Hang-Up on Humor

Modest in scale, unpretentious in theme, the paintings at Los Angeles' David Stuart Gallery last week provided a rare moment of comic relief from the outsize banality that too often passes for high seriousness in the contemporary art whirl. There were voluptuous whores and prancing dandies in rollicking Yukon saloons. An old gramophone almost visibly rocked with some long-forgotten tune of the Old West, while near by a row of hilariously curved hoofers cancanned.

The bottom of a corpulent cutie, the label on a bottle of liquor, the barroom floor, all bore the enigmatic letters: CPLY. It is the maddeningly unpronounceable nom de plume of William Nelson Copley, a Manhattan artist-collector-philanthropist who says he slipped the vowels from his name out of deference to John Singleton Copley, the 19th century American painter.

It was a noble stab at identity, though hardly necessary. At 51, Bill Copley is a sophisticated modern whose skittish lines and comic-strip teases have been displayed from Amsterdam to Albuquerque. His hangup, he confesses is humor. "People are shy of humor in painting," he says. "They think it has to be a serious matter. Well, humor is a serious matter. It's the only thing we have between ourselves and pessimism."

A psychiatrist might say his sense of humor evolved out of necessity. Adopted at the age of two by Newspaper Tycoon Ira C. Copley, whose publishing empire included 16 newspapers in Illinois and California, Bill grew up feeling lonely and out of place. "My family believed that all artists are either Communists or homosexuals," he recalls. "Four years at Andover, four years at Yale, four years in the Army it

all left me looking for something revolutionary."

Shady Ladies. Still, he put in a stint as a cub reporter on his father's San Diego Tribune, first took up painting while reading Ulysses "as an exercise for my perception." He decided to open a gallery in Beverly Hills devoted to the then avant-garde Surrealists, but the venture fell through when he made no sale for six months. "Since I guaranteed the artists that I'd sell 10% of their works, I almost had to start a collection," he says. He took off for Paris, where the artists whose works he had bought--Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp--repaid him by giving him pointers in painting. Today Copley's Surrealist collection ranks as the finest in the U.S., takes up much of his spacious Manhattan apartment, where he lives with his China-born wife,' Chuang-Hua, the author of a 1969 novel called Crossings.

Copley's humor often stems from a kind of situation comedy--for instance, the Victorian gentleman all dolled up to meet a shady lady when his rendezvous is suddenly thwarted by a policeman. One of his best series resulted when in 1967 he came across a book by Robert W. Service, whose poetry he had loved as a child. Service's Yukon saloons,^ Canadian Mounties and rootin' tootin' shoot-em-ups meshed perfectly with Copley's scampering W.C. Fields style and his love of Victoriana. The lady is often nude ("Women's bodies are very charming"), the man always clothed ("I don't find nude men charming at all"). Whether waged with sword, six-shooter or mutual stubbornness, the eternal battle of the sexes virtually always ends in a standoff.

Copley's pictures are not intended to be seen as mere gags, of course. His adaptation of the bold black line and super-simple draftsmanship of the early comics predates Pop. Of late, he has developed bright geometric patterns as an effective foil for his figures. Neither as disturbing as the Surrealists nor as incisive as some Pop artists, he yet fills a niche in which form and humor are as indispensable to each other as wit and word in a limerick. "I see painting as poetry," he says. "Humor, after all is the reminder that we are mortal."

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