OBITUARY: Sum of His Parts: John Coplans (1920-2003) , Jan 2004 http://www.mutualart.com/OpenArticle/Sum-of-His-Parts--John-Coplans--1920- 200/6576ED6A4646BBD5

An obituary for John Coplans, an international photographer who died in Aug 2003 at the age of 83 is presented. Among other things, Coplans became an internationally successful photographer over the last two decades by focusing his lens on his intensely personal yet oddly alien terra incognita.

To readers under a certain age (say, thirty-five), the name John Coplans probably conjures pictures of a hairy, schlumpy, climacteric bag of flesh. Turning his body into a living landscape tableau, Coplans became an internationally successful photographer over the last two decades by focusing his lens on this intensely personal yet oddly alien terra incognita.

Photography was in fact the third full career Coplans, who died last August at age eighty-three, enjoyed. In his lifetime, the Britishborn, South African-raised figure never followed the straight trajectory. If it is rare to find an individual who flourishes in a new milieu when most are tidying up the achievements of a lifelong pursuit, "lateness" is hardly a conceit foreign to Coplans`s biography. Indeed, his record is inflected both by the notion of belatedness and by its antonymic partner, prescience. As a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum in the mid-`6os, Coplans was among the earliest champions of Pop art and a vociferously sympathetic critic of the work of and especially . (He organized a survey of Pop as early as 1:963 and later was responsible for retrospectives of Lichtenstein and Warhol as well as the 1968 "Serial Imagery" exhibition.) But despite his reputation as a curator ahead of the curve, Coplans largely abandoned museum work until 1978, when he became director of the Akron Art Museum.

Coplans`s early museum years are less remembered today than his career as a critic and his long affiliation with Artforum. He was there at the founding of the magazine, in San Francisco in 1962.; he followed it, or it him, for sixteen years, down to Los Angeles, then, in 1967, to New York. With the departure in 1971 of Philip Leider, he became editor in chief, presiding over the tumultuous years that saw the core editorial group break apart into a handful of factions. Coplans`s reign at Artforum, coming after the magazine`s halcyon late-60s run, entered lore long ago as a time of editorial catholicity, with the publication embracing any number of (at times) incongruous critical positions and approaches. But in doing so it mirrored a moment of expanding media, practices, and modes of engagement within contemporary art. Too often the strengths of the Artforum Coplans oversaw as editor are overlooked and undervalued.

To try and take the measure of John Coplans`s multifaceted careers and personality, Artforum invited six people who knew him to offer their appreciations of the man and his work. - Eric Banks

Irving Blum

Throughout our relationship, Coplans had a bulletproof bullshit detector. He was astonishingly direct about every issue. Not only that, but he could give voice to his feelings, which is rare. If he saw something he didn`t like, he not only told you he didn`t like it but rationally explained why. John also had an amazing clarity. I remember when I had the Warhol Soup Can show at Ferus in 1962. It was greeted mostly with either indifference or outright hostility, but John came in and spent a bit of time with the paintings. I could see that he was involved with the work, and so I left him standing there, looking. After a while-after quite a long time, as I recall-he walked back to see me in my office and blandly said, "You`re going to buy all these, aren`t you?" It was an idea I was entertaining but hadn`t really articulated. So I said, "Well, I`m going to try and keep them together." And I called Andy, who said they were conceived as a series and he`d love for me to keep them together. Nobody other than Coplans saw that. Nobody else came even close to seeing that.

After that, we became very friendly. I was enormously grateful to him for corroborating the little bit of activity that I was engaged in at Ferus. And I did everything I possibly could to persuade Artforum to relocate to LA from San Francisco: There was no criticism in the city until Artforum came down. The artists recognized this immediately. John would have the most extended and lively, fascinating dialogues with Jim Turrell, with Larry Bell, with Bob Irwin. He was able to give voice to what they were doing in ways that often astounded the community of artists in LA. Having seen the Soup Cans, for example, he made one connection after another and very soon hit on the idea of seriality, about which he organized a show at the Pasadena Art Museum. That was a very big idea that hadn`t been explored until John laid it out. But because he always spoke his mind, artists adored him on the one hand and were leery of him on the other. It was not love-hate but love, because of his clarity, coupled with a kind of hesitation.

