Sam Middleton (1927-2015)
1961
Mixed media and collage on paper
9 3/4″ x 13″

Sam Middleton was born in 1927 at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. As a child, he was immersed in music, and would listen to jazz rehearsals at the Savoy Ballroom from his fire escape. In the early 1950s, he moved downtown and took part in the growing artistic scene in Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. He befriended artists and beat writers, frequenting jazz clubs like The Five Spot Café where musicians Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, and Charlie Parker would perform. Middleton describes music as an escape from the oppression he faced as a young African-American man living in New York, as well as a source of inspiration and joy.

In 1955, Middleton settled briefly in Mexico City with a grant from the John Hay Whitney Museum, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1957. From there, he moved to Spain, then Sweden and Denmark, before finding a permanent home in the Netherlands in 1962. During this time, he produced his best known collages influenced by his early experiences in the art and jazz scene, of which the work is an excellent example. Middleton described his work as ‘improvised solo[s]’, borrowing the language of jazz musicians to create his works on paper. Middleton is quoted saying, “Music and musicians have taught me how to think about painting…I found that the lyricism I wanted, the fluidity I wanted, came easier with music than it did with talking to painters.”

He exhibited regularly from the 1960s to the 1980s in Europe and the United States. In 2003, he had a retrospective at the Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst in the Netherlands. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Columbia Museum Of Art, The St Louis Museum of Art, The Amistad Research Center, The Studio Museum, Fisk University Galleries, the Hampton University Museum, and the Howard University Museum, as well as museum collection in Australia, Israel, and the Netherlands.

This work exhibits Middleton’s signature style, with expressive marking and snippets from sheet music. Color moves across the paper, with splashes of cobalt blue and carmine. Signed in lower right corner. Displayed in a painted wood frame, 16 1/2″ x 20″.