Alain Veinstein's Conversations with Sam Szafran Published by Flammarion

Flammarion has released a book of conversations between writer Alain Veinstein and painter Sam Szafran. Born in 1934 to Polish Jewish parents, Szafran survived the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup thanks to his aunt, emigrated to Australia for three and a half years, and lived as a vagabond. After failing the entrance exam for the Beaux-Arts, he chose painting over a life of crime. Initially drawn to abstraction, he turned to figuration following a 1961 meeting with Alberto Giacometti. His companions included Henri Cartier-Bresson, Chet Baker, Antoine Blondin, Raymond Mason, Jean-Paul Riopelle, and tightrope walker Philippe Petit. Szafran describes a painting to be made as an equation, citing cinema's sequential influence, his relationship with Surrealism and Dada, and an obsession with time and failure. Veinstein notes Szafran seems subject to unknown forces. His relentless stair paintings evoke vertigo, while studio plants—like a philodendron branch found in a trash can on rue Saint-Benoît in 1970—have grown continuously. Szafran now works on Chinese silk that preserves pastel's dryness and watercolor's humidity. The book is a pavane of the artist before his studio; only in the final meeting does he allow Veinstein to enter the space where he fights as if on a battlefield.