John was often misunderstood, though. The saddest example involved the opening of the Pasadena Art Museum. John was curator there, and the person with the biggest influence was a trustee, Robert Rowan, who had asked Alan Solomon, then teaching at UC Irvine, to do a show about American painting. Alan agreed and they signed a contract. As he spent more time in California and got to know a number of the artists, however, Alan felt it was too unwieldy-he couldn`t include friends he`d made out here. So he went to Rowan three months before the opening and said, "I cannot do an American painting show. It`s got to be a New York painting show. We have to change the title to New York painting." Which is what they decided to do, until John said to Rowan, "It`s impossible to open a museum here in California and do only New York painting. I will do a parallel California painting show.

Now, Alan had all the money. Alan had the expensive catalogue. Alan had the lion`s share of the space- and so the West Coast people never looked more provincial. And they blamed John Coplans. They were incredibly critical of John, so much so that I think he was forced to leave the state. They never bothered to find out why there was a secondary California show or why it looked the way it did. They crucified John for having done it, when it was John who had felt that there had to be West Coast representation.

But the guy was chameleonlike. He had the ability to change careers. I think he started out as a contractor, refitting houses in England before trying his hand at sculpture and then painting-he made these geometric relief paintings. Then he turned to criticism, then curating, and then finally became a rather celebrated photographer, totally focused on his own activity, totally committed to photography. And not so many leave as important a legacy in photography as John has left. he found his niche and exploited it and drove it home. He was dogged. Not only bright but dogged and, in the end, terribly successful. The guy was a force. The world is somehow less engaging without his presence.

Max Kosloff

A few of us addressed him as "Bwana Devil," as a joke about his colonial past and because he was our boss. Underneath a certain bluster, John let slip an impression of being unsure about his standing with his writers. An editor cannot always be sincere, but they dissed him because he did grubby things in order to keep a financially troubled Artforum alive. To the black troops he commanded during World War II as a British officer in Burma, he claimed he spoke Swahili. With me, he took delight in being politically incorrect, sexist, mainly. Cantankerous, jocular, resourceful, impulsive, he loved to provoke those who he thought were either puritanical or misbehaved more than he did. They included people who abused their high positions in the art world, and everyone else with whom he differed. Though John insisted on professionalism and was always businesslike, his pose as an enfant terrible was maybe not a pose.

But he knew pathos, and it was illumined by a chilling story he told me, a tale about his memory of a face. In Central Park, he had hoped to photograph exhausted marathon runners as they crossed the finish line. When police barred his access to it, he took a picture, for no conscious reason, of an elderly man on a bench, a doleful, tweedy person with a walrus mustache. Sleepless that night, John developed the negative, printed the picture, and, at the sight of one who looked like a ghost from his past, began to weep.

The scene changes: 1945, a military hospital in India. An icy water bath supplied by Indian troops revives him from near death by dehydration. (The rivers in the jungle at the front had been off-limits because polluted by dead bodies.) Now, as he recalled, he wanders the sun-shocked camp, energized by the recovery of some prohibited whiskey. He comes upon an old, done-in man, a brigadier with a large mustache, and offers him a swig. As they drink, news of Hiroshima is announced over the loudspeaker. It signals the end of the war and reports the incineration of over a hundred thousand human beings. The two men collapse together, beyond rank, in wet, uncontrolled lament.

To a man with this experience, what would the pickle at Artforum have amounted to? Quite a lot, as it turned out. It was not only the insolvent state of the magazine but also the suffocating pinch of its formalism with which he had to contend. At that point, he was a wide roamer, impatient with obstacles, and hair-triggered against authorities. His origin as a South African Jew must certainly have contributed to this itchiness. In contrast to his exhausted predecessor, Philip Leider, he was undereducated and less focused, but much more cosmopolitan in background and closer to art. On the job, he was naturally riled by highfalutin language-"bullshitism," he called it. Armed with such phobias, he encouraged writers who gave him an alternative, and he opened himself to the divergence of their interests. So it was that Artforum engaged with-to an extent even spearheaded-the issues of the early `70s.

