Sam Szafran

Exhibited by Stephen Ongpin Fine Art

Material Watercolour over a pencil underdrawing, on a page from a large sketchbook.

Dimensions 43 × 47.5 cm

Status Vetted

About the Work

Born Samuel Berger in 1934 to Polish Jewish immigrants and raised in the area of Les Halles in Paris, Sam Szafran was imprisoned as a child at the Drancy internment camp during the Occupation. Following the Liberation he lived for some years with his mother and sister in Australia before returning to Paris in 1951, at the age of seventeen. He attended evening drawing classes and became friendly with a number of artists, including Jean Arp, Yves Klein, Joan Miro and Jean-Paul Riopelle, as well as Alberto Giacometti. Although he was briefly enrolled at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris in the mid-1950s, Szafran was largely self-taught as an artist. He took the maiden name of his mother when he began to sign his works, and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1957 and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles two years later.

While his earliest works were based in abstraction, from around 1960 onwards Szafran began to depict representational subjects, drawn in pastel or charcoal and, from the late 1970s onwards, watercolour. Content with studying a limited range of themes - notably studio interiors, staircases and plant forms - he produced numerous drawings, each characterized by a very skillful handling of the medium and an abiding interest in perspectival effects.

From 1965, when Szafran had his first solo exhibition, his work was exhibited extensively in France, and in Switzerland, but only rarely elsewhere. Throughout much of the artist’s career, his work was acquired by a coterie of enthusiastic and devoted collectors. In 2015 a permanent gallery devoted to Szafran’s work was established at the Fondation Gianadda in Martigny in Switzerland, while other works by the artist are today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Musée Cantini in Marseille, and elsewhere.

The present sheet is part of a series of watercolours, for the most part painted on silk, which are devoted to views of the rooftops of Paris. (It may have been drawn from the window of the artist’s home and studio in a former foundry in the Parisian suburb of Malakoff, to which he moved in 1973.) Szafran began painting urban scenes in the early 1990s, initially with exterior views seen through the windows of the staircases, and gradually expanding to views of interior courtyards and rooftops. For these subjects he chose to work almost exclusively in watercolour, and often on a very large scale.

One of a number of watercolours of urban views by Szafran incorporating a distorted, anamorphic projection, the main part of the present composition is repeated in the upper section of a large pastel drawing executed in 2005 and now in a private collection, and again at the top of a pastel on silk drawing of c.2011, in the collection of the artist’s widow Lilette Szafran.

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