William Copley X‑Rated Bad Review
There is a particular kind of silence that surrounds the relationship between William Copley and Marcel Duchamp’s final masterpiece, Étant donnés. He saw the work before almost anyone else, in the spring of 1966, in a rented room downtown that Duchamp had set up for the express purpose of showing it once and then dismantling it for shipment to Philadelphia. He pressed his face to the two peepholes in the Spanish door. Duchamp signed the work that year, instructing his wife and Copley that it was to be shown only after his death. Copley described the last visit: «When I came in the next time, the work was packed in a crate. Duchamp said nothing. I think he knew he was ready to die, that this was his last statement.»
He acquired the work through the Cassandra Foundation — his foundation, renamed in that same year, 1966. Cassandra, in Euripides, is not a seer in any comfortable sense. She is the daughter of Priam whose prophecies no one believes because Apollo cursed her when she refused him, who is dragged from the statue of Athena by Ajax during the sack of Troy, and who is handed to Agamemnon as a concubine — a woman whose knowledge is discredited by what has been done to her body. Two men named the legal entity through which a cast of a woman’s body, without her name attached, would pass into a museum for her. The renaming, in that year, was not a coincidence, though what it was instead — irony, recognition, unconscious confession, an inside joke — is not something the documents will say. Copley asked the museum to leave his name off the wall label, and waited for Duchamp to die, which Duchamp did, in Paris, in October 1968, fairly soon thereafter. Six years after pressing his face to the door, Copley started painting copulating couples lifted from porn magazines bought under the counter on 42nd Street, and he set them down on tartan, gingham, plaid, floral wallpaper, the kind of fabric you might find on the couch of a dentist with reasonable taste.
What Étant donnés meant to Copley he stated only once, in a piece for Art in America in 1969, where he reported what Duchamp had told him about how the work was to be experienced — through two peepholes, like eyes in a Halloween mask, no walking around it, no touching it, no admiring it sculpturally, the piece is merely to be experienced — and stopped there.
The thing he was looking at, while he stood at the door, was something Duchamp himself called a Rube Goldberg copulating machine — a contraption assembled from parts that do not belong together, none of them especially efficient at the task, the whole thing held together by string and ingenuity and a small motor in a biscuit tin. The body in the tableau is lying spread-eagled in dry brush, head turned away, legs apart, holding a working gas lamp in the left hand. Behind it: a painted landscape, retouched photographs of a Swiss waterfall Duchamp had taken in 1946 on a trip he made not with the woman whose body he was casting for the figure but with a different mistress entirely. The torso is Maria Martins, a Brazilian sculptor who had been Duchamp’s lover from 1946 to 1951 and who advised him on the casting throughout — Maria had studied bronze casting with Lipchitz, and was, in this technical respect at least, the more experienced of the two. By the 1950s, when Maria had returned to Brazil, Duchamp finished the work using a cast of the arm of his second wife, Teeny. The original 1946 sketch had been called Étant donnés: Maria, la chute d’eau, et le gaz d’éclairage. By 1966 the Maria was gone. According to Francis Naumann, whose account of the affair appeared this spring — three weeks, as it happens, before this exhibition closed — Duchamp showed Martins the finished tableau when she visited New York in the mid-sixties, and inscribed the title in her presence: the title from which her name had been removed, signed while she stood in the room. Behind the clinical assembly of the machine lay an emotional reality she had put into her letters years earlier: «Even long after my death. Long after your death. I want to torture you. I want the thought of me to coil around your body like a serpent of fire. Without burning you.»
What the machine does, when you stand at the door, is decide for you. Duchamp left a thirty-five-page assembly manual called Approximation démontable with 116 Polaroids attached, every component numbered, every angle calibrated; the viewer is one of the components. There is exactly one position in which the tableau resolves into a coherent image, and it is the position your face takes when you press your eye sockets against the holes in the door. Walk around it, as Copley was warned, and you see the back of a brick wall and the unfinished plywood scaffolding behind a diorama. Step away, and you see a door. The viewer at the peepholes is doing the seeing, but the viewer is also being seen — by the next person in line, who will momentarily occupy the same position; the work catches you in the act of looking.
