Sam Maitin FA’51, the beloved Philadelphia artist and Gazette stalwart who died in December, left behind an extraordinary body of work (some of which is now on display on campus in a show planned before his death), a loving family, devoted friends, and many, many memories.
By Samuel Hughes | Photography by Greg Benson
Color never dies. A poster might fade, an outdoor mural might dull from sun and rain, flowers rot, but color always finds some new and joyfully subversive way to burst out and dazzle the eye.
Sam Maitin FA’51, whose death in late December shocked the art world in Philadelphia and beyond, was an astonishing conduit of color and form, wielding it like a delighted child who happened to be a serious craftsman. “The real business of art to me is to play with form, shape, and color,” he said in a 1999 interview. And what interested him was “this joy of just putting color, texture, and shape together in an experimental way.” Note the words: play and joy. To Maitin, words were an inspiration and a part of his technique, written in a vigorous, open hand across his posters and murals and collages, giving voice to wonder.
“I seek out the delightful in life,” he told the Gazette in 1987. “Like I.B. Singer, I believe that life is a series of small miracles. And I think it’s important to express this vision. I try to nurture the child in me—the innocence, the curiosity, the originality, the exultant primitivism.”
There has always been good cause for us to write about Maitin—his wildly prolific output in a slew of forms and media; his generosity to causes and friends; his long and giving involvement with Penn. He’s been a mainstay of the Gazette for more than three decades, both as the subject of feature articles (including “Sam Maitin’s Sistine Chapel,” May/June 2001) and as the illustrator of some 20 eye-delighting covers.
There are two immediate reasons to write about him now. One is the exhibition—“Sam Maitin: A Life in Art”—which opened last month at the Arthur Ross Gallery and at the Steinhardt Hall Gallery of Penn Hillel and runs through April 17. (Another show will open later at the Burrison Gallery at the Faculty Club.) Both the exhibition and the title were chosen before he found out, in early November, that he was terminally ill with cancer.
That thunderbolt from a sunny sky is the other reason. Death has a way of bringing people together—and summoning memories.
Lilyan Maitin and her daughter Ani Maitin Nu’96 GNu’99 are sitting at the kitchen table in the Maitins’ Pine Street house, talking quietly about the husband and father, artist and mensch who once warmed it with his presence. If that table could talk, it would have a lot of stories to tell, of the many artists and poets and friends who came for advice and help and stories and jokes and laughter …
“This was how we grew up, doing the most interesting things at the kitchen table,” says Ani. “I was thinking about what a public person my dad was, and how a lot of people whose parents are public people don’t see them much. He brought people—the public—into the house. The most interesting people! It was like an underground society. If an artist came to Philadelphia, my dad would help him.
“I never resented having to share my dad with so many other people,” she said a couple of weeks later at the Annenberg Center’s Zellerbach Theatre, which was filled with hundreds of old friends and admirers. “He was more present in the lives of many of my friends than their own fathers were.”
“He shared everything,” Lilyan adds. “So many times people came in and picked his brain. He was always helpful; he had so many ideas.”
Now it’s quiet, and through the window, whirling snow is dusting the branches of a tree in the garden. A question stirs a memory of some bus-shelter posters that Sam made for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance in the early 1980s.
“They were huge, huge, illuminated posters on vellum,” Lilyan says. “People were calling Sam and saying, ‘My God! I was on a dark road in the far Northeast and I saw your artwork illuminated at night!’” A word-image worthy of William Carlos Williams M’06 Hon’52.
Here’s another: a SEPTA bus drove past Lilyan near their house not long after Sam died. Some familiar colors, in the form of a poster he had designed for the Jefferson Hospital Philadelphia Distance Run, flamed tropically across the bus’s rump. She snapped a photograph; the bus drove on. The tropical flames remain.
Posters for bus-shelters, murals for CHOP and public pools, the streaking eagle (with “We the people” emblazoned in Maitin’s familiar handwriting) created for the bicentennial of the signing of the Constitution in 1987—all were part of a worldview in which art was very much of and by and for the people. “Humanism,” he told the Gazette that year, “shouldn’t be distasteful in art.”
