Sam SZAFRAN

Throughout his career, Sam Szafran concentrated on a small range of subjects, notably views of the interiors of his studios and of staircases seen from above in steep perspectival foreshortening. The present sheet is part of a series of watercolours, for the most part painted on silk, which are devoted to views of the rooftops of Paris. (It may have been drawn from the window of the artist’s home and studio in a former foundry in the Parisian suburb of Malakoff, to which he moved in 1973.) Szafran began painting urban scenes in the early 1990s, initially with exterior views seen through the windows of the staircases that he was so fond of depicting, and gradually expanding to views of interior courtyards and rooftops. For these subjects he chose to work almost exclusively in watercolour, and often on a very large scale. As Szafran later recalled of his initial experiments with the watercolour medium, ‘the extraordinary potential of this living material that is watercolour became apparent. This led to the creation of a first series of works on paper, which Claude Bernard exhibited in 1987 in New York and Paris. After thirty years of charcoal and pastel, watercolour proved to be a particularly fruitful new medium.’

The present sheet is one of a number of watercolours of urban views by Szafran incorporating a distorted, anamorphic projection. Among comparable works of a similar theme and composition is a large watercolour 'Untitled (Malakoff)', painted in 2013, which recently appeared at auction in Paris, and a monumental 'Landscape in the Manner of Hokusai', executed in 1999 and today in the collection of the Fondation Pierre Giannada, Martigny.

The main part of the present composition is repeated in the upper section of a large pastel drawing of a distorted view of a staircase, executed in 2005 and now in a private collection.