still being debated.

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As an editor, Coplans has been underestimated, both because of the long shadow of his predecessor, Philip Leider, and because of his special talent for making enemies. But, in fact, he was the one who ended the reign of formalism at Artforum and opened the pages for the first time to photography, film, and politics. Coplans was critical, provocative, and not tied to any ideology. More important, he liked art. When you think about it, those are exactly the qualities you want from an art magazine.

Mel Bochner is a New York--based artist.

Peter Plagens

Peter, the jejune and sensitive wuss of an introspective painter. John, the hardened, battle-scarred colonel of the war over whether Minimalism would hold the ground it had won from Pop (which had previously blown up Abstract Expressionism) or lose it to the molten-lead throwers and grainy-video makers trying to storm the fort. That's the way it felt back then--say, the late '60s through the '70s--and that's the way it still feels. Even during the last few years of John's life--when, in spite of his sought-after-by-museums-everywhere status as a photographer, he was fighting (at least in conversation) a fatiguing rear-guard action against an art world that had become a smart-ass fashion scene, and I was bopping all over the place as art critic for Newsweek--he seemed to me still the insider, me the outsider.

Not that John ever did anything to discourage that perception. Au contraire, he reveled loudly in the idea that art--that is, modern art, contemporary art--is a battleground. The best artists are those who win the battles, whose work seizes from defeated artists first the edgiest gallery spaces, then the opinions of the headiest critics, and finally museum shows and catalogues. When I'd encounter John in his curatorial lair at the Pasadena Art Museum or at the contentious old Madison Avenue offices of Artforum or during a boisterous dinner party at his Cedar Street loft, it was as if Clement Greenberg had donned the helmet of General Patton. I demurred ... somewhat. If the battle was everything, I used to argue, what did it matter whether the struggle was over cars, Hollywood movies, or the exhibition program at the Museum of Modern Art? Didn't the fact that art is art--expressive, beautiful, peaceful instead of merely strategic, mighty, and martial--change anything? What about, I asked him once, the painter who simply stays in his studio, makes the best paintings he can, and derives satisfaction from just that? "Kienholz goes out in his pickup truck at night," he said, "to find them and run them down."

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In the end, of course, John was right. History is written by victors. While today's trendoid Chelsea gallery flashes and biennial-in-Bratislava agents provocateurs aren't guaranteed slots in the pantheon (i.e., MIT monographs or $750,000 reserves at the fall auctions), no artist who hasn't been either one of those things is going to get a shot. How could it be otherwise, unless curators are telepathic and can see through studio walls? As a friend of mine used to say, "There are no Great American Novels lying around in dresser drawers."

Those are pretty depressing thoughts. Eventually, they probably depressed even John. And therein lies the reason, I think, for his ultimately returning to being an artist. Sure, to his last breath he got out there and elbowed, as Barnett Newman put it. But in the end, his main satisfaction came from staying in his studio, making the best photographs he could, and deriving satisfaction from just that. This unreconstructed wuss salutes you, John.

A contributing editor of Artforum and the magazine's associate editor from 1974 to 1976, Peter Plagens is art critic for Newsweek.

Susan Kismaric

John Coplans chose to devote his intense energy to photography later in life, when he was sixty. Because he was a decisive man, his late start may have helped him focus on his subject quickly. The first portraits he made (mostly of friends) were intriguing because of their unblinking clarity, but it wasn't until he discovered the possibilities available from making pictures of his own body that he found his true subject. It was a brilliant choice that offered him an infinite number of opportunities. His images drew not only on his vast knowledge of the history of photography but on painting and sculpture as well--everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics, ancient Greek friezes, and the classical nude to the blunt photographs of Weegee--plus his full awareness of contemporary abstraction and performance art. The fact that John's subject was an aged man's naked body (unsparingly described) wasn't to everyone's taste, but that didn't stop him or deflect the appreciation of people who were moved by the work. Made over the course of almost twenty-five years, the photographs reflect many aspects of his personality, especially his wit and humor, but equally apparent are the tenacity, intelligence, and passion with which he pursued and realized his ideas. Shockingly, no one had ever made such pictures.

True to John's character, the photographs are original and challenging, a provocation to conventional thinking, and, again, unblinking and relentless. On a grander scale, the work became a metaphor--John's body became a metaphor--for a fully lived life. The endless permutations of his flesh, its folds, creases, hair, wounds, sagging postures and parts, became, in full-scale photos, larger than life--as John himself was.

Susan Kismaric is curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Art dealer and collector Irving Blum was formerly a partner in Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, and in Blum Helman Gallery, New York.

RELATED ARTICLE

During John's tenure, Artforum did what it should. Its sustained investigation of new themes, often while under attack by entrenched interests, jolted the art world like a shot of 80 proof.--MK

RELATED ARTICLE

Coplans was a demanding editor, going over the review word by word. The session was contentious and abrasive but in the end helped to expand my piece from a book review into a critique of the politics of dematerialization.--MB