“What I hate is this whole elitist concept of art, that it’s something precious and ethereal, when art is actually part of life,” he added.
“He really believed that art should be all around,” says Lilyan firmly. “It should be available to everybody. Anti-elitist is definitely the right term.” So is anti-drab.
“You could see the evolution of shapes and prints,” notes Lilyan. “They were always sort of rounded, and he always had a great sense of color, and the posters that he did, and the artwork that he did in the sixties-—I mean, Philadelphia was so staid, and all of a sudden there were these bursts of color!”
She laughs, quietly. “I always said that if I hadn’t married him, I would have been one of his biggest collectors.”
Though he has been known primarily as a Philadelphia artist, with the hint of limitation that comes with the label, he was anything but provincial. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to England in 1968, he worked at the Curwen Art Studio in London, and was a guest lecturer and instructor at Kent Art College in Canterbury and Camberwell Art College in London, as well as Brevard College in North Carolina. He had numerous opportunities to move to New York (including once when he was offered the opportunity to redesign Time magazine). In addition to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, some of his pieces can be found in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian Institution. He had major exhibitions in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo, and a 66-foot tapestry hangs at the Tai Chang Tap Factory in Shanghai, delighting the more perceptive workers.
Sometimes his work would turn up in the most unexpected places.
“Somebody called him from somewhere in Mexico, when they were having a demonstration against something or other,” recounts Lilyan. “He told Sam, ‘I looked across the square, and there was a flatbed truck with a whole lot of kids standing on it, and one of them was wearing one of your T-shirts from the School of Arts and Sciences!’” Yet he was deeply devoted to Philadelphia, that “eccentric, marvelous” city that he loved in spite of its provinciality and the fact that it often “kills its artists.” The English artist and writer Paul Hogarth was told by five different people in various European cities that he should contact Maitin when he was preparing his Walking Tour of Philadelphia, part of a series of such books, because Maitin knew the city and its people so well.
“You can’t be a Philadelphian without crossing paths with Sam and coming into his aura,” says Dr. Dilys Winegrad Gr’70, director and curator of the Arthur Ross Gallery. “He was such a generous spirit, I think.” When she and Maitin and others were casting about for a title for the current exhibition, someone had suggested a more playful, “cutesy” name, she recalled. “I just started saying, ‘Well, what about “A Life in Art”’—not a life ofart but a life that’s fully lived in art. And so it stays quite relevant, unfortunately.”
“Implicit in all Maitin’s work is the way they communicate how precious life is and why it should be treasured,” wrote Dr. Burton Wasserman in a preview of the show that appeared in the journal Art Matters. “Innocently child-like, it is also brilliantly sophisticated, never childish or shallow.”
“This is about how there is an endurable quality to the creative output of the man,” Winegrad added. “Having gone over the mourning feeling that we’ve shared, this is an opportunity for people—collectors, family, friends, artists, students, colleagues—to all come together and feel that it’s the right thing to do. That, indeed, you can meet over art.”
Penn Hillel was also delighted to be a part of the exhibition. “The show developed out of the tremendous admiration we have for Sam, both as an artist and as a human being,” said Rabbi Howard Alpert, executive director of Hillel of Greater Philadelphia. “First, I like his work—many people in Philadelphia, including individuals connected with Hillel, simply like Sam’s work. Secondly, we loved Sam. He was an individual who placed his humanity and the humanity of others as his highest priority, and acted to improve the life of those around him. In Hebrew we would call him a neshama—just a wonderful soul.”
The exhibition encompasses a broad range of his work from six decades, ranging from etchings and a gouache from the 1950s to “peace prints” he made with poets C.K. Williams C’59 and LeRoi Jones (aka Amiri Baraka) to a side-wall “sketch” of a mural for CHOP to several multi-media masks dubbed “Members of the Mob,” and much more. “Having evolved a style that was all his own,” noted Wasserman, “Sam Maitin refreshed the forms with endless variation. The result is a degree of virtuosity reserved by the muses for the mightiest creative masters of contemporary art.”
