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Lot Essay
"Color is a pattern that plays across the membrane of the mind... Color is a series of harmonies everywhere in the universe being divine whole numbers lasting forever adrift in time... Color is light on fire"--Sam Francis
Sam Francis painted his spectacular Untitled (SFP 59-35) upon returning to New York City in 1959 from Paris. With its bold chromatic shapes and free handling of paint, the work captures the energy and frenetic pace of the artist's new surroundings, while its bravura drips recall the city's Action Painters. Between 1957 and 1959, Francis completed three monumental commissions, the last of which was commissioned by Chase Manhattan Bank and became Francis' largest and most accomplished mural to date. In Untitled, Francis reveals new virtuoso skill informed by his recent monumental projects and achieves, better than ever before, a balanced a state of equilibrium in which color reinstated its dominance. Exhibited at the seminal Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Untitled, a highlight of his late 1950s work, seamlessly tempers dense structure and razor-sharp clarity with weightless, luminescent color.
Along the vast canvas, Francis uses his signature technique of watering down oil paint to create sheer washes of brilliant color. Still working in joyful exuberant hues of golden yellows, deep blue, lime green and red his painted shapes take on a flatter and denser quality. Drawing on his formative training in watercolor painting, his matrix of gestural strokes and drips takes on a different tone than the visceral bravura of the Action Painters, foregoing Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning's thick impasto for chromatic washes that drip and spray freely across the canvas. According to James Johnson Sweeney, "What most interested him was the quality of light itself not just the play of light, but the substance from which light is made" (quoted in P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1982, p. 34).
During the latter half of the 1950s, Francis worked on several large-scale projects. At the suggestion of Arnold Rüdlinger, the director of the Basel Kunsthalle, Francis began an enormous triptych mural in 1957, created so that the viewer could be surrounded by large swathes of color almost floating above the white of the canvas. Taking a break from his first mural, Francis embarked on his first round the world trip from January to November 1957, stopping in New York, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and India. In Tokyo, he was commissioned to paint another large-scale painting for the Sogestu Hall. In this work, areas of blue, red, yellow and purple become dense and opaque, and with less white showing between the forms. But it was not until the Chase Manhattan Mural of 1959 that he exhibited such refined technique, with its vast expanses of sharply defined color that recur throughout Untitled. It was one of the original acquisitions within the company's innovative art program initiated by David Rockefeller, then the bank's visionary president.
The artist first was inspired to explore dynamic color pairing after a debilitating accident in 1943, when he was confined to a hospital bed for several months and found himself gazing up at the shifting patterns of light that danced along the white walls. James Johnson Sweeney explained that Francis was fascinated by the "play of light on the ceiling, the dawn sky and sunset sky effect over the Pacific, when his cot was wheeled out on the hospital balcony" (J. J. Sweeney, quoted in P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1975, p. 34). While these prismatic streams of color first inspired Francis to articulate his visions through painting, his sophisticated use of bold, flat color derives from his deep reverence for the Fauvist tradition, wherein color is elevated to the utmost reverence and permitted to exist on a purely emotional level.
Francis' own glorification of color and light was largely shaped by his many years in Paris, where he saw the preeminent early modernists, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. Francis first experienced Monet's magnificent Nymphéas in 1953 at the Musée de l'Orangerie, wherein the French artist combined light, color and water in an almost abstract way, using intense, fluid brushstrokes. Inspired by the freedom and voluminous scale of Monet's monumental canvas, he began to explore similar themes in his own work, resulting in canvases chock full of sensuous color. In Untitled, the flat, planar color aligns more closely with Matisse. His influential visit to Matisse's home in the South of France, where he met the late painter's widow, offered boundless inspiration from which he would look back to for the rest of his life. In Untitled, Francis makes special use of dark lapis-lazuli blue that fills most of the white background; its deep coloring and diverse shapes recall the silhouettes Henri Matisse's cutouts, The curvilinear outline of the central blue element, recalls similar shapes in Matisse's largest cutout, The Swimming Pool that at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Just as the cut out define the splashing water and the negative white space represents the abstract figures, Francis' Untitled possesses a dynamic interplay with the background as each shape flows rhythmically into the next, as if determining the composition itself.
Though he had spent a great deal of time in Europe and had spent much of the previous year travelling around the world, expanding his visual repertoire, he remained loyal to the New York School painters whose chromatic pairings influenced the young Francis since the late 1940s when they taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Returning to America that year, he found himself again immersed with the likes of Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann and Mark Rothko. Indeed the work recalls Hofmann's bright palette and Rothko's glowing, washed color. Francis even draws on the gestural idiom of Jackson Pollock, rendering his 1959 composition on mammoth scale and endowing each chromatic drip with emotional directness. Yet, Untitled also showcases his unique formal rhetoric, with its bright, joyful hues of green, yellow, red and blue that intertwine in perfect harmony.
