?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 5,000
SAM MIDDLETON (1927 - 2015) Drawing #12.
Tempera, brush and ink and gouache on textured cream wove paper, 1959. 508x597 mm; 20x23 inches. Signed and dated in ink, lower right.
Provenance: private collection, New York.
With an unidentified gallery label ink stamped with the artist's name, his West Broadway address and the supplied title.
This dynamic abstract composition is a scarce example of Sam Middleton's painting in New York before moving to Europe. After his 1944 wartime service with the Merchant Marines, Middleton moved to Greenwich Village in New York. A part of the Village scene in the early 1950s, according to his obiturary in The New York Times, he became a regular at the Cedar Tavern and friends of Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline. Middleton then moved in 1955 to Mexico, following the path of Elizabeth Catlett, and where he adopted his signature technique of paint, gouache and collage. In the 1960s, he moved first to Spain, then Sweden, and Denmark, where he lived in Copenhagen, and joined many other American expat artists including Clifford Jackson, Walter Williams and Herbert Gentry. In 1962, he settled in Holland where he lived in Amsterdam for the remainder of his career.
