Lorna Simpson Brings Summer Blues to The Met

Simpson’s graceful swan dive into the depths of this hue represents an aesthetic evolution. In a catalogue essay titled ‘Accumulations: Lorna Simpson’s Paintings’, curator Lauren Rosati notes:

The ‘gravitational pull’ of the color is significant for Simpson, and she ascribes to this hue a range of associations, from Earth (our ‘blue marble’) to the musical blues (a form initially popularized by African American women like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith), to ‘“blue black” culture’, to the dark of night, to indigo as a cash crop tended by enslaved laborers, to a signal of a general mood. In some of her works, washes of Prussian blue and ultramarine move across the surface like portentous clouds of smoke.

At the Met, museumgoers are first greeted with True Value (2015), a beguilingly eccentric painting that reinterprets a fashion photograph, published in Jet magazine, featuring a chic model in a cheetah-print coat and dress, walking a cheetah on a leash. Simpson first reconceptualised this image in 2010 to create her collage In Furs, which playfully transposes the face of the model with the face of the animal. In True Value, the image goes through yet another transformation: the figures, with faces still switched, are depicted in front of a moody black, blue, and violet background, with photographic crop marks hovering around each of their countenances.

A blue and black background also features in Night Fall (2023), which might be considered the towering heroine of the exhibition. The piece depicts the bust of a woman (a Warhol-esque screenprint rendered in aquamarine) emerging from a cobalt-blue, upside-down waterfall, à la Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (mid-1480s). The subject’s frank, sensual gaze recalls that of Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863), and one imagines that there is a canny art-historical reformation at play. If this is Simpson’s Blue Period, perhaps it can also be expected that historic representations of women, particularly Black women, by European painters will also undergo a long-overdue symbolic evolution. Olympia famously envisions its white European subject as the enviable, albeit purchasable, object of desire, with her nearly faceless Black maid depicted as merely a prop to augment her value. Simpson’s Night Fall offers a stunning rebuttal.

Simpson’s first foray into painting, Three Figures (2014), also features water, though in this case it is used to remember the horrific events of the Children’s March. In May 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, high-pressure fire hoses were used to punish protesters—many of whom were children—for marching against the state’s racist and unjust segregation laws. Simpson’s black-and-white painting, composed of 12 individual canvases, reinterprets a press image from the event. Six connected canvases depict three protesters holding hands, likely in an attempt to stabilise one another against the torrent of water, against a background of protesters (the original photograph is uncredited, though there is a similar image of the same three protesters made by noted Civil Rights photographer Bob Adelman). The remaining six canvases at the left and bottom of the work appear almost as though they’ve been damaged with water, harking back to the terrifying deluge the protesters themselves experienced. —[O]

Main image: Lorna Simpson, For Beryl Wright (2021) (detail). Ink and screenprint on two gessoed fiberglass panels. 191.8 x 299.7 cm. Private Collection. © Lorna Simpson. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth. Photo: James Wang.