Lacan had a phrase for this structure: the gaze is not what you see, it is the position from which you are seen. He was not theorizing at a distance. In 1955 he and his wife Sylvia had acquired Courbet’s L’Origine du monde — the torso painted in 1866 for the Ottoman diplomat Khalil Bey, who kept it behind a green curtain in his Paris apartment and lifted the curtain for guests he wanted to impress — and Lacan commissioned his brother-in-law André Masson to paint a sliding wooden panel that concealed the Courbet in his country house at Guitrancourt. Guests saw the Masson; Lacan, depending on his mood, slid it open. A hidden body, a covering image, a host who controls the moment of revelation: the structure Duchamp was building in New York was a century old, and its previous owner was writing Seminar XI. The two men dined together in Paris in those years. Whether they discussed their respective doors is undocumented. That they were working on the same door, in different mediums, is harder to dismiss.
What you see, through Duchamp’s version, is the body and the landscape, and here is where things get strange. The body has no face — turned away, deliberately, as if to insist that what matters about it is not above the shoulders. What is below the shoulders is, among other things, an opening. Carlos Jáuregui, writing in 2018, noticed that Duchamp had organized the entire perspective of the tableau so that the figure’s vagina sits at the vanishing point, and the landscape opens through it: a waterfall, a pond, hills, a sky. To look at the landscape, you have to look through the body. There are, Jáuregui pointed out, three apertures in a row — the peepholes in the door, the opening in the body, the landscape behind the body — and the viewer’s gaze passes through all three. The body is not the object of the gaze. The body is the medium through which the gaze reaches the world. He called this a gyneco-scopic regime, which is a heavier phrase than it needs to be for what is actually going on in the room, which is that Duchamp had built a machine in which a woman’s body is the lens.
This architectural manipulation of the gaze was the culmination of a half-century obsession. In 1919, Duchamp bought a cheap postcard of the Mona Lisa and drew a mustache and goatee on her, signing it at the bottom with five letters that, in French pronunciation, form a phrase about her having a hot ass. L.H.O.O.Q. is usually understood as a gesture against museum veneration, and it is, but the operation is more precise than it seems. Leonardo’s woman sits before a landscape — roads, a bridge, distant hills, a world that continues behind her shoulders and before her and after her. Duchamp leaves the landscape untouched and works only with the face: mustache, goatee, inscription. The world is preserved; the figure is humiliated.
In 1965, a year before he showed Étant donnés to Copley, he made L.H.O.O.Q. Shaved — the same postcard, without any changes, exhibited as an independent work under its own name. The face is restored, the landscape is still in place. In Étant donnés, he moves on to a third operation, one that is impossible to perform with a postcard: he constructs a figure for whom the landscape exists but does not belong to her. This is a half-century of systematically subtracting the world from the female figure — first through inscription, then through identity, finally through architecture. Étant donnés is not an anomaly in his body of work. It is the point toward which everything was leading.
The woman whose torso provides the lens was not an anonymous model. By the time Maria Martins met Duchamp in 1943 she had had a solo show at the Corcoran in Washington and exhibited at the Valentine Gallery in New York, including a two-person show with Mondrian in which she sold most of her sculptures and he sold none; André Breton wrote about her in 1947. In 1946, the year he started Étant donnés, Duchamp gave her a copy of his Boîte-en-valise with an extra item slipped inside: a small drawing on celluloid mounted on black satin, titled Paysage fautif. The title means something like «wayward landscape» or «landscape at fault.» A 1989 chemical analysis confirmed what had long been suspected: the medium is Duchamp’s semen. He gave her a landscape made of his own body, and he was, simultaneously, building a tableau in which her body would become a landscape for somebody else’s gaze. The reciprocity is unsettling. So is the asymmetry. He kept the Paysage fautif; she kept the cast.
She returned to Rio in 1949 and continued working — co-founding the São Paulo Biennial in 1951 and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio in 1952. She died in 1973, four years after Étant donnés opened under his name.
This is the situation Copley walked into in March 1966.
He had been around the Surrealists for almost twenty years by then, having opened, with his brother-in-law, a Surrealist gallery in Beverly Hills in 1948 — a venture so commercially catastrophic that he wound up buying the unsold inventory himself, becoming one of the major Dada and Surrealist collectors of his generation. Duchamp had been part of his life since the gallery’s first months. They met through Man Ray in March 1948 at the Biltmore Hotel near Grand Central. Copley memorized every word he said. Duchamp became, in Copley’s phrase, «Open Sesame.» Copley would call visiting him «charging my batteries,» three or four times a year for the next twenty years, later saying, «He taught me all I needed to know about painting; that painting was a thing to do.»
This is worth dwelling on because it complicates the position Copley was in when he walked up to the door. He was not a stranger to Duchamp’s apparatus. He owned three different copies of the Boîte-en-valise, including one of the deluxe editions of twenty, and had financed the 1958 reprint. In 1959 he bought La Bagarre d’Austerlitz, the small wooden window with the illusionistic brick pattern on its verso — a window that, as Michael Taylor noticed in 2009, prefigures the brick wall behind the door of Étant donnés. He knew the work. He knew the man. By 1966, he knew almost everything one could know about Duchamp without being Duchamp.
