“The process of painting is one of devotion to that image. The illusion is what you make of it . . . each painting is like my body print, taken at different moments of my life.” ~ Sam Francis

One of the twentieth century’s most influential Abstract Expressionist painters, Samuel Lewis Francis (1923–1994) created art that is both intuitive and cerebral; his complex and varied use of light and color has its own distinct characteristics and interpretations while also referencing historical painting traditions. With a career spanning five decades of painting, he also became known as one of the first post-World War II California painters to develop a truly international reputation, drawing inspiration from the Fauvist colorists as well as the French Impressionists, California Bay Area Modernists, and ancient and contemporary Chinese and Japanese scroll and sumi-e ink paintings. Francis’s lyrical hand, sense of movement, and capturing of light and color as well as the sheer energy of his gestural images embrace and define a beauty that he found inherent in the exploration of one’s imagination. The paintings illuminate his process of documenting moments in time and ongoing questions about the concepts of infinite space. His paintings set the soul of the world into motion. artes fine arts magazine

The exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, offers an abridged timeline of images – a reunion of works that are part of the artist’s personal history – the majority of which were created in California from the 1960s to the 1990s. Culled from collections in California, Francis’s native state, the works trace his development as an artist from the earliest paintings started while hospitalized in the late 1940s to the powerful last works that culminated in the summer of 1994, months before his death.

Curator Howard Fox wrote that: “Sam Francis is one of the acknowledged masters of late modern art…[and] any history of painting in the second half of the twentieth century would be incomplete without taking account of his unique achievement as an abstract painter…” Francis’s paintings not only frame his human condition but also provide insight into his quest to explore the realities of life and death, representing the dualities of the universe we know and imagine; Francis’s oeuvre is a result of his ongoing dialogue with these issues.

Above: Sam Francis, 3 Blue, 1952. Oil on canvas, 38 1/4 x 57 1/4″. University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Bequest of Marcia Simon Weisman Foundation, 1995.51.4. Artwork © Sam Francis Foundation, California / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Francis was born on June 25, 1923, in San Mateo, California to Samuel Augustus Francis and Katherine Lewis. Francis was close to his brother George, who was three years younger, and grew up in a middle-class household filled with literature, mathematics, and music – his father a math professor and his mother an accomplished pianist. When he was twelve the unexpected death of his mother, with whom Francis was especially close, was a momentous loss that would affect him throughout his life. In 1938 his father remarried Virginia Petersen Walker who became a supportive stepmother to Francis. In high school he was already a voracious reader (literature was extremely influential to him as he would amass an extensive personal library over the years) and spent many afternoons at the San Mateo Library. His early interests included classic literature, philosophy, and poetry by Heraclites, William Shakespeare (especially the plays), T. S. Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Thomas Mann, Alexander Pushkin, Emily Bronte, Edgar Allan Poe, P. D. Ouspensky, and Herman Melville.

During World War II, Francis left the University of California, Berkeley, where he was a pre-med major, to become a pilot with the Army Air Corps Reserves. At five foot, six inches, his shorter frame easily fit into the plane’s cockpit. He loved to fly, especially the P-38 fighters and planned a career as a reconnaissance pilot. However, in October 1943 during flight training, an emergency landing changed the course of Francis’s life. While recovering in the military hospital from spinal injuries Francis also developed spinal tuberculosis. For years he spent periods of isolation due to his condition; forced to lie flat in a hospital bed encased in a plaster cast.

On March 7, 1945, at the age of twenty-one Francis started to paint. He found his calling as an artist when the nurses at Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado provided him with a set of watercolors as a form of therapy. Though he was only able to move his arms and hands due to the plaster cast, he began painting mostly lying flat on his stomach. His first paintings were copies of images from books, including seascapes, horses, and portraits, as well as fantasy landscapes. He had a facility for realistic depiction, probably from his pre-med college classes where he would sketch the anatomy, cells, and organisms.

The act of painting provided an emotional embodiment of his spirit and an escape from his aching body. Francis’s early paintings demonstrate his intuitive sensibilities as well as his masterful ability with the brush. Painting redirected his dreams of becoming a pilot and became the impetus for his lifelong quest of discovery. The urgency to create and paint his way out of difficult times and bouts of illness remained a constant for Francis. He said that painting while hospitalized “became a way back to life for me…I painted in order to stay alive.” He was transferred to the Fort Miley Veterans Hospital in San Francisco where his room became his first studio. Francis drew and painted for as many hours a day as he could and began to fantasize: “I’m going to be a painter some day…I think about it all the time.” He experimented with egg tempera (using eggs from the hospital kitchen), prepared his own surfaces of gesso on board, and made a few oil paintings on canvas.

