Interview by Graham Lock
Sam Middleton was born in Harlem in 1927 and grew up near the Savoy Ballroom. In his teens he joined the merchant marine, traveled the globe, and later lived briefly in Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and Denmark before settling in the Netherlands, which has been his home since 1962. A self-taught artist, he has specialized in collage for most of his working life and has often taken music, especially jazz and blues, as his theme. He has also worked in the theatre and ballet, designing costumes and décor, and has painted for both book and record covers.
An associate of many other expatriate African American artists, including James Baldwin, Harvey Cropper, Ted Joans, Nina Simone, and Walter Williams, not to mention innumerable touring jazz musicians, he also became a close friend of the novelist John A. Williams (Night Song, The Man Who Cried I Am, Clifford’s Blues), who has written frequently on Middleton’s work for exhibition catalogues.1
I interviewed Sam Middleton in his studio in Schagen, the Netherlands, in February 2004.
SM: I grew up in Harlem and during my youth it was the hottest spot in New York. In the ’20s and ’30s the music was everywhere; all the cafés had a Wurlitzer or a jukebox or live musicians. In the ghettos there were rent parties. You always had a piano player like James P. Johnson or Fats Waller—his son Ed grew up with me. Music was a part of moving and breathing. Everybody knew somebody who played. It broke up in the ’40s with the beginning of the Second World War, because half of the musicians went to the army or got conscripted. But the music generated in Harlem also wound up, in thinner variations, up and down Broadway, where you had people like Gershwin and Cole Porter. So the music was a big part of my life.
It was not until the advent of Martin Luther King that I realized the music was an inimitable part of my whole form. But then, like art, music grows, your appetite grows. So, also in the ’40s I heard my first opera, Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. Then I started to listen to Stravinsky, who had another attitude about music and art. I had The Firebird attracting me in one direction, I had Duke Ellington in my heart attracting me, and I had Cole Porter and Broadway shows picking up on the music from my youth.
But I wanted to understand more of love and beauty than I had been exposed to in Harlem in the 1930s. There had to be more! Strange names started to come to my attention—Diaghilev, Sartre—in literature as much as anything. I kept thinking I was going somewhere, going somewhere.
GL: Was this connected to wanting to be an artist?
SM: No, no. I wanted to be a tailor. Because I wanted to be well dressed at all times, and I knew my family couldn’t afford to keep me that way. So, in high school, I went into…what do they call it now? Needle trades was the name in the late ’30s, early ’40s; now it’s gotten a new name like design technology, but it meant tailors, teaching you how to sew. [Laughs.] The last year, before graduating, you were expected to draw your own pattern for a costume or a jacket, cut it out, and make it. Well, from the time I started to draw from the model in school, I never put the pencil down. I enjoyed it more and more, but in the direction of fashion rather than an interest in art.
GL: You said a little earlier that you became aware in the 1950s that music was an inimitable part of your form. Can you explain what you meant by that?
SM: The music had grown during the war; it was like a pinnacle for young people to play, but they had gotten tired of being copied. Like with the old bluesmen later: you have an Elvis, who makes all the money and gets the attention, but basically, if you get underneath Elvis, what you get is Mississippi, black musicians playing for buckets of beer. Come the advent of bebop, they wanted to play something nobody else could copy. And they played things, what they called playing backwards, where they thought, heh, heh, copy this, if you can! Out of it all, as far I was concerned, as far as painting was concerned, I wanted to find something that was different too, that could not easily be copied. But I didn’t know how.
Then I began to be aware that most of the jazz musicians I enjoyed had their own identity on their particular instruments. If you go into a club and, while you’re still taking off your coat, you hear the saxophone, it’s “Yeah, Coleman Hawkins is in the house tonight.” They had their own thing. Ben Webster had his own tone, his own identity; nobody else played a song the way he played it. That was the point at which I realized that making paintings by copying from the Metropolitan, the way schools wanted you to, wasn’t going to give me a personality at all. I had to find something that was completely my own. And that, of course, is a question of hard work, trial and error; and a lot of heartbreak, a lot of tears, when you’re not able to get it together.
You continue to work, work, work, and then one day you look over your shoulder and realize, yeah, something different has gone into this work; and it has nothing to do with intelligence, it has to do with something spiritual—it must be me!
GL: Can you describe it? I mean, we can talk about the particular characteristics of Coleman Hawkins’s playing or Ben Webster’s playing: how would you describe the characteristics of your art, of your identity as a painter?
