William Nelson Copley’s Zizi Jean Mare is a witty and metaphorical synthesis of Surrealism and Pop, depicting the Parisian ballerina Zizi Jeanmarie as a horse, toying with the homonymy in French between mare (horse) and maire in Jeanmaire. The sitter, a muse to Yves Saint Laurent and infamous between Paris and New York for her risqué performances and pioneering boyish bob, is presented erotically by Copley, dressed in black lace lingerie and wearing her iconic thick black eye makeup; she grips a red rose between her teeth, reminiscent of her performance in the ballet La Croqueuse de diamants (The Gold Digger), where—similarly clad—she bites a massive diamond. The artist described black lace as embodying the feminine, and often contrasted it with ‘masculine’ corduroy. Copley, for whom “eroticism and humor have to do with the sweetness of life,” provides in this work a mélange of Surrealist metaphor along with his distinctive interpretation of humor and the erotic (quoted in Paul Cummings, Oral History Interview with William Nelson Copley, January 30, 1968, Smithsonian Archives of American Art).

Born in New York City and orphaned as an infant by the Spanish Flu, Copley was adopted by the politician and newspaper mogul Ira C. Copley, growing up between Illinois and California. Sent by his father to board at Phillis Andover then to Yale, he found the organization of these East Coast institutions suffocating, finding liberation only when drafted into the Second World War. Afterward, his brother-in-law John Ployart, a Disney animator, introduced him to Surrealism, and together they opened a California gallery devoted to the movement which quickly proved disastrous, selling only two paintings.

Introductions to Man Ray and Max Ernst while on the West Coast established lifelong friendships, which eased his path into Surrealist circles when he relocated to Paris following his second divorce. There he began to paint with the encouragement of Ernst and Marcel Duchamp. Interested less in Surrealism’s formal theories than in the movement’s approach to painting as metaphor, he began his lasting painterly exploration of what he described as “the tragedy of men and women” through humor and metaphor, which manifests magisterially in the present lot (op. cit.).