If you want to read early feminist art writing, attacks on institutional conflicts of interest, discussions of folk and tribal arts, anticipations of postmodernism, political critiques of contemporary and historical aesthetics, as well as attention to the problems of photography, you will find them in the articles John commissioned. Leider saw this policy coming-he considered it the ruin of the magazine and was glad of it. On the contrary, during John`s tenure, Artforum did what it should. Its sustained investigation of new themes, often while under attack by entrenched interests, jolted the art world like a shot of 80 proof.

As recently as a few years ago, many of the speakers recorded in Challenging Art: Artforum 1962-1974, Amy Newman`s oral history of the magazine, thought that its evangelist spirit of the `60s was a moment of triumph, whereas in reality it was a retrograde episode and a dead end for criticism. John couldn`t be bothered by the orthodoxies of formalism, even those to which he had once subscribed. Without knowing it, he spoke to the future.

When he crossed the finish line a few months ago, at age eighty-three, this man of several phases had more than an editorial stint to be proud of. In his time, he`d been an aviator, an architectural restorer, a teacher, a museum director, a collector. As a writer, he sparkled most when he studied Weegee, who was perhaps more a model for him than just a colorful character. But to reinvent yourself as an artist in your sixties, with photographs that expose your wornout body, and then go on to international success- we don`t know of anyone who did this. John Coplans lived on the edge, where he suffered pain as well as delivered it. I can almost fancy Bwana Devil toasting to the improbable fortunes of war, with that other old soldier, in the nether place.

Angela Westwater

I met John Coplans in 1970, some two years before I started working for him as managing editor of Artforum. My informal education about contemporary art and the current New York scene began then and accelerated with professional urgency during my three years at the magazine. This heady, highly productive time of artmaking was a formative period for me, and I could not have imagined a better mentor than John.

He was smart and incredibly well read, so he became a major resource for information, whether biographical, bibliographical, historical, or even culinary (John prided himself on his good cooking and hospitality). His intellectual commitment was fueled by his relationships with other artists, and this proved infectious (to me). He generously included me in his social circle, and in some cases his friends became mine-notably Bob Smithson, whose original, brilliant thinking contributed so much to Artforum`s pages. Both men were feisty, tenacious, and irreverent, so arguments and debates went late into the night either at Max`s Kansas City or at John`s Seventy-ninth Street apartment over dinner. In retrospect, I wonder how I ever got to my desk on time.

John`s passion and fast pace energized me; at the same time these attributes made for a highly charged atmosphere at the office-then a small, dingy suite of rooms on Madison Avenue occupied by a staff of five. He ran Artforum with an authority that occasionally resonated like the military. Given the other strong personalities on the editorial board (some with a doctrinaire stance), the rifts and denunciations that resulted may have been inevitable. Lynda Benglis`s provocative dildo ad in the November `74 issue was the climax of the drama and led to the ultimate schism (the departure of several longtime editors), which signaled an end to the hermetic, purist position the magazine had occupied. In the process of opening up Artforum, John had encouraged writing about art outside the prevailing canon and always welcomed my suggestions. We were pleased to publish articles about artists hitherto neglected, such as Louise Bourgeois and the Bechers, and to devote greater attention to performance, dance, photography, and music. Those lessons I learned from John left me with valuable tools for the future-and any number of wonderful memories.

Mel Bochner

By the time John Coplans took over Artforum magazine in 1971, I had stopped writing, but he wheedled, cajoled, and finally lured me back with the offer to review Lucy Lippard`s Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object. Coplans was a demanding editor, going over the review word by word. We argued every point from both sides, searching for flaws in the logic, relentlessly forcing every issue to its inevitable conclusion. The editing session was contentious and abrasive but in the end helped to expand the piece from a book review into a critique of the politics of dematerialization.

My second article for Coplans began with a telephone call protesting the magazine`s dismissive coverage of the great 1973 Malevich retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. Coplans`s response, typically, was to turn the tables. he offered me a chance to "speak my mind" on the subject through an interview with him. I should have anticipated, after my previous experience, that being interviewed by Coplans would be like being cross-examined by a prosecuting attorney. As the interview progressed, it became clear that what we were really debating was whether, after Conceptualism, anything new could be recuperated from the modernist tradition. Thirty years later, that question is still being debated.