What he did not know, until that afternoon in room 403, was that Duchamp had been building, for twenty years, in a locked back room of the studio Copley had visited many times, a tableau in which a woman’s body opened onto a landscape and a viewer was instructed to press his face to a door. Almost no one knew. Maria knew, because the body was hers. Alexina knew, because she had married him in 1954 and the work was, by then, eight years old. A few trusted others had been let in by necessity. Copley had not. He had been, as he put it later, «speechless. Here was a complete work of such complexity, which no one imagined even existed. But there it was.»
The phrase is unguarded in a way the rest of his writing about Duchamp is not. Speechless. He was, by his own account, the most articulate of Duchamp’s American disciples, a man who had built an entire publishing operation — the SMS portfolios, the foundation grants, the catalogues — around the principle that the right people should be able to talk to each other. He had also been, in his early years, a journalist, and would later say that he had started painting in part because he had read Joyce and decided his writing was insufficiently visual. He was not a man at a loss for what to say. And here was the thing his friend had been making, in the dark, for twenty years, and the only response Copley could find was that he had no response. The work, he wrote later, was a «monument to certain actions between men and women that some editors still delete if called by a certain four-letter word. But we are willing to use a four-letter word, life, and wink slyly.» That is what he wrote in 1969, three years after seeing it, by which time he had bought it and arranged for its installation and committed himself, as it turned out, to a kind of permanent professional intimacy with the door he had pressed his face to. The wink in the prose is doing a lot of work. It is also, almost audibly, not what he was thinking.
Three years later he started painting plaid.
He kept doing everything else, too. The Foundation went on. He continued to be Duchamp’s man in public. But in the studio, beginning in 1972, he started spending his afternoons with a stack of magazines he had bought, with some embarrassment, at the back-room counters of the Times Square storefronts that operated on the principle that the inventory was kept out of sight for customers who knew enough to ask. He paid full price. He took the magazines home. And then, one canvas at a time, over the next two years, he did something to those photographs that the magazines did not anticipate and that the literature on Copley still mostly explains in the wrong direction.
You see it first in the skin. Stand close to a Copley X-Rated canvas — there is one near the back at Hetzler, of two figures folded into each other on a green plaid couch — and the thing that happens is that the skin is alive and nothing else is. The wallpaper is flat. The plaid is flat. The lampshade is flat. The hair is a black mark for hair, the eyelashes are black marks for eyelashes, the nipples are dots in the cartoonist’s grammar for nipple. The figure has been outlined in the same heavy black contour line Copley used, two years earlier, for the trumpets and bicycles in the Nouns paintings. None of it is rendered. None of it tries. And yet the skin, on a single woman’s thigh, has temperature. A pinkish warmth in the highlight, a slightly cooler tone where the thigh meets the other body. You find yourself looking at the thigh and only at the thigh, not because Copley has staged it for you to look at, but because it is the only part of the picture that is pretending to be a painting in the old sense of the word. Everything around it is signage. The skin is the painting.
This is not subtle once you see it. It is the whole game. If the skin were as flat as the plaid, the picture would be a cartoon. If the skin were rendered with the kind of finish a Salon painter would have used in 1880, the picture would be pornography. Copley keeps the skin at exactly the temperature where the body is alive enough to be a body but not lit enough to be the kind of body that an apparatus is built around. He had been working on this problem for a long time, although he would not have called it that. In 1948, in a passage of his memoir that everyone quotes and nobody quite knows what to do with, he said that pictures go through the skin by osmosis and that eyes have nothing to do with it. He was talking about living with paintings — Magritte hanging on the wall like an antimacassar on a sofa — but in X-Rated he is putting the principle inside the picture. The skin in the painting is the place where the painting touches the viewer. Not the eye. The skin meeting the skin. He spent twenty-four years preparing to make a painting in which this was the only thing happening, and then he made it thirty-five times in a row.