Bay Area figurative painter, David Park, a teacher at the California School of Fine Arts, learned about Francis painting in the hospital and visited him on a regular basis, bringing art books and original paintings. Park arranged a museum visit for Francis, who still in his body cast, was transported by ambulance to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor where a painting attributed to El Greco inspired him. Francis’s compositions became more abstract through the summer of 1946, as he was introduced to the work of American painters: Arshille Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. He also created a series of works referencing the Surrealists, especially Giorgio de Chirico. Park, who was on the selection panel for the 66th Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association, entered two of Francis’s surrealist-inspired works to fellow jury members: William A. Gaw, Douglas MacAgy, Hamilton Wolf, William Hesthal, and Ruth Armer. Francis was included in his first group museum exhibition in October 1946 at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Within a short period of time Francis found his own voice in the process of painting, exploring biomorphic and geometric forms. Robert T. Buck, former director of the Brooklyn Museum commented: “Francis had already grasped the essential conflict involved, the suppression of formalist reference to the benefit of new spatial dimensions.” Upon his release from the hospital in February 1947, Francis married his high school girlfriend Vera Miller (whom he would divorce in 1951) and returned to Cal Berkeley as an art major. By 1949 Francis’s personal style of abstraction employed forms and open areas of color to create a sense of floating suspension in atmospheric environments. His palette continued experimentation with monochromatic tones, some softer and more muted, while others becoming darker, suggesting ambiguities of his psyche.

In the fall of 1950, after obtaining his Master of Arts degree from Berkeley and with support of the G.I. Bill, Francis moved to Paris (the “Mother City”) to further develop his painting career. He worked in a small room in the Hôtel de Seine, enrolled in the Fernand Léger Academy for weekly critiques, and began a series of works on paper as well as some larger-scaled canvases. He embraced the Parisian life-style, painting in the day and spending the afternoons in the cafes (especially Café du Dragon, Les Deux Magots, and Café de Flore). Two important mentors introduced him to the Parisian art circles: Georges Duthuit, art historian, writer, critic, and the son-in-law of the painter Henri Matisse; and the curator, Michel Tapié, a champion of Art Informel (also known as Tachisme, a movement loosely aligned with American Abstract Expressionism). He became friendly with French artists Bram van Velde and Alberto Giacometti, and American G.I. Bill artists such as Norman Bluhm, Seymour Boardman, and Al Held. He also would be influenced by the leading existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as well as playwright Samuel Beckett.

While in France, Francis experienced first-hand paintings by Pierre Bonnard, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse, which greatly influenced his own exploration of color and light. He was intoxicated with light. Not only the play of light and shadow, but as Robert T. Buck noted: “the substance of which light is made.” He worked in a number of studios in Paris including one on the rue Tiphaine and eventually a larger space on rue de Domrémy in the Arcueil section of the 14th arrondissement (that he maintained until it was razed in the early 1980s). He spent time with the Matisse family at their country home near Nice, exploring the coast, including Côte d’Azur and the Aix-en-Provence region. Francis enjoyed being outdoors, painting watercolors in sketchbooks while sitting in Amélie Matisse’s garden. His paintings absorbed the gray skies of Paris as well as the warm palette of the Mediterranean countryside. Francis drew inspiration from the French masters as well as his American history, bridging these worlds with his unique style of painting. He was greatly inspired by studying Monet’s Water Lilies series (especially the Grandes décorations, 1914–26 that reopened to the public at the L’ Orangerie in Paris in 1953) and that his paintings “make the late Monet pure” through his distillation of the floating lily pads into a liquid composition of colorful abstracted shapes.

Paintings from the early 1950s are predominately white, gray, red, black, and blue that exude a source of radiating, pulsating energy within atmospheric compositions. Art historian and curator Peter Selz used the term “ceaseless instability” for these paintings. The works evoke constant movement of air and water. Francis’s poetic landscapes appear as curtains of color with layer upon layer of colorful cellular cloud-like forms floating in and out and across the canvas surface. As scholar William C. Agee wrote: “It is as if Francis had combined the freedom of the brush of the late Monet, the color veils of Matisse, and the surface opticality of Bonnard’s shifting passages of multicolored hues.” These lyrical works made Francis’s reputation in Paris as they caught the critics and collectors by surprise. Art critic Pierre Schneider wrote in Art News about the exhibition at the Galerie Rive Droite: “Probably the most stimulating show in Paris at present is the one held by the young American, Sam Francis…” Dorothy C. Miller, curator at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York visited Francis’s studio to select a painting for the museum, which would become his first canvas to enter a public collection in the United States.