As an editor, Coplans has been underestimated, both because of the long shadow of his predecessor, Philip Leider, and because of his special talent for making enemies. But, in fact, he was the one who ended the reign of formalism at Artforum and opened the pages for the first time to photography, film, and politics. Coplans was critical, provocative, and not tied to any ideology. More important, he liked art. When you think about it, those are exactly the qualities you want from an art magazine.

Peter Plagens

Peter, the jejune and sensitive wuss of an introspective painter. John, the hardened, battle-scarred colonel of the war over whether Minimalism would hold the ground it had won from Pop (which had previously blown up Abstract Expressionism) or lose it to the molten-lead throwers and grainy-video makers trying to storm the fort. That`s the way it felt back then-say, the late `60s through the `70s-and that`s the way it still feels. Even during the last few years of John`s life-when, in spite of his sought-after- by-museums-everywhere status as a photographer, he was fighting (at least in conversation) a fatiguing rear-guard action against an art world that had become a smart-ass fashion scene, and I was bopping all over the place as art critic for Newsweek-he seemed to me still the insider, me the outsider.

Not that John ever did anything to discourage that perception. Au contraire, he reveled loudly in the idea that art-that is, modern art, contemporary art-is a battleground. The best artists are those who win the battles, whose work seizes from defeated artists first the edgiest gallery spaces, then the opinions of the headiest critics, and finally museum shows and catalogues. When I`d encounter John in his curatorial lair at the Pasadena Art Museum or at the contentious old Madison Avenue offices of Artforum or during a boisterous dinner party at his Cedar Street loft, it was as if Clement Greenberg had donned the helmet of General Patton. I demurred . . . somewhat. If the battle was everything, I used to argue, what did it matter whether the struggle was over cars, Hollywood movies, or the exhibition program at the ? Didn`t the fact that art is art-expressive, beautiful, peaceful instead of merely strategic, mighty, and martial-change anything? What about, I asked him once, the painter who simply stays in his studio, makes the best paintings he can, and derives satisfaction from just that! "Kienholz goes out in his pickup truck at night," he said, "to find them and run them down."

In the end, of course, John was right. History is written by victors. While today`s trendoid Chelsea gallery flashes and biennial-in-Bratislava agents provocateurs aren`t guaranteed slots in the pantheon (i.e., MIT monographs or $750,000 reserves at the fall auctions), no artist who hasn`t been either one of those things is going to get a shot. How could it be otherwise, unless curators are telepathic and can see through studio walls? As a friend of mine used to say, "There are no Great American Novels lying around in dresser drawers."

Those are pretty depressing thoughts. Eventually, they probably depressed even John. And therein lies the reason, I think, for his ultimately returning to being an artist. Sure, to his last breath he got out there and elbowed, as Barnett Newman put it. But in the end, his main satisfaction came from staying in his studio, making the best photographs he could, and deriving satisfaction from just that. This unreconstructed wuss salutes you, John.

Susan Kismaric

John Coplans chose to devote his intense energy to photography later in life, when he was sixty. Because he was a decisive man, his late start may have helped him focus on his subject quickly. The first portraits he made (mostly of friends) were intriguing because of their unblinking clarity, but it wasn`t until he discovered the possibilities available from making pictures of his own body that he found his true subject. It was a brilliant choice that offered him an infinite number of opportunities. His images drew not only on his vast knowledge of the history of photography but on painting and sculpture as well- everything from Egyptian hieroglyphics, ancient Greek friezes, and the classical nude to the blunt photographs of Weegee-plus his full awareness of contemporary abstraction and performance art. The fact that John`s subject was an aged man`s naked body (unsparingly described) wasn`t to everyone`s taste, but that didn`t stop him or deflect the appreciation of people who were moved by the work. Made over the course of almost twenty-five years, the photographs reflect many aspects of his personality, especially his wit and humor, but equally apparent are the tenacity, intelligence, and passion with which he pursued and realized his ideas. Shockingly, no one had ever made such pictures.