The other thing happening, around the skin, is that everything else has been turned into its sign. A wrinkle in a tartan jacket, in a Copley canvas, is painted as the cartoonist’s mark for wrinkle — the small black hash that means fold. The hair is the mark for hair. The mouth is the mark for mouth. The figure wears, on top of itself, a layer of cartoon notation, the way a comic book character wears its outline. This produces a strange double effect. The bodies in the picture are doing something — fucking, mostly, though sometimes only proximate to it — and they are simultaneously announcing that they are depictions, with all the apparatus of depiction painted on top of them. They are bodies and they are diagrams of bodies. They are alive (in the skin) and they are quoted (everywhere else). The figure in Étant donnés, by contrast, was rendered with maximum trompe-l’œil specificity: real hair set into parchment skin, real pigment on the lips, the whole figure built to dare you to mistake it for a body. Duchamp wanted the dare. Copley does not. He wants you to know, from across the room, that this is a painting, and to know, from up close, that one part of the painting — the part where the bodies meet — is being attended to with care that the rest does not deserve.
The patterns around the bodies deserve one more sentence, because they are not neutral. Tartan, gingham, polka dots, stripes in red and white, occasional stars on a blue ground: this is the textile of the mid-century American interior, and it is also, with one or two color changes, the iconography of the flag. Copley had spent the preceding years painting flags, eagles, cowboys, an electric chair. The bodies in X-Rated are not lying on abstract fabric. They are lying on the country. He paints what is in the room, and the flag is in the room.
And then there are the titles, which are usually described, including in the press release for the show I am writing about, as Surrealist disjunctions or pop-cultural games. This is a polite way of not noticing what they are. The titles in X-Rated are a list of films — Monsieur Verdoux, Viridiana, A Clockwork Orange, Last Tango in Paris, Bonnie and Clyde, Chelsea Girls, The Exterminating Angel, Midnight Cowboy, Scorpio Rising, The Conformist, Hiroshima Mon Amour, The Devil in Miss Jones, Straw Dogs, The Seven Year Itch — and they are not random films. Verdoux is a serial killer who marries his victims. Viridiana is a nun confronted with a beggar’s body. Alex in Clockwork Orange rapes to Beethoven. The lovers in Hiroshima Mon Amour fuck while she remembers the German soldier she was punished for loving in Nevers. Bonnie chooses Clyde. The films are about people for whom sex and crime and political damage are the same situation. They are also, more concretely, the films that were playing in Times Square in the months Copley was painting the series. Last Tango opened in October 1972. The Devil in Miss Jones opened in March 1973. Clockwork Orange and Straw Dogs were both still in repertory from December 1971. The cinemas where these films played were within ten minutes’ walk of the back-room storefronts where Copley was buying the magazines that supplied his images. The reframing is geographic. He took images from one institution of the same neighborhood — the back-room magazine, illegal, anonymous, hidden — and titled them with the names of the other institution of the same neighborhood — the cinema, legal, public, advertised on the marquee. He moved the body from the magazine to the marquee. The title is the name of the room the body has been moved into.
What all of this does, when it works — and it works, I think, more often than not in the canvases Hetzler has hung — is produce a painting in which the gaze, in the technical Lacanian sense the word has had since Seminar XI, has nowhere to go. The skin is alive but does not present itself for inspection. The signs of the body are too obvious to be peered at. The wallpaper is too busy to recede. The title belongs to a different room. There is no point in the picture where attention can do what Duchamp’s apparatus, in room 403, required it to do — which was to fix on a single body, through a single hole, in a single position, with the rest of the visual field held in service to that one act of looking. In a Copley X-Rated painting, the visual field has been broken into four equally insistent surfaces, and the eye has nowhere to settle. There is no objet petit a, in the sense Lacan meant, because there is no withheld thing, no door behind which the desired body waits. Everything is on the surface. The surface is too busy to be peered through.
Copley said it himself, to Sam Hunter, in 1974: these paintings are essentially still lifes. They are flowers. He had said something else in the same conversation, less often quoted: «I paint them like I would paint a landscape or a still life.» Landscape or a still life. He gave both options. The line is usually treated as a joke — the elegant deflection of an old man being asked to defend pornography to a feminist-adjacent interviewer — and it is a joke, but it is also the most accurate description of the operation in the literature. A still life is the genre in which the painter’s attention falls equally on every object. The peach is no more important than the cloth. The cloth is no more important than the shadow. Copley took the most hierarchical image he could find — the pornographic photograph, in which the figure is everything and the room is nothing — and he flattened the hierarchy. He distributed his attention. The body is no longer the figure for which the room exists. It is one element among others, in a domestic space whose patterns have their own life, whose textiles are doing their own work, and whose lighting is busy with its own concerns. The interior, in other words, performs the function of the landscape: it restores the field in which the body is no longer exhausted by being seen.
