Untitled

In 1950, California born artist Sam Francis left the United States and travelled to Paris. The years spent in France would yield some of the artist’s most significant work culminating in an aesthetic born from his California roots and complimented by the great masters he encountered there. In the catalogue for a 2009 exhibition focusing on the years spent abroad, William C. Agee writes, “Francis’ gift was for high and intense color, which he had first discovered in California when he exposed to the color and the painterly means of Hans Hofmann, Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Ed Corbett, his teacher at the University of California, Berkeley. When he arrived in Paris, he was thus predisposed to immerse himself in the great French tradition of color exemplified by the art of Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard” (exh. cat., Sam Francis 1953-1959, exh. cat. New York, L&M Arts, 2009, p. 9).

Painted in 1955 during this pivotal period, Untitled demonstrates the mastery of Francis’ formative training in watercolor. Lyrical and confident brushstrokes form interlocking biomorphic shapes which come to life in their gestural execution. The deep blue cell-like forms take on a mystical life of their own as though they are about to dissolve into formlessness. Saturated with the vivid blue which would become Francis’ signature color, Untitled emulates a shimmering pool of water. As thin watery shapes layer and bleed together with the thickly painted, gravitational paint drips and highlights of yellow, brown and red lend an added component of spontaneity to the composition. “[The] shapes play against the white ground, which in turn begins to eat into the edges of the shapes in a manner suggestive of Monet. Francis… closely studied the double-oval murals of the Nymphéas then re-installed (1953) at the Orangerie du Louvre.” (Robert Pincus-Witten in “Sam Francis The Paris Years” in Ibid, p. 21).