True to John`s character, the photographs are original and challenging, a provocation to conventional thinking, and, again, unblinking and relentless. On a grander scale, the work became a metaphor-John`s body became a metaphor-for a fully lived life. The endless permutations of his flesh, its folds, creases, hair, wounds, sagging postures and parts, became, in full-scale photos, larger than life-as John himself was.

SIDEBAR

During John`s tenure, Artforum did what it should. Its sustained investigation of new themes, often while under attack by entrenched interests, jolted the art world like a shot of 80 proof. -MK

Coplans was a demanding editor, going over the review word by word. The session was contentious and abrasive but in the end helped to expand my piece from a book review into a critique of the politics of dematerialization. -MB

AUTHOR AFFILIATION

Art dealer and collector Irvtng Blum way formerly a partner in Ferns Gallery, Los Angeles, and in Blum Helman Galiery, New York.

New York-based critic Max Kozloff served in numerous editorial capacities at Artforum from 1964 to 1975.

Managing editor of Artforum from 1971 to 1975, Angela Westwater is a partner in Sperone Westwater gallery in New York. Mel Bochner is a New York-based artist.

A contributing editor of Artforum and the magazine`s associate editor from 1974 to 1976, Peter Plagens is art critic for Newsweek. Susan Kismaric is curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

COPYRIGHT: Copyright Artforum Inc. Jan 2004. Provided by Proquest- CSA, LLC. All Rights Reserved. Only fair use as provided by the copyright law is permitted.

Marilyn Minter’s Pleasure Principle SOMA: The Design Issue Sept 2009, vol 23.6 http://www.somamagazine.com/marilyn-minter%E2%80%99s-pleasure-principle/.

It is difficult to tell if Marilyn Minter’s subjects are meant to make viewers uncomfortable—or turn them on. A self-proclaimed “still life art photographer,” Minter’s pornography-inspired portraits of women seemingly possessed by the voyeuristic lens all appear to be objects of her wildest hallucinations. Yet, upon closer inspection, the images reveal the simplest reality that exists in beauty: imperfection. Her camera catches, with peephole discretion, tongues and fingers intermingling with precious stones, body hair and birthday cake, rendering her subjects in a miserable yet erotic state of disarray. Unconventional to be sure, but refreshing nonetheless.

As a social critic, Minter documents deeply rooted cultural insecurities in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection. But she will never admit it. And her modesty almost makes you feel as if you are over analyzing her spontaneous and uncomplicated alterations of regular photographs. “I just make pictures of what already exists,” says Minter of her artistic process. “I don’t define anything.” Minter’s final products—untouched and uncropped—are amalgamations of several images superimposed and digitally layered onto an initial shot. Multiple coats of high gloss enamel paint add a certain translucency and dimension that is impossible to achieve in a regular photograph or painting. The images are not enhanced; instead, Minter searches for and accentuates the minor imperfections that are usually airbrushed from commercial images. “I like things that are sweaty and wet and drippy,” explains the artist, “I’m not cleaning things up.”

The opposite is also the case, as evidenced by Minter’s contribution to the July 2007 issue of art publication Parkett, which showcased uncharacteristically bare shots of Pamela Anderson. Gone was the overexposed and oversexed image, which was instead stripped of artificial accoutrements in raw images such as “Unarmed” and “Drop.” “It’s easy to stereotype someone who makes their living as a pin-up girl, but Pamela is also a lifetime spokesperson for PETA,” Minter says. “I feel she has incredible empathy. Isn’t she allowed to be vulnerable?”

Perhaps the artist can relate to her subject’s intense public scrutiny. Her earliest photographs, a series of basic black-and-whites of her mother shot in 1969 for an art class at the University of Florida, depicted a deteriorating, substance abusing parent whose commitment to primping offered a grotesque portrait of a walking contradiction and, assumingly, a clue to Minter’s gross perception of beauty, that she now describes as “askew.” Not surprising given the indifferent responses to the glamour shots by Minter’s first critics: her fellow students. Deftly hidden from view for 25 years, Minter’s infamy burgeoned in the early ’80s and continued to haunt her until 2006 when she was chosen as one of the artists to be included in the Whitney Biennial in New York. “I was demonized,” admits the artist of her reputation in the art world.

