Sam Szafran

Private Collection, Europe (acquired directly from the artist)

Sotheby's, Paris, 18 October 2024, lot 133 (consigned by the above)

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Szafran; October - November 1980, n.p., no. 30, illustrated in an earlier state

Sam Szafran was not one to bend to the dictates of his epoch, continuously charting a singular and umcomprising course away from prevailing orthodoxies and championing figurative art at a time when the art world had all but cast it out. Born Sami Berger to a family of Polish Jewish immigrants, the young Szafran narrowly escaped the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup in 1942, only to be caught two years later and imprisoned in the Drancy concentration camp. After being freed by the Americans, he eventually made his way back to Paris where he developed a unique style of representation which tried to grapple with, and reclaim, the weight of reality. 

The recurring motif of the staircase lies at the heart of Szafran's formal inquiries into perspective and space – each iteration a quandary of light, harmony and spatiality. Depicted in the artist's characteristically meticulous, figurative style, the present Escalier is a masterful synecdoche of Szafran's broader oeuvre, triangulating discordant focal points to the result of dizzying heights and whirling sensations. The artist's meticulous and dramatic hand traces the dramatic gradients of shadow, the sweeping curve of the ramp, the rhythmic gaps and slits of the steps, before plunging the eye into the vertiginous descent of the stairwell. Such a technique cedes to anamorphism; the viewer finds himself simultaneously looking downward at the flights that lie ahead and forward at the supposed path already taken. The resulting sensations are akin to the vertigo, fear and claustrophobia of Alfred Hitchcock's films, which had served as refuges to Szafran from the early age of four. 

In his intimate worlds of unsettling proportion and vertiginous slant, Szafran appropriates reality while espousing the imaginary, staid figuration transcending the fiats of representation in a supreme act of liberation. Indeed, he asserted: "I always believed, as Alberto Giacometti used to say, that reality is much more powerful than utopia, dreams or fantasy. What was important for me was less to achieve a successful work than to give people the opportunity to look a little more closely. An artist's role was to provide an alternative regard, a regard that offers an alternative view." (Sam Szafran quoted in: Musée de l’Orangerie, Exh, Cat., Paris, Sam Szafran (1934-2019) Obsessions d’un peintre, 2022, p. 20)