Sam Szafran

Private Collection, Paris

Sotheby's, Paris, 3 December 2014, lot 23 (consigned by the above)

Private Collection, Paris (acquired at the above sale)

Private Collection, Paris (acquired from the above)

Christie's, Paris, 11 April 2025, lot 574

Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Sam Szafran was not one to bend to the dictates of his epoch, continuously charting a singular and uncompromising 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.

Sans Titre is a powerful testament to Szafran’s virtuosity: a consummate distillation of the artist’s forays into anamorphism, in which the fabric of reality fractures into oblique angles and disorientating cants. The artist’s touch is uncompromising in its forensic depiction of cacophonous fragments of a cityscape—stained windows, luscious grass, and strict building façades emerging across geometric apertures. These mirrors of reality reveal, reflect, and confront one another. While the inclination for geometric rationality reveals Szafran’s innate flair for figuration, sensations of vertigo, fear, and claustrophobia domineer, exemplifying his unique ability to fully exploit the potential of pictorial representation.

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)