In 1955 Francis married his second wife American painter Muriel Goodwin (whom he met at Cal Berkeley) as they were living together in Paris for years. During this formative and pivotal period, Francis’s style garnered more international attention, and by 1956 he was described by TIME magazine as “the hottest American painter in Paris these days.” Although a contemporary of American abstract expressionist painters Jackson Pollock, Willem deKooning, and Mark Rothko, Francis’s work did not have the angst-filled qualities of the these New York painters, as his paintings appear more lyrical, serene, and contemplative, aligning himself with sensibilities of the Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis. Former Guggenheim Museum director, James Johnson Sweeney wrote: “Sam Francis is the most sensuous and sensitive painter of his generation.” The saturation and building up of the color blue is prominent in his paintings as Francis said, “Blue was the Mother liquid, matrix,” and became the signature color he explored throughout his life.

In 1957, he embarked on an extended trip around the world, working in Mexico City, New York, and Tokyo, where he completed a large-scale 26-foot mural for the Sogetsu Ikebana School (flower arranging), commissioned by the Ikebana master, Sofu Teshigahara. His deeper exposure to sumi-e paintings and the calligraphy of Japan influenced his gestural abstractions where he captures a moment in time with single strokes of color — highlighting the natural energy of his body in motion. His compositions opened up with the white areas becoming an integral contemplative part of the painted surfaces. This accentuated space that resonates with the colorful forms is what the Japanese call ‘ma’. Francis also worked on two loosely defined series receiving critical acclaim known as the Moby Dick and Japan Line works. The Moby Dick paintings are metaphorically inspired by Herman Melville’s novel and the Japan Line works are more meditative and reflective of the artist’s view of the world.

From 1956–58 Francis continued to work off and on in Paris at the Arcueil studio, particularly on three major mural-sized panels known as the Basel Mural Triptych for the stairwell of the Basel Kunsthalle in Switzerland. Peter Selz referred to this as the “great triptych” and it was unveiled simultaneously with the Jackson Pollock and New American Painting exhibitions where it remained on view in Basel until 1964. After it was shown at Documenta in Kassel, Germany Francis separated the triptych (as it is not purchased by museum), with the left and right panels sustaining some water damage on their return to his studio in California. After their restoration, the original left panel, Basel Mural I and two fragments from Basel Mural III were donated to the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena where they are currently on view. The middle panel, Basel Mural II, was acquired by the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and is also on view, and two other restored fragments from Basel Mural III will be exhibited in 2014 as part of the Demsa Collection Museum in Istanbul.

The changing light of each new locale as well as traveling by plane experiencing different aerial-views of the earth deepened Francis’s sense of color and expanded his shapes and forms to appear as landmasses. The compositions from the late 1950s emulate islands, peninsulas, continents, space, and water. Francis continued working in Paris but would spend more time in New York in 1959, completing a 38-foot long mural commissioned for the new Chase Manhattan Bank building at 420 Park Avenue designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft. He responded to the intense energy of Manhattan; his shapes and colors became bolder and suggest three-dimensional qualities. He developed a new compositional balance, with areas of dense, opaque painting. Francis would marry again, for the third time to Teruko Yokoi, a painter from Japan, and in the summer of 1959 she gave birth to Francis’s first child, a daughter named Kayo.

By 1960, Francis’s paintings shifted in imagery and color, becoming more monochromatically blue and loosely anthropomorphic – almost ghostly or demon-like. The saturated blue forms evoke the power of the human body with the organic shapes resembling kidneys or lungs. As Peter Selz would later note in his 1975 monograph on the artist: “…the shapes in the Blue Forms and Blue Balls series from the early 1960s are like elements circling through space. They could be atomic or cosmic constellations, in either sense referring to organic matter. The forms themselves seem to be in a constant state of metamorphosis and transformation, appearing to swell and retract or open and close during their journeys.”

