Look With Your Eyes: Sam Szafran

I think about my Instagram scrolling like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, falling a long long way. But I don't feel bad and mindless, I feel good-lost in the beautiful and thoughtful (and sometimes properly mindless) things people create. I find so many artists to love on Instagram.

Months ago, a fashion magazine archivist I follow, Julien Baulu, was at a museum and took photos of some paintings by Sam Szafran. I took a screen shot (as you do), and later got off my phone to get on a computer so that I could keep falling down that particular rabbit burrow. Sam Szafran turns out to be fascinating and a bit difficult to find information about.

Those of you with Central Asia fibers in your beings will recognize right away the components that drew me in. And yet the facts, from what I can discover, are unrelated, in as much as anything on a rather small planet can be.

(2019)

There's a documentary about his life that is still in peer-review (I know because I tracked down the director on Instagram). Here's some information from the Kickstarter page for the documentary:

"Born in 1934 in Le Marais, the Jewish ghetto in Paris, his father, uncles and aunts all perished in nazi camps. He himself was among the few children to have miraculously survived the Vel d'Hiv Round-up, in which 13,000 French Jews were herded into a cycling stadium. Aged 10 he was arrested again and imprisoned briefly in an internment camp before American troops liberated it. After the war, living down and out on the Left Bank, he overcame a heroin addiction."

He was creating until his death in September of 2019, but he seems little known outside of Paris where his works have almost exclusively been shown. His work is primarily in chalk pastels (his pastel board from his studio appears many times in his work, it often looks like a quilt to me!). I'm also so interested in the limit of his subject matter, primarily his studio, hallways and stairwells, and his plants. Over and over again. And it doesn't get old to look at. I'm enamored with the composition of this blue one.

(2006)

(2012)

(2015)

I especially like looking at the treatment of the floor areas in these works. I have an idea of how he did it, but I don't know for sure. 

I admire artists who dwell on the same scenes endlessly. The work is no less beautiful, but I can not fathom the mental focus. I am not sure if the person in the ikat-looking robe in these pieces is the artist, his wife Lilette, or someone else. 

One of my favorites (above), titled "ATELIER DE RAYMOND MASON, 2004"

Here are some photos of his studio and the scale of his work at a gallery.

Photo by Manolo Mylonas

Photo from here. 

Here is a photograph of Szafran and his friend, the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (well worth his own blog post) taken by Martine Franck in 2003. I love it. Sam owned more than 200 prints of Henri's photos that Henri had given to him, the subjects of the exhibition of Henri's work that the photo below was also displayed at. Knowing about Sam Szafran and his work feels like owning a small and secret glowing treasure.