A precocious child, Walter Augustus Simon became a well-educated adult with a multi-faceted career that included teaching in the South and California and serving in the United States foreign service. Though Simon's paintings largely reflected Cubist characteristics, his multicultural family and myriad areas of study led him to develop a unique modern international style.
Simon was born in Brooklyn, New York, and displayed an early interest (at age eleven) of painting portraits. In 1935 he received a certificate in commercial design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, which was founded “to provide an affordable college education to all students regardless of class, color or gender." Simon furthered his education in the fine arts towards the end of the 1930's with a certificate from the National Academy of Design.
His enrollment at New York University was short-lived because of a poor academic record. In 1940, shortly after marrying, Simon joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers. He earned a commission as second lieutenant in 1942 and spent time in Europe and Alaska during World War II.
In 1946, using the GI Bill, Simon pursued art history degrees at New York University, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1948, followed by a Master’s degree in 1950 and a PhD in 1961. Hale Woodruff became his mentor and supervised Simon’s master’s thesis, which used a variety of modern representational paintings to analytically catalog contemporary art movements. During this period and afterward he held various teaching positions at historically Black institutions, beginning with Georgia State College (now Savannah State College) where he organized the art education department and was a member of the curriculum committee. Between 1949 and 1953 Simon was professor of art education at Virginia State College (now Virginia State University) in Petersburg, and during the summers 1949 to 1951 he was chairman of the art education department at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University). These positions were followed by a stint (1952–1961) at Paterson State College (now the William Paterson University of New Jersey) in Wayne.
Simon's service in the military primed him for more international travel after he obtained his advanced degrees, this time with direct connections to the American Embassy. Between 1961 and 1969, he traveled from Cairo, Egypt to Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and finally to Kabul, Afghanistan leading various educational programs and affiliated with such institutions as the Fulbright Program.
Returning stateside, between 1969 and 1971 Simon served in an administrative position at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. He then became a professor of art history at Bloomsburg State College in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania (now Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania). He was also the director of the educational opportunity program there until 1977 when he was appointed Charles W. Florence Distinguished professor of art history at Virginia Union University in Richmond. Simon joined the NAACP in 1978 and wrote for The Crisis, their official magazine, founded in 1910 by W.E.B. Du Bois. Over his academic career Simon taught a broad range of subjects including the Harlem Renaissance, Ceylonese and Islamic art, as well as Cubism, having admired Pablo Picasso’s modern forms. The latter of which is evident in the multiple paintings he made of his New York apartment building on Washington Street, which also served as an artist salon.