It is hard, standing in front of these paintings in 2026, not to feel that Copley was working out something specific to himself. He had, by then, been married five times and was about to be married a sixth. He had grown up in a household where, by his own account, there could be no reference to anything physical. He had been sent to Phillips Andover, then to Yale before they admitted women, then to the Army, then to the desert. It took him a long time, he said, to find out what a girl was. When Hunter asked him about the X-Rated paintings, he answered with a phrase that gets quoted often enough that it has gone slightly soft from handling: possibly an attempt at self-therapy. The phrase is, I think, exact. He had a theory about it, too, which he gave Hunter in the same conversation: pornography has to do with repression, and eroticism with fantasy. When his generation was dead, he said, there would be no more pornography. Whatever one thinks of the prediction, the formula explains the project. The magazines on 42nd Street were, in his terms, repression — bought under the counter, kept out of sight, the residue of a culture that could not speak about the body. To paint them on plaid, in his living room, with attention to the warmth of the skin, was to move them from one category to the other. He was not therapizing the viewer. He was not therapizing women, who had not asked. He was therapizing himself — and he said as much, in the same interview, in a sentence that is harder to make a joke of: painting, he said, is the only activity that keeps me from becoming more peculiar than I am. He had been formed by a particular kind of mid-century American repression of the body, and he had spent the previous twenty years standing as close as a man could stand to the most refined apparatus of repression-as-art his century had produced. He had stood at the door. He had paid for the door. He had arranged for the door’s permanent installation in a museum that would charge admission to see it.
Three years later, he started painting plaid.
The X-Rated paintings are what he made when he tried to paint his way out of the room he had been raised in, the schools he had been sent to, the war he had survived, and the door he had pressed his face to in the spring of 1966. They do not solve any of these problems. Self-therapy is not, on the evidence of the canvases, a process that arrives at a conclusion. What the paintings do is record the attempt. They show a man who has decided that the painting itself — the actual fabric of paint on canvas — is going to be the place where the work gets done. Not the title. Not the iconography. Not the politics. The skin. The temperature of the paint. The decision, made canvas after canvas, to put the warmth in the one place where two bodies meet, and to let everything else go flat.
At Hetzler, in April 2026, the paintings hang in a white room on Goethestraße, slightly above eye level, so that you lift your face a little to see the figures — the opposite of what Duchamp’s door required. The most explicit canvases are near the entrance, fully recognizable couplings on fully recognizable furniture, and people walk past them with a kind of polite efficiency, the way one walks past a room in a museum that is not the room one came for. The painting they stop at is the one where the bodies have folded into each other so completely that the composition reads, at distance, as pattern. You have to stand close to see what is happening. From across the room it looks like a Matisse cutout someone has roughed up with a heavy black marker. From close, it is two figures, more or less, doing what the magazine on 42nd Street showed them doing in 1973, except that the woman’s thigh has the kind of pink-warm tone Copley reserved for the place where two bodies meet, and the rest of the picture is plaid. People photograph this canvas, I think, because it is the one where the painting has done the work the painter wanted it to do. The body is in the room with the wallpaper. The wallpaper is in the room with the body. Nothing is hidden, nothing is offered. The painting refuses to be either pornography or critique, and in Berlin, in a private gallery, in 2026, this turns out to be a saleable refusal.
It is worth saying, plainly, that this is not what Copley was afraid of. He told Hunter in 1974 that he expected to be burned in effigy by the women’s movement, and that this would be their fault, and that the whole point of his subject matter was joy. He was wrong about the burning. The movement that would have mattered for X-Rated had not yet organized itself in 1974 — Dworkin’s Pornography: Men Possessing Women was seven years away, Women Against Pornography five — and by the time it did, it had bigger and easier targets than a self-taught American Surrealist with a back-room habit and a habit of saying the wrong thing. The effigy never got burned. What happened instead is that the paintings sat, mostly unsold, in a market that did not know what to do with them, until the market changed and the post-2010s figurative revival caught them up. By 2012 they were collectible. By 2016 they were institutional. By 2026 they are art-historical. The paintings have outlasted the kind of looking the back room was built around.
Before leaving I stood for a while near a small canvas at the side — The Seven Year Itch, two figures barely outlined on a yellow ground, one of the tender ones. A woman ahead of me had stopped at it too. She did not take a photograph. She looked, shifted her weight to the other foot, looked a little longer, and moved on. The painting did not require her to fix her position, and it did not punish her for leaving. That is the whole difference, and it took Copley thirty-five canvases to state it.
Berlin, April 26, 2026
William N. Copley: X-Rated Galerie Max Hetzler
Berlin: Goethestraße 2/3
13 March – 22 April 2026