Red and Blue

Red and Blue is a jewel-like watercolour that stems from one of the most significant periods of Sam Francis’ career. Executed between 1958 and 1959, it coincides with the production of some of his most important canvases, including The White Line, held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Within the paper’s intimate field, the artist weaves a pattern of navy blocks which resist melting into the ribbons of crimson and black. The work’s flat geometry offers a release from his earlier, more frenetic compositions. Red and Blue both demonstrates the artist’s ongoing dialogue with Abstract Expressionism and simultaneously reveals the influence of French artists such as Claude Monet, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard whose work Francis encountered while living in Paris in the mid-1950s. Such paintings intensified his own interest in vibrant light and colour, and in the present work, the blue’s luminosity is particularly hypnotic. The colour, which Francis saw as the embodiment of both water and the cosmos, would play a prominent role in his oeuvre. As curator Priscilla Colt wrote, ‘Since 1954 his choices have persistently favoured the high-keyed hues of the spectrum. Colour is saturated, yet translucent, ebullient, without heaviness. His own phrase “lovely blueness," though not referring to his painting, best describes its affective quality. Though brilliant it never over-dramatizes nor clamours for attention. Rather it beguiles by its pure and unabashed involvement with loveliness’ (P. Colt, ‘The Paintings of Sam Francis’, Art Journal, Vol. 22 No. 1, Autumn 1962, p.6). The present work was originally held in the Idemitsu Collection in Tokyo, whose contents would come to form the basis of the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in 1966.