Indeed, the sociopolitical zeitgeist after the feminist era of the ’70s was not ready for—and quite unforgiving of—the fetishization and objectification of females engaging in unmentionable acts, their imploring hands and ripe mouths grasping at eager members. Similarly received was Minter’s late-night television commercial, 100 Food Porn, which featured a montage of graphic, pop-art inspired prints of female hands, nails shellacked with glossy red paint; sensually dismembering lobster tails and separating eggs. Like most of her works, the advertisement incorporated mixed media applications to create a multi-dimensional moving art piece whose very composition made a statement about erotic edibles and the hyper-commercialization of consumption.

Because of the social ramifications of creating controversial art, Minter attributes many of her successes to “serendipity” including the creation of her graphic film installation Green Pink Caviar and its appearance on Madonna’s Sticky and Sweet Tour. “I couldn’t have planned for this to happen in a million years,” says the artist of the pairing. Luckily, in an era where choreographed bedroom activities are applauded onstage, Minter’s film of models with long tongues swirling and sucking bakery products from under a pane of glass is acceptable. So acceptable that mainstream corporations are now seeking Minter’s creative edge to sell their products. For their fall line, MAC Cosmetics tapped into the stylized pigments used by three photographers including Minter, to create collections reflective of each artist’s work. In Minter’s palette, a bright, almost incandescent fuchsia takes precedence among eight pots of glitter powder, each one a tube of paint ready to be splashed on the ultimate blank canvas.

With an upcoming exhibit at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects and a highly anticipated new body of work after multiple commercial projects, Marilyn’s late-in-life success can definitely be chalked up to experience. “I’m better at making work,” she says. Better? Maybe. Stimulating? Always. – Gareen Darakjian

Fashion & Style The Gimlet Eye: The Crew Behind a One-Woman Show By GUY TREBAY June 2, 2010 NEW YORK TIMES http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/03/fashion/03Gimlet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

YOU were the child of glamorous but emotionally absent narcissists; your own credo is “Never take advantage of anyone.” You were drunk or high for much of the 1980s; you got sober when you realized that no matter what quantities of drugs and alcohol you consumed they no longer had an effect. You were an art-critical flop who spent decades in the professional wilderness; you were then so suddenly taken up by the establishment that collectors now stand in line for your work. Your pictures sell for $400,000; you insist that you will never give up teaching, so what if it pays two cents?

You are Marilyn Minter, a 61-year-old painter with galleries in New York and Los Angeles, a newly published monograph (Marilyn Minter, Gregory R. Miller & Co., $60), a museum show opening Friday in Cleveland and another one-woman show in preparation. Your work, which critics have alternately praised or condemned for the attention it pays to the luster of fashion and pathology of glamour, has seldom been more desirable. And so, on a given Friday — last week, let’s say — six assistants arranged around the perimeter of your Mercer Street loft are helping to make your new work.

“I think we probably have the closest thing there is to a Renaissance workshop,” said Johan Olander, Ms. Minter’s studio manager, meaning that no person can be considered the sole author of any work bearing Ms. Minter’s name.

And, as if to confirm this, Natalia Yovane, Ms. Minter’s “blocker,” was filling in what looked like a paint- by-number schema devised either to blind a person or drive her onto a ledge. With mindless mechanical delicacy, Jenny Morgan and David Mramor were applying “second coats” to another image, smearing wet enamel on a pair of enormous lips that looked like a pointillist abstraction up close. Chris Oh and Agata Bebecka, the so-called “finishers,” dabbed paint onto a nearly finished picture, patting each stroke with an index finger to create a lustrous sheen.

It was only when a viewer stood away from the paintings that a mouth, or an elegantly shod foot splashing through silvery liquid came into focus. “We used cake decoration, that silver powder they use to decorate fancy cakes, suspended in vodka,” Ms. Minter said, referring to the liquid depicted in one painting. “Water wasn’t viscous enough.”