Sam Francis painted his spectacular Untitled (SFP 59-35) upon returning to New York City in 1959 from Paris. With its bold chromatic shapes and free handling of paint, the work captures the energy and frenetic pace of the artist's new surroundings, while its bravura drips recall the city's Action Painters. Between 1957 and 1959, Francis completed three monumental commissions, the last of which was commissioned by Chase Manhattan Bank and became Francis' largest and most accomplished mural to date. In Untitled, Francis reveals new virtuoso skill informed by his recent monumental projects and achieves, better than ever before, a balanced a state of equilibrium in which color reinstated its dominance. Exhibited at the seminal Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, Untitled, a highlight of his late 1950s work, seamlessly tempers dense structure and razor-sharp clarity with weightless, luminescent color.
Along the vast canvas, Francis uses his signature technique of watering down oil paint to create sheer washes of brilliant color. Still working in joyful exuberant hues of golden yellows, deep blue, lime green and red his painted shapes take on a flatter and denser quality. Drawing on his formative training in watercolor painting, his matrix of gestural strokes and drips takes on a different tone than the visceral bravura of the Action Painters, foregoing Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning's thick impasto for chromatic washes that drip and spray freely across the canvas. According to James Johnson Sweeney, "What most interested him was the quality of light itself not just the play of light, but the substance from which light is made" (quoted in P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1982, p. 34).
During the latter half of the 1950s, Francis worked on several large-scale projects. At the suggestion of Arnold Rüdlinger, the director of the Basel Kunsthalle, Francis began an enormous triptych mural in 1957, created so that the viewer could be surrounded by large swathes of color almost floating above the white of the canvas. Taking a break from his first mural, Francis embarked on his first round the world trip from January to November 1957, stopping in New York, Mexico, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand and India. In Tokyo, he was commissioned to paint another large-scale painting for the Sogestu Hall. In this work, areas of blue, red, yellow and purple become dense and opaque, and with less white showing between the forms. But it was not until the Chase Manhattan Mural of 1959 that he exhibited such refined technique, with its vast expanses of sharply defined color that recur throughout Untitled. It was one of the original acquisitions within the company's innovative art program initiated by David Rockefeller, then the bank's visionary president.
The artist first was inspired to explore dynamic color pairing after a debilitating accident in 1943, when he was confined to a hospital bed for several months and found himself gazing up at the shifting patterns of light that danced along the white walls. James Johnson Sweeney explained that Francis was fascinated by the "play of light on the ceiling, the dawn sky and sunset sky effect over the Pacific, when his cot was wheeled out on the hospital balcony" (J. J. Sweeney, quoted in P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1975, p. 34). While these prismatic streams of color first inspired Francis to articulate his visions through painting, his sophisticated use of bold, flat color derives from his deep reverence for the Fauvist tradition, wherein color is elevated to the utmost reverence and permitted to exist on a purely emotional level.
Francis' own glorification of color and light was largely shaped by his many years in Paris, where he saw the preeminent early modernists, Claude Monet and Henri Matisse. Francis first experienced Monet's magnificent Nymphéas in 1953 at the Musée de l'Orangerie, wherein the French artist combined light, color and water in an almost abstract way, using intense, fluid brushstrokes. Inspired by the freedom and voluminous scale of Monet's monumental canvas, he began to explore similar themes in his own work, resulting in canvases chock full of sensuous color. In Untitled, the flat, planar color aligns more closely with Matisse. His influential visit to Matisse's home in the South of France, where he met the late painter's widow, offered boundless inspiration from which he would look back to for the rest of his life. In Untitled, Francis makes special use of dark lapis-lazuli blue that fills most of the white background; its deep coloring and diverse shapes recall the silhouettes Henri Matisse's cutouts, The curvilinear outline of the central blue element, recalls similar shapes in Matisse's largest cutout, The Swimming Pool that at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Just as the cut out define the splashing water and the negative white space represents the abstract figures, Francis' Untitled possesses a dynamic interplay with the background as each shape flows rhythmically into the next, as if determining the composition itself.
Though he had spent a great deal of time in Europe and had spent much of the previous year travelling around the world, expanding his visual repertoire, he remained loyal to the New York School painters whose chromatic pairings influenced the young Francis since the late 1940s when they taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. Returning to America that year, he found himself again immersed with the likes of Clyfford Still, Hans Hofmann and Mark Rothko. Indeed the work recalls Hofmann's bright palette and Rothko's glowing, washed color. Francis even draws on the gestural idiom of Jackson Pollock, rendering his 1959 composition on mammoth scale and endowing each chromatic drip with emotional directness. Yet, Untitled also showcases his unique formal rhetoric, with its bright, joyful hues of green, yellow, red and blue that intertwine in perfect harmony.