In 1961, Francis spent another period of isolation and hospitalization at the Tiefenauspital in Bern, Switzerland due to renal tuberculosis. During this year he created at least five hundred watercolor works on paper. After the tuberculosis was arrested he did not return to Paris, instead returning to the United States to southern California for an extended period of convalescence. He decided this environment was ideal for his work and by 1963 acquired property (formerly owned by the silent movie actor Charlie Chaplin) a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean on West Channel Road in Santa Monica Canyon. Here he built a simple yet ideal studio with wood walls and floor, high ceilings, and extra large skylights to flood the space with the warm California light. Francis said: “Los Angeles is the best for me, for light in my work. New York light is hard. Paris light is a beautiful, cerulean grey. But Los Angeles light is clear and bright, even in haze.”

Francis’s works from the mid-to late 1960s have a sense of renewal and openness. Responding to the California air and sun, his paintings opened up, becoming brighter and more colorful. By the late 1960s, a series known as the Edge, Open, or Sail paintings encompass floating forms of color that hover along the edges of the compositional plane in vibrant, shimmering slivers that frame the void. The paintings provide a window for the viewer to enter the work – the soul of the white space. The almost transparent layering of white in the center becomes an integral part of the pictorial interaction – filling the eye with a moment of reflection and introspection.

Francis’s life was also energized due to his regular travels to and from Tokyo where he set up a another studio in the Akasaka district for extended work sessions. He developed a relationship with Japanese filmmaker Mako Idemitsu, the daughter of one of his major benefactors, the industrialist Sazo Idemitsu. (The Idemitsu Museum in Tokyo houses the largest privately held collection of Francis artworks in the world.) In 1966, with his divorce from Teruko Yokoi, Francis married Mako Idemitsu. Through this union (they would stay married until 1982) Francis had two more children born in Santa Monica: a son Osamu in 1966 and a son Shingo in 1969. Francis was granted an honorary doctorate degree from Cal Berkeley in 1969, the only other artist, after the painter Hans Hofmann, to receive this distinction in the university’s history. Francis’s sense of wanderlust made him move about much as he continued to travel frequently to New York, Paris, and Bern, maintaining close ties to his dealers and friends with brief working sessions in these cities. He would regularly work in the carriage house studio next to the Galerie Kornfeld in Bern that was supplied to him by his long-term art dealer. Bern was often a home-away-from home – a refuge for Francis over the years. As Peter Selz noted: “…each of Francis’s works carries within it a sense of place, and the city where it was made is reflected somehow in the painting.”

In the early 1970s, Francis’s work turned in another direction from the minimal edge works as the color moves back towards the center of the composition. The colorful forms break away from the corners like meteor rocks or icebergs floating into space or the open sea. These paintings are especially indicative of Francis’s ability to create a dialogue between the macrocosm and microcosm of his imagery.

After several years in the making, one of his largest major commissions measuring just over 26-feet high and 39-feet long, Berlin Red, was installed in November 1971 at the Mies van der Rohe designed Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Throughout this decade Francis continued traveling, primarily between Japan and California with a few painting sessions in Switzerland. He also established other working studios in Santa Monica, complete with his own printing press to create limited edition prints. This studio, known as “The Litho Shop,” became his main business office and studio until his death in 1994.

Other paintings from the early 1970s known as the Fresh Air series exude a feeling of freshness, a free-flowing movement of color and form that Francis called “angel trails.” The energized arching lines of color create an opening or entrance – a gateway for one’s imagination. As he began working more closely with Jungian therapists, notably Dr. James Kirsch, his paintings reflect his discovery of hidden parts of his unconscious psyche. His works and writings become the conscious recordings of his dream world.

The evolution of imagery in his Grid or Matrix paintings of the late 1970s (also influenced by Zen Buddhism) reveals voids of color within more structured, grid-like compositions that imply tree branches or architectural latticework. The denser grid patterns provide the format for the counter-play of lightness and darkness with the opposite loosely painted gestures. The layering and building up of the crossing and recrossing of imagery reveal a landscaped three-dimensional environment. The Grid or Matrix paintings are some of Francis’s most dramatic compositions as William C. Agee has written because “Francis was working with the greatest intensity and consistency since the late 1950s.” Many of these grids are larger-than-life as they were painted on the floor with Francis maneuvering in and out of the painted and unpainted areas as if in a dance with the brush and canvas. He would first apply bands of tinted water across the surface using a wet paint roller and then built on the template by adding layers of paint by hand, brushing or pouring the color in a fluid manner.

Above: Untitled, 1979. Acrylic on paper, 11 13/16 x 17 3/4″. Collection of Deborah and Jonathan Davidson, Los Angeles. Artwork © Sam Francis Foundation, CA. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

Francis’s Jungian and Zen Buddhist studies were also manifested in his investigations of the archetypal forms such as the mandala, circle, square, spiral, and cross as well as an extensive series of self-portraits. One of the primary forms he explored in his paintings included the mandala – a path to the center – that expresses completeness. Francis was drawn to this because it stood for something powerful. As part of his explorations, he experimented with making his own paints, as he said: “color is a kind of holy substance for me.”

