“Lock up a department store today, open the door after a hundred years and you will have a Museum of Modern Art,” Andy Warhol said in 1985. I imagine the year 2985: In search of culture, a band of cyborgs breaks out the revolving doors of some abandoned Bloomingdale’s and roams the sales floor, their flashlight beams falling bluely on strange inventory that, in all its courtly, hard-edged majesty, looks a little like the sculptures of Diane Simpson.
The Academy of Arts and Letters is not a dystopian Bloomingdale’s but an uptown Beaux Arts jewel box off the 1 train where Simpson, aged ninety, is having her first institutional solo show in New York (on view through February 8). For four decades, this art-world ronin has transformed details of architecture and apparel—a peplum, an art deco window display, an Elizabethan bodice, a piece of samurai armor—into otherworldly structures hewn from humble materials like cardboard, MDF, and linoleum. These forms are rendered in skewed axonometric perspective, as are the meticulous hand-drawn blueprints they’re based on (marvels …
