Untitled

Sparkling with colour, light and movement, Untitled is a sumptuous vision dating from a pivotal moment in Sam Francis’ early career. Included in major touring retrospectives originating at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1967) and the Kunsthalle Basel (1968), it demonstrates the exquisite flourishing of his artistic language as he took his place on the global stage. Ribbons of red, blue, green, yellow and black converge upon the paper—which the artist subsequently laid on board—dispersing into drips and spatters. Shards of pale, blank space gleam through the texture like rays of light, infusing the colours with a luminous brilliance. After seven years of living in Paris, where he had absorbed the influence of Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard and others, Francis began to travel widely across America and Asia in 1957, leading the gallerist Martha Jackson to describe him as the first truly international American painter. With major examples held in the Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, the works of this period are alive with newfound inspiration, each stroke an expression of ecstatic liberation.

Francis had originally been inspired to take up painting in 1944, during his time as a member of the US Army Air Corps. While recovering from spinal tuberculosis in hospital, writes James Johnson Sweeney, he became fascinated by the ‘play of light on the ceiling, the dawn sky and sunset sky effect over the Pacific ... not just the play of light, but the substance from which light is made’ (J. J. Sweeney, quoted in P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York 1975, p. 34). Pivoting from his studies in medicine, Francis began to attend art classes at the University of California, Berkeley in 1947, forming relationships with artists such as Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still. His early encounters with the Abstract Expressionists would continue to infuse his language after his move to France in 1950: their disembodied treatment of colour and texture lingered in his mind as he encountered Bonnet’s sun-drenched vistas, Henri Matisse’s Fauvist spectacles and Monet’s Nymphéas in the Musée de l’Orangerie. Francis would also establish friendships with a number of second-generation Abstract Expressionists living in Paris during the 1950s: among them Jean-Paul Riopelle and Joan Mitchell, whose combined influence simmers in the present work’s gestural splatters and rivulets.

Though painted in Paris, the present work takes its place within a period of thrilling international exploration for Francis. Between January and November 1957, the artist spent time in New York, Mexico and his native California, as well as Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India and Italy. Francis had, by this stage, already achieved recognition in both France and America, notably featuring alongside Franz Kline, Philip Guston and others in the landmark 1956 group exhibition Twelve Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As he travelled Asia, however, his world began to widen further, finding particular affinity with the art, philosophies and culture he encountered in Japan. While there, Francis spent time living and working in a temple, and would subsequently take a studio in Tokyo that he retained for much of the rest of his life. His fascination with the relationship between colour and negative space was particularly resonant with the Japanese concept of ‘ma’, which describes the interaction between form and emptiness. In the present work, this dynamic is expressed with succinct eloquence: void and gesture are tightly intertwined, each infusing one another with life.