SM: That’s not an easy question to deal with. There are so many aspects; each is important, each has its own value. Franz Kline explained to me, you cannot put everything you know about painting into one painting. You have to leave something out. What you leave out is your personal choice. Of course, at the time Franz Kline was into Zen, a philosophy of stripping to the essential.
I started paying attention to people like Giacometti, who also gave you the essence of whatever was depicted. So the things you leave out are as important as the things you leave in.
GL: Still, there are certain stylistic characteristics to Ben Webster’s playing, like his use of wide vibrato. Or, say, Monk’s use of space. Do you think you have the same kind of signature touches in your work?
SM: I think so, yeah. But Monk was a master of space; where you involuntarily put things in that you expect to hear, even though the music’s silent at that moment. He leads you in and then he stops, and there you are! He also did this with musicians. I’ve been in clubs in the ’50s where Monk would lead the ensemble in and then when the saxophonist or whoever—at the times I’m thinking of, once it was Coltrane and once it was Johnny Griffin—when the saxophonist came in, Monk got up from the piano, went to the bar and had two or three drinks. The music was still going; the saxophonist was still out there soloing.
That forces you to think of, to do, something. It’s a heavy load; without knowing your craft, you fall apart. A person like Coltrane stood there and went into his own dream, same tempo, same idea, kept it going, repeating it, repeating it, once upside, once downside, once sideways. Monk was still drinking, but he was listening. Then he went back and they finished the tune together.
GL: You’ve done some collages of Monk. When you’re working on those, would his use of space affect the way you use space?
SM: It teaches me. Monk taught me not to be afraid to take a chance, not to be afraid of making a mistake. Duke Ellington taught me that within the bounds of the thirty-two-bar song, you can weave colors—but within a discipline. Louis Armstrong, when I think back on it, taught me a sense of humor and the pride to have while working. Your work is the interpretation of your free spirit, if you have one. Coltrane, coming after Monk, taught me you were permitted to go as far as you want to go as long as you remember the principle you started out with. Your original idea. You can wander, go as far left, right, up, down, or into a deeper color as long as you don’t forget where you started. Because you will have to come back to that to make it a complete, well-rounded piece of work. So, in this sense, music and musicians have taught me how to think about painting.
When I grew older and my tastes developed, Bach also taught me that you are permitted, within a discipline—yours, somebody else’s, whatever; the discipline of the size of the paper—within a discipline, you are permitted a freedom of movement, but be aware of what you started with. I can go through my entire music collection, my library, and I find music that teaches me and reminds me: Rachmaninoff reminds me you can be as flowery as you want to be but pay attention to what you are, because you can’t go outside yourself.
GL: Could you not have learned these lessons from painters?
SM: But I never went to art school, you see. I found that the lyricism I wanted, the fluidity I wanted, came easier to me with music than it did with talking to painters. It was listening to the music that taught me.
See, music was the only thing I trusted. In the sense of being factual and telling the truth. Don’t forget, I was born in a place where music was everywhere. I felt at home in music, around music. I asked for a trumpet when I was about nine or so, and my father bought me a bugle. [Laughs.] No keys! If he had given me a trumpet, I probably would’ve been a trumpet player, I don’t know. But the music was something that I understood, I trusted, I believed in. Like people believe in a religion, it gives you guidelines and discipline. Well, music gave me that. I began to apply it to whatever I was working on, and the music being on— which it always is in my studio—it still gives me guidelines and opens doors that I had not thought of before. It’s on, I’m working, and very often I’ll hear things I haven’t noticed before: a tune, an instrument, a change in the beat.
GL: Do you play music that relates to whatever you’re working on?
SM: Not very deliberately. When I walk in here in the morning, I’ll find something that I want to hear. I’m not looking for anything in particular, just something I expect to give me pleasure.
GL: So if you’re working on a collage to do with John Coltrane, say, you wouldn’t necessarily play his music while you’re working on it?
SM: No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that. But very often I’m working on something and I will put on Coltrane and he will show me, in sound, which way I should have gone in the first place. It was open—I didn’t see it! And then I will put in a piece of red that goes from point A to point B or something, and work with that. I respond to the music.
I feel like a soloist, an improvising soloist. He knows he’s got discipline, thirty-two bars to fill; the orchestration has carried him so far, then it stops and he has to stand there and fill the space. You fill it with what you are, what you know, what you think—and you make mistakes. But it doesn’t stop you, because you’ve got to fill that space. So I feel like an instrumentalist who, without paper, is doing the only thing he can—play! This is what I listen to in jazz improvisation. Very often, it’s logical, where he’s going. Sometimes there’s a turnaround, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong, just that he’s had another thought. That’s the freedom of expression that excites me. To be able to do that and still, when it’s finished, have a painting that you’re proud to send to the framer.
