CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/31/2016

William N. Copley

"En Garde" (1962) is reproduced from Fondazione Prada and The Menil Collection's stupendous new William N. Copley exhibition catalog/bible . Beautifully printed on matte paper, copiously illustrated and deeply researched, this book does it all. Menil curator Toby Kamps writes, "The world according to CPLY is an antic, ribald and candy-colored place. Rendered in a panoply of inventive, self-taught representational styles, the paintings, drawings, and other works of William Nelson Copley overflow with outrageous imagery: circus-poster caricature, slapstick humor and a surfeit of female nudes that puts Rubens to shame… A descendant of Hieronymus Bosch, William Hogarth and Otto Dix, he tilted relentlessly at the windmills of morality, nationalism and high-seriousness—all the while creating outlandish allegories of the battle of the sexes. At the heart of his exuberantly playful and puerile projects, either as express or implied subject, is a vaguely autobiographical character that the artist Anne Doran describes as a 'nattily dressed and deeply ridiculous Everyman in mad pursuit of liberty, poetry and sex.'"