Collection: John Coplans

John Coplans (1920–2003) was a British-born American critic, curator and artist whose writing and institutional work were central to the formation of West Coast American art in the 1960s. As a founding editor of Artforum from 1962 and later its editor-in-chief, he shaped the critical language through which Los Angeles and California art was identified, debated and exported. His essays on artists including Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, Craig Kauffman and others associated with Finish Fetish and Light and Space were among the earliest sustained critical accounts of those practices. Coplans later became director of the Akron Art Museum and subsequently developed a photographic practice of his own, producing large-scale self-portraits of his ageing body that received significant international recognition from the 1980s onwards.