GL: Isn’t there a crucial difference because, in painting, you can go back and make an alteration? In music, if you’re improvising, you can’t do that: you can’t go back in time.
SM: But there’s a rhythm to painting. In music, it’s the beat. You have to do it within the tempo. Okay, you can make your own tempo when you’re making a painting or a collage, but you’re just as critical about the outcome. Like I said, you can always correct the mistakes. You make mistakes, and see them, and do something about them. That’s going back, yes. But the lesson I learned from Monk is, don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The most important thing is to have a focal point and go for it. The focal point being the painting you want to see.
GL: You stopped doing jazz-based collages for a while. Was there a reason?
SM: I stopped the jazz for a long time in the 1970s because people began to associate my being black with music to such an extent that I felt they thought I couldn’t do anything except jazz to be authentic. Like I was expected to do it, being black. Nor did I want to lean on jazz in order to make a profession out of it. So then I did ballet, ballet decors, and I did classical music collages. Now I just do whatever I’m thinking in the moment. But there were reasons for changing at different times. I wanted an identification tag but not that particular one. I wanted to be identified as a painter, that’s all. And I wanted to be universal.
GL: I’d like to ask you about this. I read a quote by you where you say, “I don’t believe in the existence of Black art. Art is art.”2
SM: Exactly.
GL: Well, what about music? Because you have a collage titled Black Music (Figure 5.1)
SM: That particular collage is identifiable with Mahalia Jackson and Duke Ellington, at a time when they were both alive and recording together. Duke had made a record of Black, Brown and Beige and she sang on it: “Come Sunday.”3 She hums, she doesn’t even have words for it, she just “mmmmm, mmmmm,” right. That, to me, is black music. So the two of them made that piece for me. I really wanted to call it Come Sunday, except that Come Sunday, translated in different languages, it can become messy and misleading. Yeah, I still have that record. “Come Sunday” was out of sight, baby.
Figure 5.1 Sam Middleton, Black Music. 1993. Collage, 80 cm × 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
GL: Still, the implication is that there is a black aesthetic in music—in jazz, blues, spirituals, et cetera—so isn’t it an anomaly not to see one in painting?
SM: Yes, but I did not want to be identified with that as being all I was doing or all I was able to do. I wanted my horizon for collage to go further than that. Into landscapes and waterscapes and interpretations of where I was living at the time. There’s no reason for that to be “jazzy.”
It gets to be annoying if, from country to country to country, when they begin to write about your work, it always comes back to the same thing. They tried to put me in a pocket.
GL: You returned to musical themes later?
SM: But very often I make it a point to include Vivaldi or Stravinsky or make a very obviously classical theme or classical title. Music is always there. I love music. Like I told you, it’s the one thing I trust.
GL: Which classical composers do you like?
SM: Bach! Mozart! Rachmaninoff! It depends what instrument, of course. My favorite instrument is a cello. It means, for me, Rostropovich. I like Schumann, Mendelssohn. I have a lot of music and I play it all, but at different times. A rainy day I’ll play one thing, a sunny day I’ll play something else. My studio, in my imagination, is like a holy temple, my refuge.
GL: When you listen to music, does it evoke, for you, colors, shapes?
SM: Colors, yes. Shapes, not always. Unless the shapes have a repetitive thing that has to do with tempo. I mean, six small balls that go up and down or in a scale-like pattern. But then I will tie them together with the stroke of a pencil or whatever.
GL: If you make a collage about a musician, do the colors and shapes on the canvas relate to how you hear their music?
SM: We work on it together. I’m listening to the music and I’m working up and down.
GL: Let me get this clear. You said earlier that you didn’t necessarily play the music of the person you were working on. If, say, you were working on a Duke Ellington collage, would the colors and shapes on the canvas relate to how you hear Ellington’s music or would they relate to whatever music you were playing at the time?
SM: Oh…well, I have a feeling, when I’m doing it, would Duke have done this in his orchestration? Would he have had such an abrupt change for no reason? In that sense, mentally, I play with it.
GL: Do you have any kind of system to relate sounds to colors, like C equals red or whatever?
SM: Not literally, no. I can’t, because then it gets too complicated for me. I would very easily forget where the thread is, ’cause you’d have to note it down as you go along and I’d rather these things be spontaneous. Or instinctive is a better word, maybe.
