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  David Simpson “Little Ibicenco” – California Hard-Edge Abstract painting 1979

  DAVID SIMPSON (1928-) California, US

  “Little Ibicenco” – California Hard-Edge Abstract painting 1979

  Acrylic on canvas

  Marks: David Simpson (script signature) on back of canvas, 1979, #14/79 “Little Ibicenco”, two arrows

  H: 29″ x W: 28 3/4″

  David Simpson has explored varieties of abstraction since the early 1950s, enjoying acknowledgement and success in the art world. In 1963 he was chosen by New York’s Museum of Modern Art curator, Dorothy Miller, to appear in what turned out to be the last in her legendary series of group shows of contemporary American art. In 1964 he appeared in Clement Greenberg’s famous exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction at Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At that time Simpson painted landscape-derived abstractions and, in the 70s, he practiced a reductive but relational mode of abstraction. But with his discovery of a new acrylic medium in 1987, he was able to embrace finally and successfully the monochrome’s radicality.

  Simpson uses an acrylic paint with interference properties. The paint is composed of titanium dioxide electronically coated with mica particles. Simpson tends to mix complementaries, but admits that orange and blue also work together well. He also mixes black acrylic with the interference pigments, finding that a little bit of black helps the colour jump out. Interference pigments cause optical effects that are comparable to iridescence. When you look at the painting from one angle, you receive one set of colour sensations. When you shift your position, you get another. As you move back and forth in front of the canvas – and the paintings make you want to do so – the experience changes. The change of light also dramatically affects the optical experience, and the play of light across the canvas surface is subtly kinetic.

  ***David Simpson was associated with the California Hard-Edge Movement.

  Hard Edge Abstraction:
  It encompasses rich solid colors, neatness of surface, and arranged forms all over the canvas. The Hard-edge painting style is related to Geometric abstraction, Post-painterly Abstraction, and Color Field painting. Hard edge is also a simply descriptive term, as applicable to past works as to future artistic production. The term refers to the abrupt transition across “hard edges” from one color area to another color area. Color within “color areas” is generally consistent, that is, homogenous. Hard-edged painting can be both figurative or nonrepresentational.

  Important solo exhibitions include: Studio la Città, Verona (2008); Light Wells +, Charlotte Jackson Fine Art, Santa Fe (2007-08); Sonta Roesch Gallery, Houston (2007); Light Wells, Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2007); Iridescent Interference, Gallery Sonja Roesch, Houston (2005); Surrealist Landscape and other Departures, Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2005); Cheryl Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2004); James Kelly Contemporary, Santa Fe (2003); Artotek, Köln (2002); Renate Schröder Galerie, Köln (2002); Renate Schröder Galerie, Köln (2001); Studio la Città, Verona (2001); Modernism Gallery, San Francisco (2001); University Art Museum, San Francisco (2000); Renate Schröder Galerie, Köln (2000); Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2000).

  Important group shows include: Galerie Lausberg, Dusseldorf (2007); West Coast Abstraction, Modernism Gallery, San Francisco (2007);  Fundamental Abstraction, Haines Gallery, San Francisco (2007); The Panza Collection – An experience in light colour, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, with catalogue (2007); Inneres Leuchten-Farbe als Malerei, Kunstverein Lingen Kunsthalle, Lingen (2005); Recent Paintings, Galleria G7, Bologna (2005); Je ne Regrette Rien, Studio la Città, Verona (2005); The Forman Collection, Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo (2005); Modernism Gallery, San Francisco (2004); San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2004); Albright Knox Art Gallery, N.Y. (2003); La percezione dello spazio , Palazzo della Gran Guardia, Verona (2002); Le stanze dell’arte , MART, Rovereto (curated by Gabriella Belli) (2002); Artisti americani ed europei dalla collezione Panza , Palazzo Ducale, Sassuolo (2001); Nebeneinander III (Painting Today – Overseas and Here ), Galerie Renate Schröder, Köln, with catalogue (2001); La collezione Panza di Biumo: artisti degli anni ’80 – ’90 , Museo del Palazzo Ducale, Gubbio, with catalogue (1997).

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  Stephen Longstreet “Jazz Festival Trio – Night Faces”, Paper cut-out, mixed media and paper collage

  STEPHEN LONGSTREET (1907-2002)

  “Jazz Festival Trio – Night Faces” c. 1970’s

  Paper cut-out, mixed media and paper collage

  Signed: Longstreet (lower right), titled in pencil (upper left)

  Artist’s printed address label verso

  H: 38″ x W: 28 3/8″

  Stephen Longstreet was born on April 18, 1907 in New York City and attended Rutgers University (1926) and Harvard University (1927), and graduated from the New York School of Fine and Applied Art (1929); also studied in Paris with Matisse and Bonnard, as well as in Rome, London and Berlin; became painter, writer, art critic, and lecturer on art; literary critic for Reader’s Syndicate (1952-80) and for the Los Angeles Daily News; designed stage sets for RexRoth poetry jazz, 1952; president, Los Angeles Art Association. (1972-75); professor of modern writing, University of Southern California (1975-80); wrote radio plays, screenplays, and dozens of books ranging from novels to biography to travel, including: Decade, 1929-1939 (1940), The Pedlocks: A Family (1951), Gettysburg (1961), The World Revisited (1953), and The Real Jazz, Old and New (1956).

  The world of jazz was a constant theme throughout Longstreet’s life.
  Longstreet was introduced to ragtime and jazz by future singing legend Paul Robeson, then an All-American football player at Rutgers University. Their friendship began in 1918, when Robeson spotted the 11-year-old Longstreet sketching him as he practiced dropkicking. In his 1986 book “Storyville to Harlem: Fifty Years in the Jazz Scene,” Longstreet explained that Robeson made him “aware of the gap between the music taught on paper and the ‘razzmatazz’ sounds of the scratchy jazz recordings.” While studying at the School of Fine and Applied Arts in New York in the late ’20s, Longstreet drew the musical scenes in Greenwich Village, the speak-easies and the Cotton Club in Harlem. “I had hoped to capture with black marks on white paper, this music created by these people, and set down what they looked like, felt and did before they were gone,” he later wrote. By the late ’20s, Longstreet was furthering his artistic studies in Paris, where he met Picasso, Matisse and other artists. He also met and drew James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and the American “jazzmen” who were, he later wrote, “escaping from Judge Lynch and the back of the bus.” After returning to the United States in 1930, he traveled south to New Orleans, discovering the “strange and wonderful sounds” of jazzmen playing in Storyville, the city’s red light district, and capturing them in his work. He later drew and painted Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday, Duke Ellington and other jazz greats. Of Longstreet’s depictions of the century’s jazz scene, Louis Armstrong wrote in 1971: “You want to feel the smell–the color–the great ‘OH MY’ feeling of the jazzmen, and stomp around in the smoke and dusk of the joints … then you just go and locate some of the drawings and paintings of this cat Steve Longstreet and steal you a few.”

  Over the years, Longstreet’s jazz-era works, including collages, watercolors and ink drawings, were exhibited in museums and galleries, including the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution. The University of Chicago Library, The Graphic Arts Collection and Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at Princeton University Library, as well as UCLA all have extensive collections of Longstreet’s artwork.