Sam Francis

By 1950, the center of the art world had shifted from Paris to New York. The French capital had suffered the ravages of war, and the economy of the country had been shattered. New York’s ascendancy can be attributed to two main factors: the arrival of exiled European artists, dealers, and scholars, and the emergence of a vital and innovative group of American artists who challenged the status quo. Among these up-and-coming artists, Sam Francis (1923–1994) was divergent; he spent most of the 1950s in Paris and for the rest of his career lived a peripatetic existence between homes and studios in Santa Monica, California; Bern, Switzerland; and Tokyo, Japan.

Francis was born in San Mateo, California, and, as a child, his interest lay in plants rather art. Beginning in 1941, he studied at the University of California, Berkeley, where he majored in botany before switching to psychology and medicine. In 1943, he signed up with the United States Army Air Corps, but an injury from a plane crash led to spinal tuberculosis. Francis took up art as therapy and made his first trip to a museum, the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, in a wheelchair. After his release from the military, he returned to Berkeley and majored in art, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1949, and his master’s degree the following year.

In Paris, Francis associated with both the American expatriate community and the French abstractionists, aligning himself with a group called the “tachists,” who tended to paint in spots or blobs. His early paintings feature cell-shaped daubs of paint that dripped downwards in response to gravity, in contrast to Jackson Pollock who laid his canvases on the floor. Francis’s success was such that in January 1956 Time magazine called him “the hottest American painter in Paris.” [1] Recognition in his native country came more slowly, perhaps because he was absent so much of the time.

Francis’s work eludes easy pigeonholing. Initially, his cell or lily-pad paintings exemplified Tachism, but his canvases were also typical of Abstract Expressionism in the way that he covered the entire surface. Furthermore, the canvases were large; a mural for the Chase Manhattan Bank measures eight by thirty-eight feet. Gradually, Francis opened up more white space in his compositions, eventually leaving the entire center blank, with delicate washes along the edges. As if to explain this emptiness, Francis issued one of his many aphorisms: “The space at the center of these paintings is reserved for you.” [2] Because of the openness and the liquidity of many of his paintings, Francis has often been called a Color Field painter, a subset of Abstract Expressionism that critic Clement Greenberg termed “post-painterly abstraction.” The Color Field painters are more lyrical and more interested in color for its own sake than their energetic and emotive counterparts.

Printmaking also appealed to Francis. “It’s healthy, it forces me to think these things out, unlike painting, which is much more direct.” In residence for six months in 1963 at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, he embraced lithography, which allowed for improvisation. He retained his penchant for drips and splatters. Ultimately, he worked with printers all over the world, enjoying the variety of approaches. “It’s good to work with different printers; I get to know the medium as I see it through the eyes of others, as they know it in different ways from me.” [3]

While living in Japan, Francis developed an interest in Zen Buddhism, which complemented his admiration for Jung. He filled notebooks with sketches, haikus, and miscellaneous jottings. A posthumous publication of the Lapis Press, which he had founded, was appropriately titled Saturated Blue, after the signature color of his later work. It includes the following:

color is a series

of harmonies

everywhere in

the universe

being divine

whole numbers

lasting forever

adrift in time [4]

Notes:

[1] “New Talent,” Time 67, no. 3 (January 1956), 72, quoted in Peter Selz, Sam Francis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1975), 51.

[2] Francis, “Aphorisms,” in Martin Sosin, Sam Francis: Color is the Essence of It All (Santa Monica, CA: Martin Sosin, 2003), 20.

[3] Francis quoted in Susan Einstein, “The Prints of Sam Francis,” in Selz, Sam Francis, 225 and 233.

[4] Francis, Saturated Blue…Writings from the Notebooks (Santa Monica, CA: The Lapis Press, 1995), unpaginated.