GL: How concerned are you with trying to capture the particular sound or style of a musician? For instance, if this collage didn’t include a photo of Monk, could I tell it was about Monk? (Figure 5.2)
SM: My composition, in my head, is something that I think he would play or he would have written. Could have written. Might write. But it’s my interpretation. Using his method of dealing with space. Then I do my thing with space, with the idea that Monk could have done this. But he would never do the kind of fluidity that I would give to an Ellington piece.
GL: I know you just compared yourself to an improvising soloist when you’re working, but presumably you already have some ideas before you begin the piece. For example, do you plan the basic structure of a piece in advance?
SM: Only the geometric underpainting. Like Rembrandt, you know? Underneath every Rembrandt painting, there’s an out-of-sight drawing. A geometric block-type drawing. Back space. See, you’re limited, horizontal and vertical. That’s your geometric problem to begin with. It wasn’t until the Second World War that people started just throwing paint on the wall and calling it a painting. [Laughs.] There are understructures to paintings, like Rembrandt’s, point-to-point drawings that broke the canvas into sections.
Geometry is the basis of life. There’s nothing that geometry has not played a part in. From as far back as the pyramids, baby—they didn’t just throw some stones up there. [Laughs.] No building goes up without the geometry being respected. Otherwise, you got more than the Leaning Tower of Pisa, you got it lying down! Things fall apart.
Figure 5.2 Sam Middleton, Monk Lost in Music. 2001. Collage, 80 cm × 110 cm. Courtesy of the artist.
You have to respect space. I block it out, then I think about the colors I intend to use, because colors can alter shape when they are too strong or unbalanced. So I do a lot of thinking about it. That’s what I do with the sketchbook. Then I put the sketchbook away and go to work.
GL: Do you work in layers? The geometry first, then big blocks of color, then details?
SM: It grows, it grows. The geometry is only the basis. It gives me my discipline. Then it grows.
GL: You said you learned chiefly from musicians, but were there no artists working in collage who influenced you?
SM: There were a couple of Italian guys back in the 1940s, Burri and Afro. Do you know them? [Fetches books.] They cut me loose, in terms of attitude.
GL: [Looking through books.] Oh, I like these Afros.
SM: Afro is out of sight, baby! [Laughs.] He taught me a lot about shape and form, a sense of structure. Burri, too. He was a prisoner of war who was sent to the States. See those collages he made with red paint and burlap? He was a doctor, a physician…see, it’s like a wound.
GL: It’s a rough surface?
SM: Yeah. For a long time I used to grind bricks into a powder and throw it into the paint to get some of that roughness, that textured approach. I didn’t want work that was polished and smooth.
There was another guy, too, Diebenkorn, I found years later. I liked his approach, though he was more involved with paint. He was in California in the ’50s, doing the same kind of thing the New York School was doing in Greenwich Village.
GL: You mentioned Franz Kline a little while ago. Did you know many of the abstract expressionists in New York?
SM: I knew Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, yes. Motherwell and I used to talk, but not about painting. We’d talk about poetry. We did a lot of talking in the Cedar Street Bar. With Franz Kline, he and I were talking about Zen; Motherwell was a shy, poetic type. We talked about books, reading. Like Camus; you know, books with some depth.
GL: You met in the Cedar rather than the Five Spot? Didn’t the jazz at the Five Spot attract artists?
SM: The Cedar was the meeting place for the entire New York School in the mid-1950s. The Five Spot was nearby; you could walk there, from Eighth Avenue down to Third. It had live jazz every night: good modern jazz. The Cedar was just a tavern—but the bartender who owned the joint very often took bad checks that he knew were bad. [Laughs.] So the Cedar became the gathering place for Village artists.
GL: Were there other black painters in those circles? Did you meet Norman Lewis? Or Romare Bearden?
SM: No. I didn’t know many black painters at that time. I never met Norman Lewis. Romare I met later in Europe and we became very good friends. He was beautiful!
You have to remember, I wasn’t a painter then; certainly not a good one. I was still on the boats. I had a studio but I could only paint when I got home; then I went back out to sea. But I only wanted to paint. There was an old man on the boats—he was the manager of a Harlem nightclub, very much my senior—and he’s the one who told me, if I was ever going to be serious about being a painter, I had to stop sailing. And it was Franz Kline who told me, before you break your heart, if you’re going to be a painter, you have to get out of New York. No gallery is going to take you, they only take one at a time. Same with writers and publishing houses. They’d put Langston Hughes into the bookshops; later it was James Baldwin—but one at a time.
