Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Sam Francis Catalogue raisonné edited by Debra Burchett-Lere and published by the University of California Press, Berkeley and is registered with the Sam Francis Foundation as archive number SFP60-10.
"Not surprisingly, the outstanding qualities of Sam Francis's painting are the same as his personality - intuition and intelligence. A clear intelligence is felt to be consciously at work in these paintings and is what ultimately makes them so satisfying. Everything else seems to be out of the way--labor, preparation, skill, technique: the paintings appear as if spontaneously. But it is the rarest kind of simplicity, that of master touch and sure control. Somehow there seems to be more to them than meets the eye. From the few spots on canvas enough is suggested to encourage the viewer to relate them to his own experience. Visually they are metaphors, images open to comparisons with other things in the universe...."
Betty Freeman, Sam Francis: Ideas and Paintings, 1969.
"Not surprisingly, the outstanding qualities of Sam Francis's painting are the same as his personality - intuition and intelligence. A clear intelligence is felt to be consciously at work in these paintings and is what ultimately makes them so satisfying. Everything else seems to be out of the way--labor, preparation, skill, technique: the paintings appear as if spontaneously. But it is the rarest kind of simplicity, that of master touch and sure control. Somehow there seems to be more to them than meets the eye. From the few spots on canvas enough is suggested to encourage the viewer to relate them to his own experience. Visually they are metaphors, images open to comparisons with other things in the universe...."
Betty Freeman, Sam Francis: Ideas and Paintings, 1969.