Sam SZAFRAN

Between 1958 and 1965 Sam 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.’

In his first week of depicting cabbages in pastel, Szafran created eight large works, and he continued to work obsessively on the theme for the next few years. Early on, as he recalled, ‘I was seeing a cabbage, but drawing something that wasn’t a cabbage. One day I had the idea of looking at a cabbage through a thread-counter, and I realized that, between staring at something and simply looking at it, there was a world of difference. Through my thread-counter, I wasn’t seeing a cabbage, I was inside it, in the middle of the veins and the giant pigmentation. My eye did this quite naturally when I was looking at my cabbages, but no longer when I was looking at my sheet of paper. By dint of staring at the cabbages, my eye had developed like a sportsman’s muscle; it had become a thread-counter in its own right. But just as I was able to stare at the cabbages with my eyes, I still had to fix them on my paper. So everything changed for me. In the street, I no longer saw things in the same way. I finally understood the reasons for my determination to master the pastel technique, which, unconsciously, my eyes had already perceived. My pastels appeared to me in a new light. Through them, I could see the decomposition of colours. In oil painting, you take elementary or complementary colours and mix them together. You can’t mix pastel colours.’

As one writer has quoted the artist, referring to this period of his career, when he first began working in the medium of pastel: ‘If I had known what I was letting myself in for, admits Szafran, 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.’