Sam Middleton - Flying Code

Hand-signed gouache with pencil on paper.
The painting hung in the former town hall of Schermer in Stompetoren. This work can only be picked up.

Sam Middleton (1927 New York - 2015 Schagen) was one of the leading American artists of the 20th century who lived and worked in the Netherlands. A mixed-media artist whose preferred medium was collage, Middleton grew up in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. He was immersed in the vibrant cultural and musical scene of the time and was introduced to jazz music while performing at the Savoy Ballroom, which would remain a primary influence on his art throughout his career.
Middleton left New York briefly at the height of World War II, joining the Merchant Marines in 1944 at the age of 17, but returned to his hometown in the early 1950s. He immersed himself in the burgeoning artistic scene of Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side. Middleton initially frequented the Cedar Tavern and formed close friendships with New York School artists including Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell. His circle of beat writers and artist friends soon gravitated to The Five Spot Café on the Lower East Side, where jazz greats Cecil Taylor, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker performed nightly. During this decade, jazz, the music that had inspired him, was changing. Compositions were never played the same way twice. Musicians emphasized improvisation, spontaneity and creativity of sound. Middleton found inspiration in this new sound and worked to find his own creative voice. He said, “To me, improvisation is a galaxy of color. “When I listen to music, I feel like a soloist.” In his quest to 'paint sounds', Middleton was challenged by the changing tempo, the hint of melody and the speed and agility of the music.
In 1955, Middleton made his first artistic trip outside New York. Following the example of other African-American artists such as Charles White and Elisabeth Catlett who were seeking a more open-minded atmosphere than the pre-civil rights era, Middleton settled briefly in Mexico City. He had traveled there on a grant from the John Hay Whitney Museum that Franz Kline had helped him secure. In Mexico City, Middleton began working in collage and transformed his artistic outlook from social realism to expressionism. In 1957, he had his first one-man exhibition.
By 1959, Middleton had left the United States for good. He moved to Spain, then to Sweden and Denmark, before finding his permanent residence in the Netherlands and settling in Schagen in 1962. Influenced by modern artists such as Marcel Ducamp, Wassily Kadinsky and Piet Mondrian and Lucebert, the artist combined his experience and wealth in his collages.
He began teaching at Ateliers 63 in Haarlem and at the Royal Academy of Art in Den Bosch. He exhibited regularly, with shows throughout Scandinavia during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and had a retrospective at the Cobra Museum in 2003. Middleton's work is included in American museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Fisk University Galleries, Hampton University Museum, and Howard University Museum. His work is also included in international museum collections in Australia, Israel, and the Netherlands, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Van Bommel Van Dam Museum in Venlo. His collages were included in the Whitney Museum's pivotal 1962 exhibition, Forty Artists Under Forty, and twenty years later in the Studio Museum's exhibition An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad. His work continues to be shown in major exhibitions in both the United States and Europe, including the Whitney Museum's 2015 exhibition America Is Hard To See. Every scholarly publication on postwar African American art mentions Middleton's elegant and lyrical collages.

Source: dekunsthandel.nl