William N. Copley (1919 in New York – 1996 in Key West, Florida), the self-taught painter who was just as much at home among the Surrealists as he was among Pop Art artists, returned to the USA in the early 1960s after spending 13 years in Paris. His characteristic style had already developed in France, and now, back in his homeland, his visual language began to manifest itself. The theme of the Wild West, which had dominated American cinema in the 1950s, appeared in his paintings.
The ballads of writer Robert W. Service (1874–1958), which had also been made into films, fascinated Copley at this time and became the inspiration for his paintings and titles. It is not surprising, that the first verse of the ballad “The Shooting of Dan McGrew” reads like a description of one of Copley’s works:
„A bunch of the boys were whooping it up in the Malamute saloon; The kid that handles the music-box was hitting a jag-time tune; Back of the bar, in a solo game, sat Dangerous Dan McGrew, And watching his luck was his light-o’-love, the lady that’s known as Lou.“ (Robert W. Service: The Shooting of Dan McGrew, in Songs of a Sourdough, 1907)
At first glance, the scenes in Copley’s paintings appear cheerful, but on a closer look, they reveal underlying conflicts. Copley plays with taboos and social conventions, but without morally criticizing or condemning them. His art always remains a mixture of humor, provocation, and narrative complexity. He scratches the surface without analyzing things in detail, and what he says about surrealism can certainly be understood in a broader sense: „I don’t like to intellectualize it. It’s a very simple thing for me.“ William N. Copley remains a restless wanderer between surrealism and pop art, between provocation and humor — an artist whose life was as wild as his paintings.
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