Sam Middleton, born in 1927, grew up in Harlem at the height of the Harlem Renaissance. He joined the U.S. Merchant Marines in 1944 to see the world, came back to a Greenwich Village loft in 1950, and eventually counted among his friends a cohort of black artists including Walter Williams, Clifford Jackson, Harvey Cropper, and Herb Gentry, as well as painters Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. A frequent patron of the Five Spot jazz club, Middleton rubbed elbows with musicians Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane, and they would remain a primary influence on his art throughout his career. 
 
In 1960, Middleton was selected for the pivotal Whitney exhibition Young America 1960: Thirty American Painters Under Thirty-Six.  Others in this selection included Alex Katz, Joan Brown, Ron Gorchov, and Wolf Kahn.  Four of his works were selected for this show, three of which were collages.  In 1962, Middleton was selected again to participate in the Whitney's 40 Artists Under 40 exhibition where he shared the wall with Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Theodore Stamos.  Middleton's Out Chorus was selected for this show -- a watercolor and tempera on collage mounted to board -- and it remains in the Whitney's permanent collection (see a picture of the work above). 
 
The work for sale here, Thelonious, was created shortly after Out Chorus in the same size and with same materials, and it captures the same incredible energy and harmonius balance with its distinctly jazz reference. Sam often described his collage as "an improvised solo".  There is no better an example of that than Thelonious.
 
Sadly, despite the skill and recognition that landed Middleton among the greatest artists in New York at that time, he struggled with persistent racism and joined a wave of African American artists who moved to Europe to pursue life and art free from the abuse.  He quickly became a well-known figure of the Dutch art scene, associated with the country’s 1960’s Pop Art and a frequent collaborator with cutting-edge graphic designers. Though he initially planned to stay in the Netherlands only briefly, Middleton ultimately chose to call it home until his passing in 2015. His works are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum in New York and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others.  But he remains largely under-recongnized here in the United States today.
 
This is a very unique opportunity to own a piece of art, and jazz, history!