Inspired by the connections between European Surrealism and American Pop art, William N. Copley (PA 1938), also known as CPLY (pronounced “see ply”), is best known as a painter but was also a writer, publisher, collector, and gallerist. The adopted son of a newspaper magnate, Copley attended Phillips Academy and Yale University before being drafted into the U.S. Army. After completing his military service in 1945, Copley worked as a reporter for his father’s newspaper in Los Angeles. In the late 1940s, he turned his attention to art and began dealing in Surrealist and Dada work. In 1947 he cofounded a gallery in Beverly Hills, which exhibited works by Joseph Cornell (PA 1921), Max Ernst, and René Magritte, among others. During this period, he befriended expatriate artists Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. The gallery lasted only a few months, and after it closed, Copley, with the encouragement of his artist friends, embarked on a career as a painter. In 1949, when Man Ray returned to Paris, Copley moved there, too, and continued to paint in Surrealist circles. He stayed in the French capital for nearly thirteen years before returning to the United States, settling in New York in 1961. By the early 1970s, he had established his signature style of narrative painting infused with eroticism, symbolism, social satire, and political humor.
Copley began to produce bitingly satirical flag works in the early 1960s in response to the increasingly nationalistic Cold War-era geopolitical climate. First executed as paintings, his flag designs were fabricated as functional flags in 1962–1967 and were later reproduced on a larger scale for documenta 5 in 1972. Copley’s flags were first exhibited at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1962 as part of the artist’s solo exhibition, “The Flags (Les États-Unis du Monde).”
