Sam Szafran at the top of the stairs

Be careful not to trip! In Sam Szafran's interiors, it's best to watch where you step. In his paintings too. The abundance of objects and vegetation is everywhere, not to mention the dizzying stairways. But in the Musée de l'Orangerie, everything is tidy. Almost too much so. The feeling of vertigo does not come from the scenography, but requires time for contemplation. The exhibition, which runs until 16 January, is definitely not called "Obsessions of a Painter" for nothing. Staircases, workshops, rhododendrons... And more staircases, workshops, rhododendrons... In about seventy paintings, the visitor is offered a complete overview of the now completed work of the French painter who died in 2019, and who frankly resembles no other.

As he himself said with a great deal of black humour: "The war saved me. I was emancipated at a very young age. Otherwise I would have been a tailor! Born Samuel Berger in 1934 in Paris into a family of Polish Jewish immigrants, the child miraculously escaped the Vel d'Hiv round-up and, despite a stint in the Drancy camp, managed to hide from host family to host family throughout France, until he embarked in 1947 in Marseille with his mother and sister for Australia. Her father and other family members were murdered in Auschwitz. Back in France in the early 1950s, poverty and mistreatment made him a street teenager, asocial and wild, with a hollow stomach and beset by all sorts of phobias. But definitely curious. He could do any job during the day, as long as he could go to drawing classes in the evening.

During his years of hardship, Sam Szafran lives in the porches and bistros of Saint-Germain-des-Prés or Montparnasse to avoid freezing to death, meets heroin... but survives everything. Poets, jazzmen and painters of the second School of Paris become her entourage. And she learns from them. As Elisabeth Védrenne wrote in Connaissance des arts, "his strongest friendship was with Alberto Giacometti, whose meeting and influence made him choose figuration. He also forged close ties with the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, an unlikely meeting between a small Polack Jew and the quintessential French bourgeoisie. Friendships will always be decisive. They are his window on the world.

Between 1953 and 1958, Sam Szafran attended the Académie de la Grande-Chaumière in Paris, where the American-born French painter and engraver Henri Goetz taught. He met the painters, sculptors and engravers Jacques Delahaye, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Ipousteguy, Orlando Pelayo, Nicolas de Staël, Joan Mitchell, Roseline Granet, Jean Tinguely... The resourceful and nosy kid even helped Yves Klein to make his famous "Klein blue"! His school was the street, his strength that of the self-taught. "He does not depend on any avant-garde, he knows he is singular and accepts that he is unclassifiable", writes the journalist from Connaissance des arts. Thus Sam Szafran can free himself from any diktat, and "leave abstraction without a qualm to turn to a figurative representation then abhorred by the majority of informal or abstract artists who gravitate around him".

He had made his first collages and abstract works by discovering the collages of Kurt Schwitters, the materialologies and texturologies of Jean Dubuffet, Hantaï and Bernard Réquichot. "His patience does not prevent him from grumbling incessantly or from lamenting. He digs his furrow, wants to be as free as the wind, at the price of a black misery", writes Elisabeth Védrenne. For it is difficult for Sam Szafran to enter the art market and to make his works of art known. From there to making pictorial concessions, there is a step that the artist refuses to take. He was given a box of pastels in 1960, a medium that was completely out of fashion at the time, and he insists on doing something with them. Because he only likes to confront difficulties. "Pastels resisted me for a very long time. This explains why I've worked so hard on it," the painter explained. One is either obsessive or one is not.

Thus Sam Szafran's pictorial vocabulary was born. In the seclusion of his studio. Away from the debates of his time. A painter's vocabulary, to which he would later have the audacity to add watercolour, on Chinese silk canvases. Imbued with his own psychic states, the worlds of his paintings are constructed like those of a mad architect à la Piranesi, "these spaces where he lives in a vacuum and which he metamorphoses into labyrinths, anamorphoses, vertigo, jungles..." writes Elisabeth Védrenne.

In the abundance of his studio representations, where we can even make out his pastel sticks, a human figure suddenly appears. Tiny but radiant. Lilette, a young Swiss woman who does tapestry and will become a graduate of Aubusson, has come into his life, "like an angel", Elisabeth Védrenne points out. They married in 1963 and gave birth to Sébastien, their son, who was severely disabled. "The tragic is never far away" in Sam Szafran's life, as the journalist from Connaissance des Arts notes. "Yet everything gradually falls into place, life becomes less precarious. Finally, an art dealer spotted the unclassifiable artist. In his art gallery, Claude Bernard now represents Sam Szafran and promotes his paintings for sale.

"He introduced him to Jacques Kerchache, the great collector of African objects, who organised a personal exhibition for him in 1965. He was finally able to work in the various refuge-workshops that were lent to him. From Zao Wou-Ki's studio on rue Jonquoy to the one on rue de Crussol and then to the Champ-de-Mars..." reads the article in Connaissance des arts. In the 1970s, Szafran and four associated friends took over an old lithograph factory on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, turning it into a workshop for young artists, where he met Arrabal and Topor, among others. At the end of the 19th century, lithographs by the poster artists Steinlen, Chéret and Lautrec were printed here, followed by cinema posters. This place inspired Szafran to create an important series of studio views that he named Imprimerie Bellini, in homage to the Venetian painter of the Renaissance.

For this singular artist, everything was a matter of looking. And of course, it was all about experience. For if stairs are so present in his work, it is perhaps because as a child he was once suspended in the void by an abusive uncle. And if he only paints enclosed spaces, it is perhaps because he knows the insecurity of wandering. "No one before me had ever done stairs, and I've always lived on stairs. It's the territorial, physical side, the survival, the little gangs of kids who hold a territory." The kid survived 85 years.