Sam Middleton

Sam Middleton (1927-2015) was one of the most distinctive American collage artists of the postwar era, whose jazz-inflected mixed-media compositions established him as a singular voice at the intersection of visual art and music. Born in Harlem, Middleton grew up in the vibrant African American cultural community that produced so many of the great figures of twentieth-century American music, and he developed a lifelong love of jazz that would remain the foundation of his artistic sensibility.

Middleton is said to have described what he does with his collages as "small stealing," which is an interesting way of looking at what collage artists do. Once you know that, you feel it when you look at a work like Modern Times, in which the gathering and reassembling of fragments from other visual sources becomes the whole subject of the picture. Early in his career of doing collage work, he put together elements that evoke the sights and sounds related to jazz music, translating the improvisational structure and layered rhythmic complexity of the music into visual form. He moved away from these musical subjects mid-way through his career and then returned to them in the 1980s, this time inspired by a broader range of music that included the great American songbook composers Rodgers and Hart and George Gershwin.

Middleton traveled extensively as a young man, spending time in Mexico and elsewhere before eventually settling in the Netherlands, where he would live for most of his adult life. His work found particularly enthusiastic audiences in Europe, and he became one of the most respected American expatriate artists working in Dutch and Northern European art communities during the second half of the twentieth century.

Middleton's mature collages combine found imagery, painted passages, printed materials, and calligraphic marks into carefully composed fields that reward extended looking. His work is held in significant collections in the United States and Europe, including major Dutch museums, and it remains among the most personal and musically resonant achievements in the American collage tradition. He continued to work productively until near the end of his life, leaving behind a body of work that captured the sound of American music through the visual language of postwar collage.