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![Sam Szafran
Jean Clair
our themes in the work of Sam Szafran by Jean Clair The Enclosed Garden - This must be one of the most secret and poetic works of this period. Little is known of it because little of it has been shown.
It has not been honoured by any retrospective. Apart from a few abstract drawings of the fifties, it has remained decidedly figurative and, as such, has recently been judged “unclassifiable”.
Collectors of these works, including some representatives of the greatest French, British and American collections, hang on to them jealously. The studios - Szafran’s studios are firstly disasters. They are threatened by dark clouds, flooded by rain, covered in snow and ravaged by wind.
As a result of the storm, everything is pell-mell - furniture, trestles, tables, frames and leaves. The painter himself is caught up in the whirlwind. He is uprooted, cast out, rejected from the field of vision. All that remains to be seen of him is a hand, in the lower left corner which, like a seismographer records earthquakes and follows the progress of destruction. Thus, after much wandering, from Poland to Australia, Szafran rebuilt this home where, in the powdering of coloured dust, flow the milk and honey of this Canaan of which his pastels are made.
By treating the studio as a special and recurrent motif - not just the successive studios he had occupied in the Rue du Champs de Mars and the Rue de Crussol in Paris, and then the Rue Vinceni-Morris in Malakoff - but also the Bellini engraving workshop where the lithographs were printed, and the studios of certain friends such as that of the sculptor Raymond Mason, Szafran has returned to one of the richest themes that Western painting has created. Projected shadows - When you see Szafran manipulating leaves cut out of zinc then applying their shape to paper, drawing the outlines on blue paper tracings, one thinks of the stratagems of Chinese shadow theatres and Javanese puppets.
It is a whole fable carried from leaf to leaf based on an abuse of the senses, on illusion and on the essential emptiness of appearances. The serpentine line. Very early - since his first drawings - Szafran takes on the seductions of the serpentine line.
This is extraordinarily elegant, for example, in the Rocking Chair series which [he] slaps on the paper, develops broadly then imperatively delimits the border between light and night. What matter that it traces its path around a real object, the curved timbers of a Thonet armchair, the coils of a Gaudi bench or the sinuous rail of a staircase.
These are only the pretexts of an abstract game, of perfect mastery that enlivens the inanimate and that, with the vibration of the flagella, breathes the power of life into the inert. Sam Szafran lives and work in Paris. Jean Clair, Director of the Paris Picasso Museum, is the commissioner of the exhibition and the author of the exhibition catalogue.
Catalogue of the Szafran exhibition extensively documented by descriptive texts, biography, bibliography as well as the colour reproductions of all the works exhibited](tumblr_mbd6z1tvfw1riq0xpo1_400.jpg)
Sam Szafran
Jean Clair
our themes in the work of Sam Szafran by Jean Clair The Enclosed Garden - This must be one of the most secret and poetic works of this period. Little is known of it because little of it has been shown.
It has not been honoured by any retrospective. Apart from a few abstract drawings of the fifties, it has remained decidedly figurative and, as such, has recently been judged “unclassifiable”.
Collectors of these works, including some representatives of the greatest French, British and American collections, hang on to them jealously. The studios - Szafran’s studios are firstly disasters. They are threatened by dark clouds, flooded by rain, covered in snow and ravaged by wind.
As a result of the storm, everything is pell-mell - furniture, trestles, tables, frames and leaves. The painter himself is caught up in the whirlwind. He is uprooted, cast out, rejected from the field of vision. All that remains to be seen of him is a hand, in the lower left corner which, like a seismographer records earthquakes and follows the progress of destruction. Thus, after much wandering, from Poland to Australia, Szafran rebuilt this home where, in the powdering of coloured dust, flow the milk and honey of this Canaan of which his pastels are made.
By treating the studio as a special and recurrent motif - not just the successive studios he had occupied in the Rue du Champs de Mars and the Rue de Crussol in Paris, and then the Rue Vinceni-Morris in Malakoff - but also the Bellini engraving workshop where the lithographs were printed, and the studios of certain friends such as that of the sculptor Raymond Mason, Szafran has returned to one of the richest themes that Western painting has created. Projected shadows - When you see Szafran manipulating leaves cut out of zinc then applying their shape to paper, drawing the outlines on blue paper tracings, one thinks of the stratagems of Chinese shadow theatres and Javanese puppets.
It is a whole fable carried from leaf to leaf based on an abuse of the senses, on illusion and on the essential emptiness of appearances. The serpentine line. Very early - since his first drawings - Szafran takes on the seductions of the serpentine line.
This is extraordinarily elegant, for example, in the Rocking Chair series which [he] slaps on the paper, develops broadly then imperatively delimits the border between light and night. What matter that it traces its path around a real object, the curved timbers of a Thonet armchair, the coils of a Gaudi bench or the sinuous rail of a staircase.
These are only the pretexts of an abstract game, of perfect mastery that enlivens the inanimate and that, with the vibration of the flagella, breathes the power of life into the inert. Sam Szafran lives and work in Paris. Jean Clair, Director of the Paris Picasso Museum, is the commissioner of the exhibition and the author of the exhibition catalogue.
Catalogue of the Szafran exhibition extensively documented by descriptive texts, biography, bibliography as well as the colour reproductions of all the works exhibited
Livres | Fluate.net
Otlet's Shelf theme by Andrew LeClair & Rob Giampietro.