Born Samuel Berger in Paris in 1934 to Polish immigrants, Sam Szafran took the maiden name of his mother when he began to sign his works in the 1960s. Although he was 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 two years later at the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. While his earliest work was based in abstraction, from around 1960 onwards he began to depict representational subjects, drawn in pastel, charcoal or watercolour. Content with studying a limited range of themes – notably studio interiors, staircases and plant forms – Szafran produced numerous drawings, each characterized by a very skillful handling of the medium and an abiding interest in perspectival effects.
Between 1958 and 1965, Szafran produced one of his first series of works in pastel, which also marked his turn from abstraction to figuration — a group of large-scale works depicting heads of cabbages. The vegetable reminded him of his youth, and in particular of trips with his father to the market in Paris, and 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 multicolored 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 twenty 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 also in Switzerland, but only rarely elsewhere. A retrospective exhibition of drawings, pastels, watercolours and sculptures was held at the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, Switzerland, in 1999-2000, and was followed by further retrospectives at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl in 2010-2011 and the Fondation Gianadda in 2013. Following Szafran’s death in 2019, a large commemorative exhibition at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris in 2022-2023 drew some 330,000 visitors. A permanent gallery devoted to Szafran’s work was established in 2015 at the Fondation Gianadda in Martigny, while other works by the artist are today in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Centre National d’Art Contemporain, the Musée d’Orsay and the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.
