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New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Gretchen Dow Simpson, Creator of New Yorker Covers, Dies at 85
Gretchen Dow Simpson, an acclaimed Rhode Island painter whose moody, highly geometric images of seaside cottages, snow-covered farms and other totems of New England life drew comparisons to Edward Hopper and graced the covers of 58 issues of The New Yorker, died on April 11 at her home in Providence, R.I. She was 85. The cause was complications of Lewy body dementia, her daughter Megan Wolff said. Ms. Simpson was best known for her meditative images of the seaside and country architecture of the Northeastern seaboard — 'those rather Protestant exteriors and interiors that Edward Hopper was so taken with,' Carl Little wrote in 1997 in reviewing a Manhattan exhibition of her work for Art in America. While modest, solitary buildings were often her subject matter, Ms. Simpson's work was not purely representational. A former commercial photographer, she applied a telephoto approach to many of her paintings, zooming in on windows, doorways or rooftops to emphasize the juxtaposed angles and intersecting lines that characterized her work, giving it the feel of abstract art. As ARTnews noted in a 1995 review of an exhibition of her paintings, Ms. Simpson's 'emphasis on the solid geometry of the buildings as well as the planar geometry of surface decoration is further enlivened by the strong contrasts of light and shadow.' Her style became so recognizable that in 1993, Absolut Vodka included it in its celebrated series of print advertisements featuring the distinctive shape of its bottle in a series of playful themes, like the work of Andy Warhol or the sparkling swimming pools of Los Angeles. The 'Absolut Dow Simpson' ad, which fittingly ran on the back cover of The New Yorker, featured a haunting late-afternoon shadow in the shape of the bottle, cast upon a white clapboard wall. Over the years, Ms. Simpson's work was commissioned by The Atlantic Monthly (now The Atlantic), New York magazine and other publications, and featured in solo exhibitions in New England and New York City. But it was her two-decade run producing cover paintings for The New Yorker that most shaped her legacy. Even so, it took her almost a decade to break through. As she recounted on a 2011 radio program, she had been receiving rejection notes from the magazine for nine years before the art director, Lee Lorenz, called her into a meeting in 1974. As for the subject matter, she recalled, Mr. Lorenz told her, 'Paint what you like, not what you think we would like.' She ended up snapping a photograph of the hallway of a friend's apartment, which had an arched doorway, and using it as the basis of her first New Yorker painting, which appeared on the cover of the Aug. 19, 1974, issue. Ms. Simpson went on to produce 57 more covers for The New Yorker, attracting fan mail from readers around the country. 'They react in such a personal way that they write me letters telling me details about their family life,' she said in an interview with the magazine. 'They're practically inviting me to come in and eat the leftovers from their icebox.' Gretchen Hansell Dow was born on May 17, 1939, in Cambridge, Mass., the eldest of four children of Richard Dow, the director of a real estate firm, and Elizabeth (Sagendorph) Dow. After graduating from the Beaver Country Day School in Chestnut Hill, Mass., in 1957, she spent two years studying painting at the Rhode Island School of Design. She then moved to New York City, where she worked as a photographer at an advertising agency while pursuing her artistic ambitions. In 1968, she married John Simpson Jr., an actor, and the next year they moved to Waverly, Pa., near Scranton, where Ms. Simpson spent afternoons painting in a converted barn studio. The couple had two daughters before divorcing in 1982. Ms. Simpson settled in Providence in 1987. In 1989, just before her 50th birthday, Ms. Simpson tallied her 50th New Yorker cover, a close-up image of gold and silver dance shoes. It was a sly tribute to her midlife turn as a competitive ballroom dancer, whirling her six-foot-tall frame around the floor to achieve mastery in the fox trot, the tango, the cha-cha and other dances. While she 'hadn't done much dancing since my coming-out cotillion in Boston,' she said in a 1989 interview with The New York Times, she found satisfaction in dancing as both art and exercise. 'Jogging bores me, aerobics gives me a headache, tennis is too social and squash too claustrophobic,' she added. 'With ballroom dancing, you're using every muscle and along with that you have the plus of glamour and illusion.' In 2013, at age 73, Ms. Simpson married again, to James Baird, a retired Brown University chemistry professor. He survives her. Over the years, she unveiled a number of murals in Pawtucket, R.I., including a giant one on Interstate 95 of the interior of an industrial building. It's still there today. In addition to her husband and her daughter Megan, Ms. Simpson is survived by her other daughter, Phoebe Bean, and four grandchildren. Her long run at The New Yorker ended in 1993, the year after Tina Brown, the swashbuckling former editor of Vanity Fair, took over and ushered in a series of sweeping changes, including more topical and gag covers in place of the traditional stately ones that had served as artworks in their own right. As Ms. Simpson later recalled, Ms. Brown 'did buy one painting to be used as a cover, but only because it reminded her of her own property in the Hamptons.'
