David Simpson (artist)
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David Simpson (born 1928) is an American abstract painter and educator, who lives in
Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...
. His work is associated with the minimalist,
monochrome A monochrome or monochromatic image, object or palette is composed of one color (or values of one color). Images using only shades of grey are called grayscale (typically digital) or black-and-white (typically analog). In physics, mon ...
, and color field movements. Since 1958, Simpson has had more than 70 solo exhibitions of his paintings in galleries and museums worldwide. His paintings have been included in hundreds of group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. During the early 1960s Simpson was included in two seminal group exhibitions: ''Americans 1963'' at the
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
in New York curated by Dorothy Canning Miller and Post-Painterly Abstraction curated by Clement Greenberg in 1964; that traveled to the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...
the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto.


Early life and education

David Simpson was born in
Pasadena, California Pasadena ( ) is a city in Los Angeles County, California, United States, northeast of downtown Los Angeles. It is the most populous city and the primary cultural center of the San Gabriel Valley. Old Pasadena is the city's original commerci ...
in 1928 to Frederick Simpson, an interior decorator and expert on 19th century fabrics and furniture and Mary Adeline White, a housewife. After Frederick died in 1936, Mary supported Simpson and his older brother, Robert, by working at the National Tuberculosis Association. In 1952, Simpson met art student Dolores Debus. The two were married the following year in Sierra Madre, California. Simpson has a stepson, Gregory Vose, born in 1949, and a daughter, Lisa Simpson, born in 1953. Simpson joined the
Navy A navy, naval force, military maritime fleet, war navy, or maritime force is the military branch, branch of a nation's armed forces principally designated for naval warfare, naval and amphibious warfare; namely, lake-borne, riverine, littoral z ...
in 1945, when he was seventeen-years-old. For three years, he served as a Hospital Corpsman stationed near the Mexican border in El Centro, California. After staying on an extra year to help fellow hospital staff with the repercussions of war, Simpson left the Navy in 1949.


Education

Simpson used payments from the
G.I. Bill The G.I. Bill, formally the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944, was a law that provided a range of benefits for some of the returning World War II veterans (commonly referred to as G.I. (military), G.I.s). The original G.I. Bill expired in ...
to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, earning his BFA in 1951. He went on to receive his Master of Arts from
San Francisco State University San Francisco State University (San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a Public university, public research university in San Francisco, California, United States. It was established in 1899 as the San Francisco State Normal School and is ...
(then San Francisco State College) in 1958. While in school, Simpson worked the graveyard shift at a gas station and managed the campus cafeteria to cover tuition costs. Simpson has said that studying under professors like
Clyfford Still Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American Painting, painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediat ...
, David Park, and Elmer Bischoff helped him realize that he, too, could make a living teaching and producing art.


The Six Gallery

In 1954, Simpson co-founded the Six Gallery at 3119 Fillmore Street in San Francisco alongside Wally Hedrick, a neo-expressionist painter and integral member of the Beat movement ; Deborah Remington, an abstract artist known for hard-edge painting abstraction; Jack Ryan, a poet; Hayward Ellis King, an artist who became the director of the Richmond Art Center, and Jack Spicer, a poet and faculty member at the San Francisco Art Institute. Before it was turned into one of the inaugural student-run cooperative galleries in the area, the space had been an auto-repair shop.
Herb Caen Herbert Eugene Caen (; April 3, 1916 February 1, 1997) was a San Francisco humorist and journalist whose daily columnist, column of local goings-on and insider gossip, social and political happenings, and offbeat puns and anecdotes—"A continuo ...
wrote in the ''
San Francisco Examiner The ''San Francisco Examiner'' is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and has been published since 1863. Once self-dubbed the "Monarch of the Dailies" by then-owner William Randolph Hearst and the flagship of the He ...
'' on September 26, 1954 that the Six Gallery was "sponsored by six people interested in art, music, poetry, integrity and other worthwhile things." Many well-known artists, including Joan Brown and Manuel Neri, held their first one-person shows at the Six Gallery. On October 7, 1955, Allen Ginsberg read his famous poem, " Howl" publicly for the first time at a reading at the Six Gallery."Howl's" future publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet Michael McClure, and
Jack Kerouac Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac (; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969), known as Jack Kerouac, was an American novelist and poet who, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, was a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Of French-Canadian ...
were in the audience, but Simpson, home sleeping after a night shift at his gas station job, missed the reading. The Six Gallery closed in 1957.


