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Sam FrancisFramed1967
1967
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
Price Upon Request
About the Item
Framed
Sam Francis (American, 1923-1994)
Edition 58/100 in pencil Lower Left
Signed in pencil Lower Right
17 x 22 inches
25.5 x 30.5 inches
An Abstract Expressionist* painter known for his brilliant coloration and splotch-like shapes, Sam Francis became one of the big-name modernist artists of the second half of the 20th century. He was much influenced by Clyfford Styll and Mark Rothko. Unlike the creations of many of the Abstract Expressionists and the Bay Area Figurative* painters, his work was light and airy and increasingly decorative. Seeking his own approach to abstraction*, he spent much of his career out of the United States, especially in France.
Of his painting, Sam Francis said that he wanted to make "something that fills utterly the sight and can't be used to make life only bearable". (Herskovic 130)
Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, and attended the University of California at Berkeley from 1941 to 1943. He studied psychology and pre-med and then went into the Army Air Corps where he was in an air crash that led to spinal tuberculosis. Recovering from this injury, he turned to abstract painting and then sought formal art education. In 1949 and 1950, he earned his B.A. and M.A. Degrees from the University of California. Also as a patient at Letterman Hospital, he studied privately with abstract figurative painter David Park. Evident at this time were signature aspects of his mature style--- "the irregular-cell or blotlike color-shape and a preference for thinned oil and acrylic pigments." (Baigell 127)
For a period of time Sam Francis was part of the Bay Area Abstract group that included Styll, Park, and Richard Diebenkorn. However in 1950, when his work was gaining national attention, Sam Francis left San Francisco to live in the Orient and Paris, where he was much influenced by the French Impressionists* and Post-Impressionist's* use of color. In France, he began to do monochromatic* paintings that suggested fog and mist, often with paint trickling down from the shapes.
In 1962, he settled in Santa Monica and worked extensively for the next thirty years with the medium of printmaking* as well as with his oil painting. He was one of the pioneering artists to experiment with "empty-center" paintings and created works that had pigment stains on the periphery and much open space where traditionally canvases were filled with paint. However, in the 1970, he abandoned the "empty-center" method.
- Creator:Sam Francis (1923–1994, American)
- Creation Year:1967
- Dimensions:Height: 17 in (43.18 cm)Width: 22 in (55.88 cm)
- Medium:
- Movement & Style:
- Period:
- Condition:
- Gallery Location:Missouri, MO
- Reference Number:1stDibs: LU747313827462
Sam Francis
Sam Francis was an American artist known for his exuberantly colorful, large-scale abstract paintings. His practice incorporated elements from Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, Impressionism and Eastern philosophy to create a unique style of painterly abstraction.
Influenced by Jackson Pollock and Clyfford Still, Francis is more closely associated to the work of Helen Frankenthaler, as he was more interested in the formal arrangement of the picture plane than the expressivity of the individual artist. “Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment,” Francis once reflected.
Born on June 25, 1923 in San Mateo, California, Francis briefly served in the US Air Force during World War II but was injured during a test flight. Returning to California, he received his BA and MA from UC Berkeley in botany and psychology before beginning to pursue a career in art. The artist traveled widely during his career, and he was closely aligned with the Art Informel movement while living abroad in Paris during the 1950s.
Francis died on November 4, 1994 in Santa Monica, California, at the age of 71. He was a founding trustee of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and his paintings can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among others.
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