Jean-François Chevrier / John Coplans - Un corps

The artistic activity of John Coplans (1920-2003) is part of an existence made up of radical ruptures and profound continuities. After a childhood divided between London and South Africa, he joined the British army at the age of seventeen and fought until the end of the Second World War. In the 1950s, he studied art in Paris and then in London, where he then practiced abstract painting. At the age of forty, John Coplans left for the United States, where he became an art critic, exhibition curator and museum director.

Co-founder in 1962 of the famous magazine Artforum, he played an essential role in the artistic debate of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1980, at the age of sixty, he began a photographic work in which his own body became the only material, and which he continued until his death.

Jean-François Chevrier, who was John Coplans' interlocutor and friend - they met in 1984 -, offers an "artistic biography" in which art is the foundation of a mode of existence and a relationship to the world. This essay, both erudite and non-academic, is accompanied by a booklet of some fifty reproductions, works and documents by Coplans, but also by other artists from whom his work has been inspired. It is followed by a selection of texts by the artist, written between 1965 and 1991, which give a representative overview of his activity as a critic and shed light on his own artistic practice. A bibliography and a chronology complete this unique overview of Coplans' activity.

Text : Jean-François Chevrier
Published by Le Point du Jour

French
14 x 20.5 cm
240 pages
2021