Connection with Jay Defeo

In 1953, Simpson and Dee lived in the same house as Hedrick and his wife, the artist Jay Defeo (best known for her ten-foot masterpiece, The Rose), on Bay Street in San Francisco. During that time, Simpson and Dee ran the San Francisco Art Institute's cafeteria to help with Simpson's tuition fees. During their shifts at the cafeteria, Defeo babysat the Simpson's newborn daughter, Lisa. Defeo, who worked in numerous mediums including drawing, collage, photography, jewelry, and sculpture, was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2013.


Academic work

In 1959, Simpson accepted a teaching position at the American River Junior College, near
Sacramento, California Sacramento ( or ; ; ) is the List of capitals in the United States, capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat, seat of Sacramento County, California, Sacramento County. Located at the confluence of the Sacramento Rive ...
, where he taught for two years before joining the teaching staff of Contra Costa Junior College in
San Pablo, California San Pablo (Spanish language, Spanish for "Paul the Apostle, Saint Paul") is an enclave city in Contra Costa County, California, Contra Costa County, California, United States. The population was 32,127 at the 2020 census. The current mayor is P ...
. In 1965. Simpson became an assistant professor in the art department of the
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
. Five years later, he was promoted to full professor with tenure. After teaching at Berkeley for twenty-five years, Simpson retired in 1990.


Career

Simpson has had three notable artistic periods during which he produced cohesive works of particular resonance and importance. These phases are the Landscape-Based Abstractions, the Relational Abstractions, and the Interference Paintings.


Landscape-based abstractions/horizontal stripe paintings (1955–1963)

"During the last several years I have been interested in paintings made up primarily of horizontal stripes and bands. Some of these appear as landscape—some as pure paintings. I've always been more interested in the painting than the landscape," –David Simpson, 1962. From the beginning of his career Simpson has described himself as a reductive rather than minimalist painter. His reductive, abstract landscapes of this period were inspired by the level earth floor and color-smeared sky of the Sacramento Valley. Simpson has related these works to "Indian blankets, or East-Indian madras, or the American tradition of landscape." Their abstract glazes and references to fog and sky caught the attention of the critic Clement Greenberg, who included Simpson in his seminal 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction at the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Page Museum). LACMA was founded in 1961 ...
alongside thirty other artists including Frank Stella, Thomas Downing, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ellsworth Kelly. In 1958, Simpson had the first solo exhibition of his career at the San Francisco Art Association gallery, and two years later he participated in the International Sky Festival in
Osaka, Japan is a designated city in the Kansai region of Honshu in Japan. It is the capital of and most populous city in Osaka Prefecture, and the third-most populous city in Japan, following the special wards of Tokyo and Yokohama. With a populatio ...
, both times showing his horizontal stripes paintings.


Relational abstractions (late 1970s–early 1980s)

