John Coplans: A Pioneer of Stark Portraiture and Pop Art Criticism John Wesley Cope, born in London in 1920, was a British artist, art writer, curator, and museum director whose career spanned decades of artistic exploration and critical engagement with the burgeoning pop art movement. His formative years were marked by an unconventional upbringing – his father, Joseph Moses Coplans, a medical doctor and polymath, emigrated to Johannesburg shortly after John’s birth, creating a transient childhood between London and South Africa until 1930. Despite this instability, Cope developed an unwaver…