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100-10, by 1958, oil on Masonite, signed and titled verso, 22 x 30 inches, presented in its original frame
$8,500
New Jersey-based, Marshall S. Simpson and Roslynn E. Middleman formed an unusually innovative artistic team. Separated by a generation and a half, the two painters combined forces during the 1950s to create a body of slick hard-edged paintings referencing their interpretations of light and space, particularly of the night sky. Together, they created some of the nation’s first Op Art, combining science, mathematics and painting. Their work was popular with many of their compositions serving as advertisements for the aircraft manufacturer Boeing Company in Scientific American and other publications.
The son of an architect/engineer, Marshall Shoemaker Simpson, was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. He was raised in Newark and attended the Choate School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dissatisfied with engineering, Simpson began his career as an artist in the early 1920s after attending the Art Students League in New York, where he studied with John Sloan, Maurice Sterne, and Guy Pene Du Bois. After marrying in 1925, Simpson and his bride, Gertrude Woodcock, moved to France where Simpson continued his art education until their return to the United States in 1929. Working from his studio in Monmouth County, New Jersey, Simpson began to show regularly in Newark and New York City art galleries. By the 1940s, Simpson also lectured and served as a student advisor at the Newark School of Fine & Industrial Art.
Roslynn Estelle Middleman was born in Philadelphia, but was raised mainly in Plainfield, New Jersey, where she graduated from the local high school in 1947. Middleman first attended the New Jersey College for Women in New Brunswick (now part of Rutgers University), but then became an honor student and graduate of the Newark art school where she met Simpson. Among her teachers were Wladyslaw Benda, Reuben Nakian, and Bernard Gussow.
The Simpson-Middleman artistic partnership began around 1949 when a “chance conversation with Simpson, then a member of staff, in the school cafeteria, revealed a community of aims. Both were stirred by new vistas and possibilities in art that modern science offered. . . . A decision to join forces was made and toasted with lukewarm coffee,” Roslynn Middleman recalled in a 1954 interview. Simpson and Middleman shared a studio at 65 William Street in Newark where they collaboratively worked out new forms of nonobjective painting informed by optics, math, engineering and science. The duo held their first major show in 1951, at New York’s Rose Fried Gallery. In connection with this exhibition, the artists wrote: "Let us assume an area in which the arts and sciences overlap. This assumption is not altogether arbitrary, for there is evidence that such an area exists. The paintings shown here are the present results of explorations in this area. In the course of these explorations, the working methods of the scientist have been employed, and the resources of the artist have been used to communicate information that has been obtained.”
Their works were selected for inclusion in significant exhibitions during the remainder of the 1950s, including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Montclair Art Museum and the Newark Museum. In 1955, thirty-three of Simpson-Middleman’s works were included in a show at New York’s John Heller Gallery. In connection with this exhibition, a critic wrote, "Simpson-Middleman is the collaborative signature of Marshall Simpson and Roslyn [sic] Middleman, who work together on their pictures and here present new paintings done in the past two years. They are sharply linear in the definition of planes and employ a scientific precision of light in abstractions which are occasioned by sentiment and idea rather than by analysis of object or space. Thus they relate more to the Futurists than to the Cubists, though their impulse is toward stasis rather than motion. They have an intimacy not often found in this style, as if flat rectangles and triangles of clear color were drifting like birds through an interior, or as if a doorway were viewed through corrugated glass; but this is a response, not a suggestion of the work. Some have the pure, almost sterile, look of water–which is a pleasant visual experience in itself.”
Two years later, a second exhibition of twenty-two works was held at the John Heller Gallery, but the collaboration was cut short in 1958 when Simpson passed away. Both Simpson and Middleman are listed in Who Was Who in American Art and other standard references.
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