"I placed blocks of color bands right around the edge of the painting instead of in the center. I wanted to keep the center open. t wasvery different from the traditional American landscapes I'd been doing earlier. I wanted to create space so you had room to breathe again in aesthetic terms. I likened them to dense fog pressed up against a window pane."—David Simpson Influenced by
Piet Mondrian Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (; 7 March 1872 – 1 February 1944), known after 1911 as Piet Mondrian (, , ), was a Dutch Painting, painter and Theory of art, art theoretician who is regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. He w ...
,
Mark Rothko Mark Rothko ( ; Markus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz until 1940; September 25, 1903February 25, 1970) was an American abstract art, abstract painter. He is best known for his color field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular reg ...
, and the
Russian avant-garde The Russian avant-garde was a large, influential wave of avant-garde modern art that flourished in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, approximately from 1890 to 1930—although some have placed its beginning as early as 1850 and its e ...
, Simpson's abstract paintings of the 1970s and 1980s consist of flat, color-blocked rectangles, squares and other geometric shapes seeming to vibrate from relational energy. These meticulously envisioned paintings involve minute spatial calculations. They depict vividly colored geometric configurations in push-pull interactions of marked reverberation and intensity. Particularly notable works from this period include ''Red Square'' (1974), ''Barrio'' (1979), ''Quatro Camino'', (1980), ''Five Square Rotation'', (1982), and ''Intra Muros'' (1983). About Simpson's ''Red Square''—which takes its name from Russian painter and geometric abstract art pioneer
Kazimir Malevich Kazimir Severinovich Malevich (
's famous ''
Red Square Red Square ( rus, Красная площадь, Krasnaya ploshchad', p=ˈkrasnəjə ˈploɕːɪtʲ) is one of the oldest and largest town square, squares in Moscow, Russia. It is located in Moscow's historic centre, along the eastern walls of ...
'' painting (1915)—Kenneth Baker wrote in 2001, "Each shape pulses with assertions of its own position and scale in the picture's internal space." In 2009, the Modernism Gallery in San Francisco held a solo show of Simpson's relational abstraction paintings.


Interference paintings (late 1980s–present)

In the late 1980s, Simpson began experimenting with interference paints, soon becoming fascinated with the mercurial characteristics of the medium. Interference paints, which have only six pigment variations containing micro-particles covered with titanium oxide, reflect and refract light, giving rise to nuances of color and optical illusions of depth. Using only one color pigment for each painting and a specially designed, hand-crafted trowel, Simpson applies on average about thirty coats of paint to each canvas, creating a modulated surface space with which the paint interacts in ripples and layers. In 2011, Simpson had his seventh solo show, Nonsense Poems, at the Haines Gallery in San Francisco, which featured 19 new interference paintings with one-syllable titles such as Blink and Ring. Three paintings of particular importance during this period are ''April First'' (2012), ''Enthrone'' (2013), and ''Mississippi'' (2012). Simpson has created hundreds of interference paintings since he began working with interference pigment more than twenty years ago.


Critics and collectors


The Panza collection

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo (1923-2010) was a pre-eminent contemporary art collector based in
Milan Milan ( , , ; ) is a city in northern Italy, regional capital of Lombardy, the largest city in Italy by urban area and the List of cities in Italy, second-most-populous city proper in Italy after Rome. The city proper has a population of nea ...
and Varese, Italy, and a major collector of Simpson's work. He began purchasing abstract expressionist pieces in the late 1950s before moving on to pop art,
minimalism In visual arts, music, and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...
, and conceptualism. He spent the following twenty years amassing one of the most important private collections of postwar American art in the world—over 2,500 pieces by artists including Dan Flavin, Carl Andre, and
Donald Judd Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism.Tate Modern websit"Tate Modern Past Exhibitions Donald Judd" Retrieved on February 19, 2009. In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for ...
. He exhibited the paintings in his 130-room villa in Varese, eventually even converting the stables into galleries for his growing collection. Dr. Panza bought his first Simpson painting in 1990. He went on to acquire over 140 of Simpson's works, mostly his earlier iridescent metallic paintings and then his later interference pigment paintings. Simpson has described Dr. Panza as simultaneously "supportive and critical, generous and parcimonious, ndvery opinionated." Dr. Panza died in 2010 at the age of 87. His home was turned into a public museum run by Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano, the Italian national trust, in 2000. Upon his death, Dr. Panza donated a large number of Simpson's interference paintings to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in
Buffalo, New York Buffalo is a Administrative divisions of New York (state), city in the U.S. state of New York (state), New York and county seat of Erie County, New York, Erie County. It lies in Western New York at the eastern end of Lake Erie, at the head of ...
.


