?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
SAM MIDDLETON (1927 - 2015) Untitled.
Oil and sand on masonite board, 1962. 1143x533 mm; 45x21 inches. Signed and dated in oil, lower right.
Provenance: directly from the artist; private collection, Netherlands.
This rich abstraction is a significant oil painting by Sam Middleton - painted upon his move to the Netherlands, it is a very scarce example of an abstract painting in oil without collage by the artist.
After his 1944 wartime service with the Merchant Marines, Middleton first moved to Greenwich Village in New York where he became a regular at the Cedar Tavern and friends of Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline and was very influenced by the jazz scene. He left Harlem to avoid the frustrations of discrimination in the early 1950s. He then moved to Mexico in 1955, following the path of the expatriate artist Elizabeth Catlett, where he adopted his multimedia approach of paint, gouache and collage, and moved away from social realism. Two years later, he moved to Spain where in 1960 he exhibited at Gallery Silo in Madrid. He later left for Sweden, and Denmark, where he lived in Copenhagen, and joined many other American artists including, Harvey Cropper, Clifford Jackson, Walter Williams, and Herbert Gentry. In January of 1962, the artist finally settled in Amsterdam where he lived for the remainder of his career.