The thick, almost structured, darker grid patterns from the late 1970s dissipate into free-flowing, globular color shapes in the early 1980s. The clustered images become more cloud-like, but grounded by gravity and the gritty elements of the earth in their volcanic and lava-like intensity of color. Francis’s mercurial nature and exploration of alchemy is evident in these works as the tactile paint seems to be in a state of transformation, providing insight into his internal, spiritual, and emotional being.

Right: Untitled, 1984. Acrylic on rice paper, 72 x 37″. Private Collection. Artwork © Sam Francis Foundation, CA. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In 1983, he was awarded the honor of Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France. He completed three mural-sized commissions for the U.S. Federal Building, Anchorage; the San Francisco International Airport; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with the latter two completed in an industrial warehouse in San Leandro near Oakland. In 1984 Francis was involved in the creation of the Lapis Press, named after lapis philosophorum (the philosopher’s stone of alchemy). Through Lapis he published books on poetry, literature, philosophy, Jungian psychology, and art. Francis’s fifth marriage in 1985 to English painter Margaret Smith, whom he met while working in Japan, and the birth of their son, Augustus in 1986 (Francis’s fourth child) gave Francis’s work renewed energy and feelings of rebirth. His paintings through 1990 became more explosive and emotionally charged with a vigorous application of paint that is thicker and more colorful with intense splashes of red, yellow, green, and purple built up on the surfaces.

Francis started to spend more time in northern California in Palo Alto (near his birthplace) and in the Inverness/Point Reyes area (close to one of his favorite fishing sites when he was a young boy), alternating painting sessions with his studios in Santa Monica and Venice in southern California. He purchased an old industrial building in Palo Alto and remodeled it as a live-in studio as well as a number of different properties in Point Reyes. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1989, and although able to fight the effects of his ill health for a number of years, but by the end of 1993 was so weakened by the metastasized prostate cancer he lost use of his right arm.

Left: Augustus After Sonny, Sonny Before Augustus [Untitled], 1989. Acrylic on handmade wove-screen paper coated with gesso, 72 x 36″. The Buck Collection, Laguna Beach, California. Artwork © Sam Francis Foundation, CA / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

In his West Channel Road studio during the summer of 1994, confined to a wheelchair and forced to use his left arm to paint, Francis created a new body of work (over 152 paintings on canvas and paper filling the walls of his studio) known as The Last Works. The paintings echo the imagery from the 1970s with a pronounced sense of urgency, as Francis profoundly believed that painting would heal his illness much as art had previously provided a way back to life. As he wrote about his paintings: “I work in a circular, gyro-like manner-spiral . . . I keep coming back to something from before, but approached from a completely different point of view. A rearrangement of the psyche.”

The Last Works or Joie de vivre (Joy of Life) are a summation of Francis’s life journey and interestingly parallels his life with that of Henri Matisse, an artist he greatly admired and whose family he knew well in his Paris years. Matisse and Francis began their careers in a hospital bed recovering from an illness – Matisse’s mother started him off with a paint box when he had appendicitis – and their final paintings were both completed when they were confined to wheelchairs. Matisse’s last cutouts are similarly titled: The Last Works.

Right: Iron Forest, 1989. Acrylic on paper, 72 x 36″. Collection of Martin and Kelly Katz, Beverly Hills. Artwork © Sam Francis Foundation, CA. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY.

 On November 4, 1994, at the age of seventy-one, Francis died in Santa Monica and was buried in a small cemetery in the Point Reyes area. He continues to be regarded as the preeminent California artist of his generation. It was Francis’s wish to be remembered for his oeuvre as he wrote in his journal: “The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human.” In his paintings, Francis exposed himself in a way that allows people to understand the human condition – an affirmation of not only the joys of life, but also the anxious and chaotic moments that afflict everyone.

By Debra Burchett-Lere, Contributing Writer

Sam Francis: Five Decades of Abstract Expressionism from California Collections is on view through April 20, 2014 at the Crocker Art Museum, 216 O Street,,Sacramento, CA 95814.

Phone: 916.808.7000
cam@crockerartmuseum.org

Co-curated by Debra Burchett-Lere and Peter Selz, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, the exhibition includes an illustrated 172-page catalogue (left) available at the exhibition venue and online.