Critical reception

"In the 1970s, Simpson's painting would have taken its place more readily in the narrower context of color-field abstraction, a tendency more associated with New York than the Bay Area. How lucid and soulful Simpson's big paintings of the period look today. They may appear to present themselves wholly at a glance, because they conceal nothing, but it takes time to size up how any one of these pictures operates in terms of color, composition or visual poetics."—Kenneth Baker. "Spending time with a David Simpson painting, one experiences shifts of light and color like that which happens when looking at the sky or ocean. Those transitions may appear subtle or spectacular, depending on a work's size and the conditions of its installation, but each canvas is active and also activates viewers in the space around it. In the mid 1980s, Simpson began working with interference paints, an acrylic coated in micro-particles of mica, which upon interacting with light, cause effects like the swirling spectrum of colors visible on the surfaces of oil puddles or soap bubbles. Simpson's skill with the medium is masterful."—Louis Grachos. "If anything, Simpson's paintings became more predictable before they grew less so. By the time he was preparing to leave for Sacramento, he'd cast aside cubism to make straightforwardly expressionist landscapes—thickets of childlike brushstrokes that were skillful exercises in the standard Bay Area style of the period. The transition that followed was both radical and natural. His surroundings completely changed, Simpson enlisted primitivism in a wholly new way. Specifically he took up the stacked structure commonly seen in children's drawings, which he ingeniously applied to the extreme horizontals of the Sacramento skyline? No longer was Simpson's primitivism a mannered affectation. It was fully internalized to his composition."— Jonathon Keats.


Survey book

In May 2016, Radius Books published a survey book of Simpson's life's work entitled, ''David Simpson Works 1965-2015''. Featuring essays and 120 color illustrations, the book traces Simpson's progression through numerous artistic phases. About the book Simpson has said, " tis an exquisite creation. It does a wonderful job of showing how my work varied and developed over the years." The survey book includes exhibition reviews from the Richmond Independent and the ''
San Francisco Chronicle The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. ...
'', as well as the transcription of a conversation between Simpson and the art critic Kenneth Baker.


Selected public and private collections

* Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York * Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland *
Colgate University Colgate University is a Private university, private college in Hamilton, New York, United States. The Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college was founded in 1819 as the Baptist Education Society of the State of New York ...
, Hamilton, New York * Columbia Broadcasting System, New York City, New York * Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California * David Owsley Museum of Art Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana * Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York *
Honolulu Museum of Art The Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts) is an art museum in Honolulu, Hawaii, Hawaii. The museum is the largest of its kind in the state, and was founded in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke. It has one of the largest single co ...
, Honolulu, HawaiiHonolulu Museum of Art wall label, ''Daybreak'' (study), 1995, accession TCM.2003.28.3 * IBM Corporation, San Jose, California * John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois * Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California * Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin *
Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...
, New York City, New York * National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC *
Oakland Museum of California Oakland is a city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area in the U.S. state of California. It is the county seat and most populous city in Alameda County, California, Alameda County, with a population of 440,646 in 2020. A major We ...
, Oakland, California * Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; Lugano, Switzerland *
Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMA) is an List of art museums#North America, art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at ...
, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania *
Phoenix Art Museum The Phoenix Art Museum is the largest art museum, museum for visual art in the southwest United States. Located in Phoenix, Arizona, the museum is . It displays international exhibitions alongside its comprehensive collection of more than 18,0 ...
, Phoenix, Arizona *
Reed College Reed College is a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, United States. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus in the Eastmoreland, Portland, Oregon, E ...
, Portland, Oregon * San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California * Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington * Shasta College, Redding, California *
University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
, California *
University of Nebraska A university () is an educational institution, institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly ...
, Lincoln, Nebraska


References


External links


ArtnetDavid Simpson - University of Wyoming Art Museum interviewPeyton Wright Gallery


{{DEFAULTSORT:Simpson, David Living people 1928 births 20th-century American painters American male painters Artists from the San Francisco Bay Area Painters from California Abstract expressionist artists American contemporary painters 20th-century American male artists Artists from Berkeley, California San Francisco State University alumni San Francisco Art Institute alumni