in 1967. He was an integral part of the group
around the now-legendary Ferus Gallery that
introduced the emerging group of Los Angeles-
based artists including Ed Ruscha. He also taught
at the California College of Arts and Crafts and
the Chouinard Art Institute, and he wrote for
numerous art journals. In his role as a curator, he
organized the first museum exhibitions of work by
Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Judy Chicago,
and Andy Warhol. His book on this latter figure
is a classic of contemporary art scholarship. He
also published monographs on contemporary
artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd,
and Roy Lichtenstein.
In 1971, Coplans took up the mantle of Editor-in
Chief at the magazine he’d founded, Artforum,
which had relocated to New York City. Working
at the publication during what might be termed its
Postminimalist phase, he published seminal essays
by critics and scholars including Rosalind Krauss,
Max Kozloff, and Annette Michelson. Dismissal
from the magazine in 1976 led Coplans to a posi-
tion in the Midwest as director of the Akron Art
Institute, Ohio, an appointment he held from 1977
to 1979. While he mounted a variety of exhibitions
featuring the work of major contemporary artists,
in an attempt to appeal to the region’s working
class audience, Coplans exhibited forms not
thought of at that time as suitable material for
exhibition in art museums, including Amish quilts
and antique jukeboxes.
As he had done in California, Coplans saw the
need to establish a forum for artists, curators, and
art critics in the Midwest to discuss and promote
their work and exhibitions, particularly the work of
regional artists. He founded the Midwest arts
magazine,Dialogue, with the help of artist Don
Harvey, who was gallery director at the University
of Akron. Coplans asked museums, arts centers,
and universities with galleries to publish essays
and reviews of their exhibitions indialogue.The
publication gave curators an opportunity to write
about regional artists who were not covered by
major east- and west-coast publications.
Coplans’ interest in photography expanded in the
1970s. Earlier in his career, he had rediscovered the
work of nineteenth-century landscape photographer
Carleton Watkins, becoming an avid collector and
promoter of his work. Coplans’ continuing interest
in photography led him to organize several exhibi-
tions in addition to teaching himself about the tech-
nical aspects of the medium with some assistance
from his friend Lee Friedlander. He organized the
first American exhibitions of John Heartfield’s
photomontages and of sculptor Constantin Brancu-
si’s photographs, and organized a retrospective of
Weegee’s photography for the International Center
of Photography, New York in 1978. Coplans jet-
tisoned his writing and curatorial career to exclu-
sively pursue the art of photography. His last
critical essay about the work of Philip Guston was
published in 1980.
By the early 1980s, Coplans had turned to the
subject for which he is best known: his own body.
With the help of an assistant, Coplans creates com-
positions featuring large-scale, close-in shots—of
his hands, fingers, and feet, back, and so on (but
never his head)—that set such formal properties
as line, surface, texture, and shape front and cen-
ter. These qualities can be seen in an early work
entitledSelf-Portrait (Feet, Frontal), 1984, from
his first group of photographs published under
the titleA Body of Workin 1987. Coplans would
further explore the formal qualities of the human
figure, and he often revealed the body’s abstract
qualities as well as the sheer mass and weight of the
figure as seen inSelf-Portrait (Torso Front), both
from 1984.
Coplans, however, transcends the mere formal
investigation of the human form in his photo-
graphs. He presents his body as a subject that is
timeless, simultaneously subverting the Western art
tradition of the nude as the embodiment of beauty
and youth. Coplans’Self-Portrait (Frieze No. 4,
Three Panels), 1994, includes nine separate photo-
graphs that present an overview of his body from
shoulder to knee, in three different angles, right
side, back side, left side. Coplans presents his own
physical topography in an attempt to reveal
humankind in its most primal sense. He noted:
I got the idea that my body was everybody’s body. Like
my genes were the genes of the whole human race,
shared with them.... My photographs became raceless
and timeless and about the whole of human beings. It’s
not (just) about the exterior. It’s also about the genetic
past of mankind and what we share together.
The images also pose critical questions about
social reactions to age, and Coplans commented:
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
energizing myself by my belief that the classical tradition
of art that we’ve inherited from the Greeks is a load of
bullshit.
After a career as a writer, curator, and editor,
Coplans, in later life, evolved into photography and
focused on the commonality of the human form,COPLANS, JOHN