GL: There’s an essay by John A. Williams, in which he suggests it was when you were at sea, staring at “the vast Atlantic sky,” that you began to think in terms of seeing sounds.4
SM: That’s possible. There was little to do at sea except read and dream. Daydream. Not so much about painting but getting lost in yourself, thinking. Like writers do, just staring, opening something inside. When there’s sea all around, you get accustomed to nothingness, except what’s inside your head. The baggage I brought onto the boat was all my memories of Harlem, the music; you can’t get rid of it, and I didn’t want to get rid of it, but it was the solitude I liked at sea. Solitude in the sense that I grew up in a ghetto in Harlem and, man, it was too tight, there were too many people. You never got a chance to be alone, to think—always kids, always people, always noise. Goddamn! Not for nothing I came to Holland and all I wanted to do when I got here was to find a place out in the country. Space! In tenements in New York, you don’t see this kind of space. Ever. Unless you go to Central Park. Or Rockaway Beach, then you can see the sea. [Laughs.]
Here, I learned to respect Dutch painting. Because of the light. It’s a different kind of light from anywhere else, and nothing’s changed really. They’ve put up more buildings, but it’s the same sky, the same flatness.
GL: How is the light here special?
SM: It’s a gray light that doesn’t change, and it’s the greatest thing for painting. If the sun is strong, like in the tropics, the light keeps changing: as the sun moves, from sunrise to sunset, the light is changing, the shadows are moving. It’s difficult to paint—especially when you’re working with color on white paper. In Holland, because it’s flat, there are fewer shadows, and there’s less sun here too. Normally, you get gray days, like today. I can work until 5 p.m. in winter, 6 p.m. in spring; the light will stay the same. It’s a silvery, soft gray, like a pearl gray: it gets a little lighter, a little darker, but it doesn’t really change. Oh, I love this kind of gray day!
GL: You’ve lived in Holland now for over forty years. Have you ever felt tempted to move back to New York?
SM: Never. I don’t think I left anything that I wanted to go back for.
GL: I thought I detected a nostalgic theme in some of your recent canvases. A couple of them have titles like Jazz Nostalgia.
SM: From my memory…yeah, okay. I don’t forget where I come from, but I don’t want to go back there. That I remember my roots is a plus for my work. I have a book, Harlem on My Mind, from an exhibition at the Metropolitan. It has photographs of Harlem from the ’30s, ’40s, ’50s—beautiful! I often look at it here in my studio, my shrine, and sometimes I cry. But every memory, all of my music, is here. There’s nothing to go back for.
To see more collages by Sam Middleton, including another take on Thelonious Monk as well as some examples of work inspired by classical music, please go to the Hearing Eye Web site at http://www.oup.com/us/thehearingeye.
1. See under Selected Works for some examples. The most comprehensive biographical essay on Middleton, however, is that by Claire Steinmetz in Sam Middleton: Jazz Voor Ogen: Images of Jazz (Venlo: Museum Van Bommel Van Dam Venlo, 1997).
2. Quoted in ibid., 9.
3. Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, featuring Mahalia Jackson, Black, Brown and Beige (Columbia CL 1162, 1958).
4. John A. Williams, “ ‘For Me, Improvisation Is a Galaxy of Color. When I Listen to Music I Feel Like a Soloist,’ ” Sam Middleton, exhibition catalogue (Amstelveen: Cultureel Centrum Amstelveen, 1987), n.p.
An Ocean Apart: American Artists Abroad. New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1983.
Sam Middleton. Amstelveen: Cultureel Centrum Amstelveen, 1987.
Sam Middleton: Mischief and Melancholy. Laren: Singer Museum, 1999.
Sam Middleton: Poems to Life. Amstelveen: Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, 2003. [Includes poems dedicated to Middleton by James Baldwin, Ted Joans, and others.]
Steinmetz, Claire. Sam Middleton: Jazz Voor Ogen: Images of Jazz. Venlo: Museum Van Bommel Van Dam Venlo, 1997. [This is a biography as well as an exhibition catalogue.]
Ellington, Duke, and His Orchestra. Featuring Mahalia Jackson. Black, Brown and Beige. LP. Columbia CL 1162, 1958.
Bush, Teresia. “African American Artists in Amsterdam: Sam Middleton Rediscovered.” International Review of African American Art 19.2 (2003): 2–17.
Williams, John A. “ ‘For Me, Improvisation Is a Galaxy of Color. When I Listen to Music I Feel Like a Soloist.’ ” In Sam Middleton. Amstelveen exhibition catalogue. N.p.
———. “Middleton.” In An Ocean Apart. Exhibition catalogue. 15–19.
———. “Painting in Sound.” Black American Literature Forum 19.1 (Spring 1985): 9–11.