Certainly Maitin was protean in the range of forms and media he worked in. He may still be best known as a terrific printmaker, which in some art circles may be a backhanded compliment, but he was far more than that. In 1971, when he had a retrospective at the Fleisher Art Memorial in South Philadelphia (where he had taken many classes as a high-school student), he had an epiphany while looking at a wall of his prints. “I realized that I always layered things in my works (such as the process of printmaking),” he said in a 1999 interview. That realization that he had been “putting things on top of things”—drawing or painting on top of pieces he’d printed—led to collage, a process he described as “intuitive, frantic, and very quick—that’s my nature.”
It was, he later said, a “liberating” process, even though his pieces were always “carefully considered.”
“I start with the idea that there are no rules at all—there’s the eye,” he said. “A sense for color—there are vital decisions to be made even in the most chaotic piece. The image is in flux up to the last second.” Years later, another retrospective led to his color-splashed sculptural cut-outs. “I think of them as color in three dimensions,” he told the Gazette in 1987. He had been invited to have a retrospective at a gallery, and having done some color-on-color collages, “I wanted the color to be in three dimensions,” he recalled. “So I developed some cut-outs from numerous drawings and put them all over the room. And when they were compressed, as they appeared to be from certain perspectives throughout the gallery, they looked like the collages on the wall. The people who came to see the show would browse around the gallery—and it was as if they were walking around in my paintings!”
At the time of his death, he was working on a mural for the new home of Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum. The connection with children was deep and life-long.
“There seemed to be an innate sense of trust with kids in his presence,” said Ian Maitin, Sam’s nephew. “It was not unusual to find him on all fours, so as to engage the kids eye-to-eye, and better to relate to them. He had the ability to dream and think and create like a child, with boundless imagination.”
Maitin was just a kid of 16 when he started moonlighting as a night student at Penn, 60 years ago this fall. At the time, he was also attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (now University of the Arts) on a scholarship.
“I took academic courses at night under the aegis of the fine-arts school,” he recalled in 1987. So many subjects grabbed his interest—zoology, botany, history, art history (even though he described one professor of art history as “semi-fascistic”)—that he accumulated something like 130 credits over a six-year period, nearly enough for a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. “I remembered Dean Coyle calling me in, and saying, ‘Well, you’re on your way to an MA. Do you want an MA?’” he recalled a few years ago. “And I said, ‘God, no,’ and he said, ‘Well, get out of here. You’ve finished your work.’”
Two Penn institutions in particular played an important role for him. One was the Annenberg School for Communication, where he headed the Visual Graphics Communication Laboratory from 1965 to 1972. His playful, heart-cheering polychrome dimensional mural, “Celebration,” fills the entire east wall of the school’s lobby, commissioned 30 years ago by the late Walter Annenberg W’31 Hon’66 and his wife, the Hon. Leonore Annenberg Hon’85. In 2001 the school gave him the Merrill Panitt Citizenship Award for his contributions to the art world and to Penn.
The other was the Christian Association, which he always treasured for its caring tolerance at a time when Jews were not always so warmly welcomed. “As a Jew, I love the CA because it has always frowned on quotas and protected minorities,” he told the Gazette a few years ago.
In 1983, the CA’s executive director, Ralph Moore, commissioned Maitin to paint an 18- x 8-foot mural.
“I went to study the space and the light,” Maitin later recalled. “There was a Penn student standing on one foot, meditating. I realized that this room, which Ralph called the Chapel of Reconciliation, was for everybody.” It took him two years and 100 sketches to paint the mural. During that time he built a sort of trolley in his studio, climbed aboard, and had Lilyan push him back and forth while he painted on the floor. (“I couldn’t have painted it standing up because I wanted to use a wash effect, with no sharp edges,” he explained.)
The mural employs the elements of earth, fire, water, and sky, joined by winged shapes from the Book of Isaiah. Along one side, Maitin wrote in pencil: Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh (Holy, Holy, Holy). After the CA moved out of its longtime home at 36th Street and Locust Walk in 1999, the mural was moved to the Great Room of the CA’s new quarters at 118 S. 37th St., where it remains. Incidentally, when Moore met Maitin some 40 years ago, he was so taken with the convivial artist that he finally burst out: “I must have you as my friend!” Maitin was game, and so began “the remaking of my world,” in Moore’s words.
