With his lustfully erotic, utterly indecent depictions, William N. Copley rebelled against the conventions of the post-war period and established a singular position in figurative painting, combining elements of American Pop Art with characteristics of European Surrealism. Since his youth, the adopted son of a wealthy newspaper magnate had been the black sheep in his conservative family. The eccentric autodidact only began his artistic career in the mid-1940s and moved to Paris in the early 1950s, where he escaped from prudish, Puritan American society and refined his painting style.

In the mid-1960s, Copley found his unmistakable style: a narrative pictorial language with round forms, strong contour lines, bright colors, a spatiality based on the surface, and often obscene and frivolous motifs from every aspect of human sexuality. The artist developed a vocabulary of recurring motifs, including the male figure with a hat (bowler hat), the naked or half-naked woman, the hugging couple, and numerous other elements of the "X-Rated" series works, to which "Maltese Falcon" belongs. The motifs he uses come from pornographic magazines that Copley transforms into painterly explorations of the human body and sexual acts against opulent backgrounds reminiscent of Matisse in his own stylized visual language. The artist explains: "For me, it's a very simple thing, pornography has to do with repression, and eroticism with fantasy [..]. I am trying to break through the barrier of pornography into the area of joy." (William N. Copley in conversation with Sam Hunter, in: exhib. cat. CPLY. X-Rated, New York Cultural Center, New York 1974)

The style and iconography of these works originate in part from American everyday culture and contain influences from the graphic imagery of comics, contemporary advertisements, and. The titles also refer to Hollywood films, such as "Monsieur Verdou" (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, film from 1947), "Come Back Little Sheba" (Collezione Prada, Milan, film from 1952) or the work offered here, "Maltese Falcon" named after the 1941 film (The Trail of the Falcon; directed by John Huston, starring Humphrey Bogart).
In 1974, the painting was part of the much-discussed solo exhibition "X-Rated" at the New York Cultural Center. [CH]