Born Samuel Berger in Paris to Polish immigrants, Sam Szafran took the maiden name of his mother when he began signing his works in the 1960s. Although briefly enrolled at the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris in the mid-1950s, Szafran was largely self-taught as an artist. He exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1957 and at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles two years later.
While Szafran’s earliest work was based on abstraction, he began to depict representational subjects – drawn in pastel, charcoal or watercolour – from around 1960 onwards. Though he seemed to have been content with studying a limited range of themes, notably studio interiors, staircases and plant forms, Szafran also produced numerous drawings, each characterised by a very skilful handling of the medium and an abiding interest in perspectival effects.
Between 1958 and 1965, Szafran produced one of his first series of pastel works – large-scale creations depicting heads of cabbages – which also marked his turn from abstraction to figuration. (ECKART ASIA has one of these works in its collection.) The vegetable reminded him of his youth when he would take trips with his father to the market in Paris. It was also likely a staple of his diet during the penurious years of his early career. As one scholar has noted, ‘the artist executed numerous variations on heads of cabbage, a vegetable familiar to him from his childhood…In 1961-62, the nourishing and cheap post-war vegetable became the young artist’s study object of preference.’
When Szafran began working in the medium of pastel he said, ‘If I had known what I was letting myself in for, I probably would never have bought my first box of pastels. I found myself in 1958, fresh from abstract art, in front of these little multicoloured sticks like a poverty-stricken child in a Belgian or Swiss delicatessen amidst an abundance of candy and cakes, and I seized them without even thinking. For 20 years, I threw myself into this technique because I was incapable of mastering it.’
From 1965, Szafran’s work was exhibited extensively in France and Switzerland, and rarely elsewhere. A retrospective exhibition of his drawings, pastels, watercolours and sculptures was held at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland from 1999 to 2000 and another in 2013, and was followed by further retrospectives at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, Germany from 2010 to 2011. Following Szafran’s death in 2019, a large commemorative exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris from 2022 to 2023 drew some 330,000 visitors. A permanent gallery devoted to Szafran’s work was established in 2015 at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda. Other works by the artist are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Musée d’Orsay and Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.
