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Lot Essay
This work is included in the Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946-1994, with number SFF.64, edited by Debra Burchett-Lere and published by the University of California Press 2011 and alternatively registered with the Sam Francis Foundation under archive number SFP48-5/SFP49-3.
Painted in 1948-1949 during the rise of Sam Francis' notoriety among American Modernist painters, Rim #1 emerges from the apex of Francis' transition into his signature painterly style. Having developed a wide array of painterly forms extending from landscapes, seascapes and portraits to surrealist canvases influenced by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Paul Klee, Francis began to adopt an increasingly indifferent approach to figuration from which he began to explore the notions of abstract representation that came to define the remainder of his career.
Releasing his paintings from any vestiges of representation, Rim #1, with its translucent layers of liquid red paint and thin washes of soft, pale hues curving around simple contours of muted rosy colour, emphasises the undoubtable debt that Sam Francis paid to America's leading Abstract Expressionists. At pains to avoid any attempt to instill a sense of figuration, Francis has relegated the deep purple, burnt orange, sky blue and ruby red jewel-like tones to the outer edges of the composition, highlighting the varying tones of the gentle red washes-a colour which he believed contained every colour. Pushing these accents to the verge of the canvas' limits, Francis began to explore a motif that would evolve into his signature style of the 1950s and 60s. In response to the Expressionist excitement of Pollock's drip paintings and the serene nebulous coloured rectangles of Rothko, Francis focused on the 'ceasless instability' inherent in both air and water which formed the basis of his painterly aesthetic and would remain the premise for his art through the rest of his life.
Painted in 1948-1949 during the rise of Sam Francis' notoriety among American Modernist painters, Rim #1 emerges from the apex of Francis' transition into his signature painterly style. Having developed a wide array of painterly forms extending from landscapes, seascapes and portraits to surrealist canvases influenced by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Paul Klee, Francis began to adopt an increasingly indifferent approach to figuration from which he began to explore the notions of abstract representation that came to define the remainder of his career.
Releasing his paintings from any vestiges of representation, Rim #1, with its translucent layers of liquid red paint and thin washes of soft, pale hues curving around simple contours of muted rosy colour, emphasises the undoubtable debt that Sam Francis paid to America's leading Abstract Expressionists. At pains to avoid any attempt to instill a sense of figuration, Francis has relegated the deep purple, burnt orange, sky blue and ruby red jewel-like tones to the outer edges of the composition, highlighting the varying tones of the gentle red washes-a colour which he believed contained every colour. Pushing these accents to the verge of the canvas' limits, Francis began to explore a motif that would evolve into his signature style of the 1950s and 60s. In response to the Expressionist excitement of Pollock's drip paintings and the serene nebulous coloured rectangles of Rothko, Francis focused on the 'ceasless instability' inherent in both air and water which formed the basis of his painterly aesthetic and would remain the premise for his art through the rest of his life.