Boston Globe
04-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Jo Baer, minimalist painter who rejected abstraction, dies at 95
Advertisement Her diptych 'Horizontals Flanking, Large, Green Line,' which appeared in the Guggenheim show and which the museum later acquired, was typical of her work at the time. In it, two identical flat white fields are surrounded by thick black borders. A thin green line between white and black — the paintings' most important feature, according to Ms. Baer — adds an extra visual pop. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Other Baer paintings might use vertical bars instead of the all-around border or replace white with a carefully modulated gray. But all of them were just as rigorously stripped of anything that might evoke the sensual, emotional approach of 1950s-era abstract expressionism. After a midcareer retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, however, Ms. Baer left nonrepresentational art behind, along with New York City and, to an extent, her position in the art world. In Ireland, England, and finally Amsterdam, where she settled in 1984, Ms. Baer took up the figure, finding inspiration in cave paintings and ancient history. In collagelike compositions with off-white backgrounds and long, sometimes obscure titles, she painted horses, architecture, women, and men, and the occasional sexual situation. In 'The Rod Reversed (Mixing Memory and Desire),' from 1988, a faint blue woman and a songbird caught in midflight hang beneath what looks like a Japanese temple. In 'Moonstruck Armageddon (Meditation, on Predators and Prey),' from 2019-20, a series of sheep-faced female figures emerge along a colorful spiral, gaining detail and definition as they grow larger. Advertisement Ms. Baer explained her apparent about-face in a typically pugnacious letter, which Art in America published in 1983 as part of an issue looking back on the abstraction of the 1960s. 'Modern avant-garde art died in the seventh decade of the 20th century,' the letter begins. And though its argument, about the diminishing returns of abstraction and its conceptual progeny, is highly technical, Ms. Baer's conclusion was not: 'I am no longer an abstract artist.' Josephine Gail Kleinberg was born Aug. 7, 1929, in Seattle to Hortense (Kalisher) Kleinberg, who had earlier worked in fashion, making drawings for Vogue magazine in New York, and Lester Kleinberg, a commodities trader. 'When I was about 11 or so, she enrolled me in an art school,' Ms. Baer said of her mother in a 2003 interview with Art in America. 'But instead of getting to do landscapes and figures like the other students, I was put in another room and made to draw crabs or lobsters that she brought in for me to render. My mother had told them that I was going to be a medical illustrator, because there was a lot of money in it, and we were starting me early.' Ms. Baer was married three times: to Gerald L. Hanauer, whom she met while studying biology at the University of Washington; to screenwriter Richard Baer; and to painter John Wesley. She also lived and worked collaboratively with British artist Bruce Robbins in the late 1970s and early '80s. In addition to her son, an art adviser, she leaves two brothers, Lester Kleinberg Jr. and Dr. Henry Kleinberg; and a granddaughter. Advertisement After her successes of the 1960s and early 1970s, she shifted her focus. Eventually the pace of the New York scene, and the demands created by her success within it, helped persuade her to leave. 'People want you to keep doing what you've already done, because it makes money,' she explained in the 2003 interview. 'Once you've got a trademark, you're recognizable, and they want you to stay that way.' Though she never quite recovered the heat she had in New York, Ms. Baer's later career had its successes. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam gave her a career survey in 1999, and the Dia Center for the Arts in New York gave her another three years later. In 2019 she joined Pace Gallery, where her first show, in 2020, included new paintings and reconstructions, from photographs, of work she had destroyed in the 1960s. With the hindsight of later years, Ms. Baer became more inclined to find a through line in her own career. She noted a consistency in her use of color and questioned the kind of dogmatic separation of abstract and representational art that she and her peers had once taken for granted. But the truth may be as simple as that Ms. Baer, an uncompromising woman who also studied Greek, collected orchids, and spent the better part of a year as the chatelaine of a sprawling Norman castle in County Louth, Ireland, just found the austerity of early minimalism unsatisfying. 'I wanted more subject matter and more meaning,' she said in a 1987 interview. 'There was an awful lot going on in the world, and I didn't just want to sit there and draw straight lines.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