Maitin’s friendship with the late Louis I. Kahn Ar’24 Hon’71 led, indirectly, to a major windfall for Penn. (It also led to a two-man exhibition at the William Penn Museum in Harrisburg, titled, “Louis I. Kahn, Architect/Sam Maitin, Artist.”) After Kahn’s death, Maitin spent two years petitioning the Pennsylvania legislature to buy up the architect’s drawings and papers. Eventually the Commonwealth ponied up $500,000 for the vast collection, which now resides in and forms the centerpiece of Penn’s Architectural Archives, which are open to the public.
“My father was a man of vision, driven by uncompromising values,” recalled Izak Maitin at the memorial service in January. “He saw things both as they are and as they should be. He instilled in me the value that not only can one person change anything, but also that one person can change everything.”
Although Maitin did not regard himself as a religious person in the conventional sense, he was “spiritually religious,” in the words of Lilyan. “He was probably the most knowledgeable Jewish person I ever knew,” she added. “He knew about the Bible; he knew about Greek mythology. You could see it in a lot of the things he’s done.”
“As I was thinking about this memorial for Sam’s life, the title of a novel by Peter Matthiessen flashed across my mind’s eye,” said actress Jane Moore, Ralph Moore’s wife. “At Play in the Fields of the Lord. I thought, ‘That’s Sam. Sam at play in the woods of Vermont, Sam at play in the studio, and, in recent years, Sam playing on the floor with his beloved grandchildren.’ Life simply poured out of this man, this mensch. He poured himself out, giving, giving, always giving of himself and his art for people.”
Chris Palmer was one of the many “studio alumni” who worked as Maitin’s assistants over the years. Though he was 45 years younger than Maitin, the latter’s youthful outlook and boundless energy made him both a contemporary and a father-figure at the same time. At the memorial service, he spoke of his first days in Maitin’s studio: “I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to make it here. This guy’s intense.’”
“He was proud to know that his studio was such a crucial part of our education,” Palmer said. “We all performed different functions in the studio, and some of us tried to bring some logical order to the mountain of pictures, posters, sculptures, collages, and tools … Assistants tried to get Sam on top of the mountain of paperwork, but he hated it. He would rather scrape shards of colored paper off the floorboards, so they could be recycled into some wonderful series of collages.”
Sometimes Maitin would “get into a fever of creative activity, where he would churn out as many variations of color and shapes as we could provide him materials for,” Palmer recalled.
On other days, visitors would come, and Maitin would call Palmer up to the kitchen and have him join them at the table; the time would sneak by without any work getting done. At that point, Palmer said: “Sam would turn and remind me in that familiar cadence and tone, ‘Time spent with friends is never wasted.’”
I ask Lilyan if she thinks her husband had accomplished what he wanted to. “I think so,” she says after a moment. “I mean, he had such a full life. He touched so many people in so many areas.”
She looks out the window, her hands folded on the kitchen table. “There was such an outpouring of affection,” she adds. “It was as though they had a personal loss. He appealed to people in such a personal way; there was almost a sense of ownership.” She points to a huge stack of letters and cards that she has received. One turns out to be a sprawling hand-made card from artist Don Madden, who once shared a studio space with Maitin, and who, when he heard of his old friend’s illness, drew a wonderfully wise, hallucinatory animal (with shapely hind legs and spiked heels) to look after him.
“Through his art, his spirit will live on,” said Izak Maitin. “This may be the greatest degree of immortality one can achieve. His work will continue to bring joy, as he always intended.”
The night before the memorial service, Ralph Moore drove down from Maine, where he now lives. He described his entrance into the city the next day: “As I came over the bridge last night, and saw Philadelphia after being away for some time, I looked at it again, and I saw it as bursts of light and funny shapes and all the things that Sam knew about. And I said to myself, ‘Philadelphia is safe. Sam has got Philadelphia eternally written in the arts.’”
