With an unmistakable symbiosis of American Pop Art and European Surrealism, as well as with a mixture of comic art and “naïve” painting, Copley challenged artistic conventions and the audience's viewing habits and attained a singular position in figurative painting with lasting influence on post-war art in the United States and Europe. Copley's career began in the mid-1940s after his ambitious yet unsuccessful gallery for surrealist art in Beverly Hills was forced to close after just twelve months. In the meantime, Copley had not only become a collector of surrealist art, but also a painter. In the early 1950s, he moved to Paris to enlarge his art collection (with, among others, works by Jean Arp, Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Giacometti, Arshile Gorky, Joan Miró, Meret Oppenheim, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters and Dorothea Tanning) and, by the time he returned to the USA, he had already had his first solo shows at renowned galleries in Paris and Italy, including one at Iris Clert.
After he had returned to New York in the mid-1960s, the self-taught artist eventually attained his inimitable style: a narrative pictorial language with round, curved forms, a contour style reminiscent of comic drawings, strong colors, a spatial appeal based on the surface and a lexicon of recurring motifs and mostly faceless, roundish figures that seemed to anticipate Haring's characters - taking a clear stance against contemporary abstract trends of the time. Copley increasingly drew on American myths and ballads that he translated into his own unmistakable artistic language, creating his own dense narrative and opulent visual worlds. A review of his exhibition at the time aptly described Copley as “Vuillard à la Wild West” (Washington Post, April 4, 1967, quoted from: ex. cat. William N. Copley, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2016, p. 144).
In “Father, Dear Father, Come Home With Me Now, the Clock in the Steeple Strikes One”, the artist incorporated the song “Come Home, Father” (1863, also “Poor Benny”) by Henry Clay Work into his painting. The ballad from the American Temperance Movement tells the story of a girl who tries to persuade her drunken father to come home. Although Copley is best known for his frivolous and erotic depictions, the present work reveals a social and socio-critical component which, despite its pleasurable painterly style, is diametrically opposed to the lightness and frivolity typical of his later works.
William N. Copley exhibited in the Kassel documenta in 1972 and 1982, three of his works featured in the legendary "Bad Painting" exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 1978. In recent years the artist's work has been honored in several important solo exhibitions, at, among others, the Museum Frieder Burda in Baden-Baden. Copley's most extensive retrospective to date was held at the Menil Collection in Houston and at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (2016/17), as well as at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Miami (2018/19). [CH]