Sam Francis is an American artist, one of the country’s most important. Francis was born in San Mateo, California, in 1923. He began painting in 1944, while recovering from injuries sustained from an airplane crash while serving in the US Air Force. He studied under David Park at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

Untitled L.A., 1973, acrylic on paper, 76 x 55 cm

In his early abstract paintings, reminiscent of the work of Clyfford Still and Jackson Pollock, he used spontaneous painterly gestures, resulting in the typically American, “all-over” structure: The whole canvas is covered with dots, spots, specks and other traces of the painterly brush. While in Paris from 1950 – 1957, Francis briefly gave up colour and went a new direction, like in “White Painting” (1950), but he returned to red and pink in the following summer in the South of France and later embraced the whole range of colours again. Sometimes he makes use of a full spectrum of colours and their variations in hue, and other times he allows one colour to dominate, like the blue in “Blue Balls” (1960). Although Francis has been associated with colour field painting, this may be just a categorization used to come to grips with a highly original pictorial language. Francis’s “fields” hardly ever, if at all, show themselves to be fields of colour. Rather, they have foreground / background structures and often invoke depth, making the canvas rather a “colour space.”

Tokyo, 1966, acrylic on gouache, 49.5 x 64 cm

Pasadena Box, 1963, gouache / acrylic glass, 55,9 x 38,1 cm

What is typical of Francis in pictorial strategy is that he often leaves the centre of the image white and void, concentrating on the border of the canvas, the sides, counterbalancing these images in his oeuvre by those that do just the opposite. Sometimes his paintings are interlaced with a central geometrical structure, or merge with an all-over grid or lattice. This can go as far as closing up the canvas and using it as a ground for abstract pattern brushwork, like in “Blue and Yellow” (1954, ex Betty Freeman Collection).

After his death in 1994, Sam Francis’s works have continued to be exhibited in the most important international museums and galleries. The Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery presented a selection of the artist’s works in their main hall. Sam Francis

exhibition view: Sam Francis, SF91-15

Exhibitions:

Sam Francis - Paintings and Prints

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