Tall, pale-complexioned and with sharply blue eyes, Ms. Minter has a disarmingly candid manner, a ready laugh and a painting style that defies easy characterization. Some consider her work photo- realism; she prefers to call herself a “photo-replacer.” Shooting the staged images for her paintings with analog film, she then subjects them to 80 or more rounds of PhotoShop manipulation before transferring the results to aluminum panels and handing them over to Team Minter, her crew.

“At this point, my primary job is as a generator of imagery,” Ms. Minter said. “If I did this alone, it would take me a year and a half to finish one piece.” And that would doubtless trouble her passionate collectors, among them Madonna and Tom Ford.

It is no secret that artists rely on armies of assistants to facilitate their output. Jeff Koons, for instance, employs scores of fabricators, conservators and technicians. By contrast, Ms. Minter’s production amounts to a cottage industry. Like the owner of a mom and pop deli, she lives above the store, or rather, behind it, her domestic life wedged into the perimeter of a loft she has occupied since the bicentennial. “I’m a late bloomer in the art world,” the artist said as she laid out paper plates and cloth napkins for lunch.

It was 2 p.m., time for the weekly Friday pizza delivery. “I was basically in a coma for 15 years, and then spent the next 10 being told I had nothing to offer,” Ms. Minter added. “So by the time so-called success came along, I had the tools to stay right-sized.”

Asked what exactly that meant, Ms. Minter said: “I can still hear it when someone says something’s a stupid idea.”

This does occur.

“Remember when you made that horrid wet drip on her chin?” Mr. Olander asked, referring to a painting Ms. Minter created from a photograph of Pamela Anderson with some unidentifiable liquid running from her open mouth.

“The water didn’t look like water,” Ms. Morgan said. What it looked like was ... well, never mind.

“They were fighting me constantly and kept adding more and more wetness” to the image, Ms. Minter added, until finally the water looked less suggestive. Thus Ms. Minter managed to skirt any unwanted associations with the hard-core pornographic imagery she deployed early on in her career — to the distaste of collectors and general feminist scorn.

“The most debased imagery around is pornography and fashion,” said Ms. Minter, who has probably done as much as any painter to exploit the distinct visual vocabulary of commercially stimulated desire. “The problem was, in the beginning I was touching on things that were way too loaded and it almost killed my career.”

In the case of the Pamela Anderson picture, shot from a portrait commissioned to celebrate a marriage that never took place, Ms. Minter decided in the end that her assistants were right. The drip was all wrong. “Everybody around here has an opinion,” Mr. Olander said.

“But,” Ms. Minter said, “I have the final say.”

That goes for pizza as well, since Ms. Minter, who is as good at abstinence as she is at succumbing to pleasure, quit eating meat at about the same time she stopped doing drugs. There were three pies for lunch on Friday and not a pepperoni in sight. As the painters put down their brushes and plastic palettes and came to the table, Ms. Minter conveyed the impression, unusual in the atelier of a successful artist, of being equal parts den mother and benevolent despot.

“I choose people to work for me based on integrity and good energy,” she said. “Also,” she said brightly, “everyone in here had a painful background.”

“Not really,” Ms. Bebecka, the finisher, demurred.

“What do you mean?” Ms. Minter said. “You were abandoned by your parents in high school.”

“I wasn’t abandoned and I was in college,” Ms. Bebecka said, shrugging off Ms. Minter’s dramatic reimagining of her Polish girlhood.

“Pay no attention to her, she’s in total denial,” Ms. Minter said amiably.

At that Ms. Bebecka shot Ms. Minter a look of affectionate indulgence, with an expression that said: “Love that nutty broad.”

Still, as the clichés suggest and Ms. Minter insisted, it may be the setbacks, the childhood dysfunction, the battle for sobriety and critical approval that forge the spirit of an artist. At any rate, hardship does tend to winnow out the committed from those seeking art careers because they’d like a job where you get to work in a T-shirt and sweats.

“I really never had any money until recently, and I’m still not sure I have it,” the artist said, pouring herself a Diet Coke. “For years my income from art was $16,000 a year, so believe me I don’t take any of this for granted. But I’ve been around long enough to understand the role of artists in our culture, who we are and what job we perform.”

And what is that, a visitor inquired?

“We’re the elite of the servant class,” Ms. Minter said. “I know my place.”