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Impure Pleasures
John Haberin New York City
William Copley and Francesco Clemente
John Wesley, Ivy Haldeman, and Images of Women
On his first year back in New York, William Copley called a work SMILE. He placed the title, in bright orange splotched with red and in full caps, over a naked woman and a man in a staid suit. Smile all you like, even if he cuts off their heads and reduces the man's hands to stumps or light bulbs.
Smile all you like, too, at the takedown of sex as a commodity. Copley already offers both encouragement and a warning, with "DONT WALK" over a woman's lace bottoms, as Dig We Must. The title alludes to the slogan for Con Ed back then, digging up the streets, but Pop Art and a new pop culture was just starting to "dig it," too. Did he mean to shock, or was it all in fun—and just much fun is art allowed to have? 
Francesco Clemente is more blatantly sexist, but also more tender. And with John Wesley, the adolescent male gaze again tries to grow up, while Ivy Haldeman brings a welcome female corrective.
The adolescent gaze grows up
More than fifty years ago, Modernism ruled, and William Copley came to New York in the best modern way—from twelve years in Paris. A lot had changed, though, since Gertrude Stein, Stuart Davis, and Ernest Hemingway on the Left Bank. Now New York was the place to be, and Copley set up shop at the heart of the action, on lower Broadway. Andy Warhol, Christo, and Roy Lichtenstein dropped by, to name just a few, and Marcel Duchamp became a mentor. What, then, has left Copley all but marginalized to this day? He would not have had it any other way.
The New York native returned home in 1963, after a pit stop in LA, and the next twenty years saw a sustained assault on modern art. Was Copley a part of that, or did he stand apart even then? He never shied away from knocking on doors—including that of Man Ray, who introduced him to Duchamp. He started an influential set of artist portfolios, SMS (for "you know what must stop"), which published Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, John Cage, Bruce Nauman, Neil Jenney, and Yoko Ono, all of whom became friends. Notice something, though. The names do not include the abstract artists who put the city on the map of the art world, and Copley never once looked back.
Or rather he did look back, but with a sharp and evil eye. A nude from 1986 looks back to women from Titian to Henri Matisse, but there is no mistaking her identity. This Is Death of the Unknown Whore, and the sofa is her bier. Copley's bright colors echo Henri Matisse, too, but never larger than life. Care to dismiss this as porn? He staged an entire show at the New York Cultural Center in 1970 as "CPLY [pronounced see-ply] X-Rated."
His cartoonish drawing, with black outlines and blank faces, may place him with Pop Art. It, too, laughed both at and with commodity culture. Others have seen Copley, born in 1919, as the missing link between that movement and Surrealism. Copley, though, is not buying. He went so far as to apologize for ever falling into satire. He was, he liked to say, indulging in pure pleasure.
Well, make that impure pleasure, for nothing in his art is pure and simple. The battle of the sexes extends to a sword fight, but with both handles sharing the same blade. It includes solo objects of pleasure, like a trombone, and more and more elaborate brothel scenes, in high Edwardian style. He has come a long way from Pablo Picasso and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, but is it a taste of the future or a retreat into the past? When asked, Copley pleaded for whores, too, with pleasures of their own. Was he sticking up for a woman's agency—or, if you ask me, just another male taking pleasure in their exploitation?
The question will not go away, but it makes him newly pertinent, long after his death in 1996. The show sticks to those twenty years in New York, before he sought the quiet of Connecticut and then the warmth of Key West, but it has the weight of a retrospective. And its culture wars, like the look of folk art or a graphic novel, anticipate art now. He regretted never approaching Francis Picabia, whose sheer tackiness looks to the present as well. When Copley overlays a crucifixion out of Salvador Dalí with fruit, is he playing the victim, pelting a dying god, or just mixing apples and oranges? Like the whore in a title of his, he was a "professional"—a professional provocateur.
In hot pursuit
Francesco Clemente was anything but modest when he titled a series A Story Well Told, but forgive him. In watercolor, he is a gifted storyteller. If you still cannot make head or tail of the story, you can forgive that as well. Neither can his characters. Now in his mid-sixties, he, too, is still finding his way. Even when he numbers the sheets, he can hardly remember what came first and what comes next.
The twenty-one sheets in that single series, from 2013, are the smallest of his watercolors, but collectively the fullest. He seems unable to give it up, no more than Apollo can give up his pursuit of Daphne, a water nymph. She, in turn, will not give up her chastity, even at the cost of her existence as a woman. Clemente depicts the moment at which a god answers her pleas by turning her into a tree—starting not with her roots but her head. Apollo still reaches for her, clings to her, holds her upside-down, and shakes her, as if somehow the leaves and branches would fall away. In the end, or so the myth goes, he grants her immortality, and so a laurel of bay leaves will never wither and die.
