Merton Simpson of Charleston, South Carolina.
Spiral-member; artist; dealer, jazz musician: Will the real Merton Simpson please stand up?
My birth certificate lists Iowa as my state of origin, so I join the nation in mourning the end of the Caitlin Clark’s college career—but why not celebrate the end of March Madness by saluting South Carolina with a look at one of its native sons—the Charleston-born painter, dealer, and impresario, Merton Simpson?
II. Who was Merton Simpson?
“I had the good fortune of growing up in Charleston when [William Halsey] was the top artist in the region, what a blessing.”1
It’s a characteristically Simpsonian optimism: on the one hand, the young Simpson was able to study privately with a great teacher in Halsey, a synthesizer of the array of new ideas of modern painting in 1941. A less positive perspective was that Simpson had to take lessons privately: South Carolina was fully segregated until 1963, and practically segregated until 1970, so Simpson couldn’t enroll at the all-white school. When Halsey worked with Laura Bragg,2 the head of the Charleston Museum, to give his most talented pupil his first solo show in 1949, Halsey and Bragg had to hold two receptions: “One for whites and one for whites who didn’t mind coming to a reception with blacks.” This was a leitmotif across his career: while he was talented at navigating nearly-impenetrable systems, Simpson nonetheless found himself telling a story of Black excellence to a largely segregated audience.
On the heels of his first solo show in Charleston, he landed a fellowship to study in New York. He spent the fellowship award on tuition at NYU and when he was accepted for tuition-free Cooper Union under Robert Gwathmey, he shifted his NYU classes to the evening to study at both schools. Landing as he did in the Village in the late 1940s, he soaked up Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline—and he learned what people were collecting. He learned that the raw, gestural expressionism he was developing had an audience—but also that tribal African art remained a growth sector for the same collectors. Devotional and ceremonial objects had inspired early European modernists, and interest was growing. Simpson saw an available intersection between the gestures of Motherwell and Kline and African tribal art. Both seemed present and relevant to his work, and there seemed to be a gap in the discourse that he might fill. He became a dealer of both: traditional African objects and cutting-edge African-American canvases.
“You might say I started this gallery out of economic reasons,” he told Black Enterprise in 1978. “It sort of grew out of hand.”3 ‘Out of hand’ meant commercial success—but it was also the enshrinement of the existing stratification: he feared that most Black collectors were priced out. He was pleased at the progress made by 1978, when he observed that “today’s generation of young people have a greater interest in the art of Africa than did the young people of my day. And that’s a good thing.”4
Simpson developed his relationships with the international community of African-diaspora modernists. Visiting expats James Baldwin and Beauford Delaney in Paris in the 1960s became an object lesson that another way was possible. The next decade, he would travel through Africa—sourcing material and connecting with the changing world—but between these periods of horizon-expanding travel, he accepted Romare Bearden’s invitation to join the Spiral group.
III. The Trouble with Spiral.
Every artist has to wear several hats from time to time. Marcel Duchamp was an advisor and a chess player in the long stretches when he wasn’t creating; Fairfield Porter was a revered art critic throughout his career; and virtually everyone successful with a brush has spent time teaching, curating, and networking.
But the market does not generally reward the attempt to wear two hats at once. If you want to write or teach and paint, fair enough, but if you want to deal and paint—well, the twentieth century wants you to choose your passion. Betty Parsons’s career as a painter became a footnote to her extraordinary career as a dealer; Alfred Stieglitz makes most of his appearances in these pages as a dealer—and beyond those two, most dealer-artists had their hyphenate-nature hammered into shape. Leo Castelli wanted Jasper Johns to spend his time being Jasper Johns, and Jasper Johns wanted Leo Castelli to spend his time being Castelli.
Who was Merton Simpson’s Castelli? He’d have to be his own.
For the members of Spiral, the artwork was innovative, the artists were serious,5 but then as now there was very small limelight and few opportunities to step into it. In the early 1960s, artist-run galleries proliferated in New York6—a symptom of this patchy coverage—but you can imagine the dire need for institutional architecture that motivated artists of color to collaborate with one another in the 1960s. Their dealers were telling them to avoid social issues, to lean hard on abstraction; Jasper Johns was just being told to paint.
Simpson is a great and under-sung pillar of this moment. He used any available strategy—curatorial, creative, literary, social—to fan the embers of that underserved community—and we haven’t even mentioned his work as a jazz musician. His career is worth considering as a whole, rather than as a collection of un-resolved pieces.
Thanks for reading,
Jonathan
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
Merton D. Simpson, as quoted in William Halsey: Mastery of the Modern, 2006, p. 9.
Bragg was herself a noteworthy figure: the first woman to run a public American museum, and an ardent progressive, Bragg must have been sympathetic to young Simpson’s journey and helped as she could to get him to a place that appreciated his voice.
“Merton Simpson: Prophet for Profit,” in Black Enterprise, October 1978, p. 89.
Black Enterprise, 1978, p. 89.
See our article on Bearden and Spiral here and our article on Norman Lewis here.
See our article about some of them here.