Is his obsession the ultimate in sexual harassment or an act of love—and is her transformation a woman's dehumanization or salvation? Apollo does not look all that masculine, apart from his erect penis, and by the end her flesh has become a demonic red. They exist in the artist's usual vague but shallow space, childlike drawing, and soft yellow, pink, and green, tempering a male's hot pursuit. Clemente was always the most whimsical of Neo-Expressionists, even as other Italians, like Sandro Chia, were more whimsical than Germans like Anselm Kiefer. Georg Baselitz in Germany makes his figures standing on their heads more an existential torment than a circus act. Clemente all but begs for approval, like in their way Apollo and Daphne.
Neo-Expressionism was out to preserve the glories of modern art, even as it finished off abstraction. The show opens with two larger sheets from the 1990s, when Clemente returned to figuration after his own detour through conceptualism and irony. A woman in heavy makeup hardly knows what to do, and a chain entraps no one. Otherwise it sticks to the last decade, as he dedicates himself at last to stories without an ending. He is as much a child's entertainer as ever, with a fist casting a rabbit's shadow. In other Shadow doublings, of banners and stars, one can hardly tell the magic trick from the magician.
He shares the gallery with more works on paper, Waterfalls by Pat Steir, most from the 1990s. She, too, was engaging Abstract Expressionism in imagery. She also took the past more seriously, so that the drips of Jackson Pollock or the pourings of Helen Frankenthaler became water. (I would say more, but I looked more carefully in 2005, updated more than a little after today.) When I speak of Clemente's whimsy, I do not mean it as a compliment. Still, he takes as his subject human frailty and affection, and he finds them inseparable, if also largely male. In Friends, a figure dives off the foot of another and into the dark night surrounding a radiant sun.
In Notturno Indiano, a man holds on his knee a younger or at least smaller figure. The series takes its title from an Italian novelist, and the rest of us may have no clue what they are doing, but there is no mistaking the affection. And Clemente, who has lived in India as well as Italy and New York, has his South Asian nocturnes, too. The latest shadow drawings, from 2017, incorporate Indian miniatures, packed with aristocrats or gods. They could be his dreams, while the foreground is his arena for play. He must accept this late in the story, like Apollo, that he will never get all his wishes while hoping that the story will never end.
Post Pop
I would never call John Wesley a Pop Artist, but what could be a more natural mistake? Born in 1928, he came of age when Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Lichtenstein were still taking chances. To his own pleasure and amusement, he also gained attention for just that. He never matched their sales and attention, not by a long shot, but never mind that either. In art fashion, if not in the museum, he has outlasted them. Few have a greater knack for standing out and fitting right in.
His flattened nudes may suggest a comic strip or print ad, just as in Pop Art. So do their red lipstick and nipples, bright but nondescript backgrounds, and way of getting in your face. Wesley sets them close up, so that it is never quite clear just what they are doing together. Still, he never does find them or his technique in pop culture and found media. He might have drawn them from his own or a collective imagination. When two nudes share a panel, they may not even belong to a single sex act or a shared space.
That can be more off-putting than intriguing, but it has kept him relevant. If his eroticism is cryptic or degrading, it could find a new audience schooled by Eric Fischl and David Salle in the 1980s. Now it can claim the interest of feminism and manga alike—from a gallery that has already boasted of "Pop Abstraction." It may also reflect his maturity and his life. His latest women are as stereotyped, youthful, and self-contained as ever, give or take what appear to be horns rising from one's public hair. Men, though, are degraded or at sea, and more than a few are losing hair or worse.
So, I suppose, am I, which may have for once tempted me to respond with admiration. Are the paintings shocking or complacent? The question enlivens Pop Art, and it returns with a younger artist as well. She also updates Wesley's technique for the translucency of photography, devices, and memory. Ivy Haldeman has a cast like his, of women close the picture plane. They seem to be enjoying themselves at that, even when the composition cuts off a body part of the coherence of the rest.
So, though, do the men, except for one thing: they appear neither naked nor clothed but rather as bathrobes. Haldeman pairs them, too, in ritual, a relationship, or a dance. Either way, they are as the show puts it, "The Interesting Type." They might have quipped, with Groucho Marx in Monkey Business, "I am going back in the closet where the men are empty overcoats." At a time of LGBTQ issues and art, objects from the closet could well mean something.
It changes things, though, that her paint enlivens the dance. She doubles each shade as its shadow, in broad areas of gray, pink, or yellow. It also makes more present but elusive a figure's movements. A single hand may spread its fingers, in an act of both anonymity and self-control, but the colors seem to have a mind of their own. The press release quotes French theory on the force of money and a business update for Heinz Real Mayonnaise. Could painting, too, turn on deep words and shallow pleasures?
William Copley ran at Paul Kasmin through August 28, 2020, Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy through October 1. John Wesley ran at Fredericks & Freiser through October 20, 2018, Ivy Haldeman at Downs & Ross through October 21.