Combining an American sense of space with a European eye for color, Sam Francis is one of America's most celebrated abstract painters, whose life and career helped garner international recognition for American painting of the 1950s. Born in San Mateo, California in 1923, Francis opted to study medicine and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, but with the advent of World War II, he left school in 1943 to join the U.S. Army Air Corps. Francis never saw combat, however, sustaining a severe spinal cord injury that left him hospitalized for three years following a training accident. While in recovery, Francis took up watercolor painting, eventually returning to the University of California, Berkeley in 1948 to concrete on Studio Art and Art History. During this time, Francis was heavily influenced by New York School Abstract Expression as well as then Bay Area-based abstractionists Clyfford Still (1904–1980), Mark Rothko (1903–1970), and Edward Corbett (1919–1971). After receiving his M.A. from Berkeley in 1950, Francis moved to Paris and immersed himself in French art, being particularly taken with the works of Pierre Bonnard (1867–1947), Henri Matisse (1869–1954), Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), and Claude Monet (1840–1926) for their mastery of color. While the artist produced various monochromatic series, his use of vibrant color has come to define much of his oeuvre: "Color is the real substance for me, the real underlying thing which drawing and line are not."[1]

Francis achieved international acclaim while abroad, proclaimed by Time magazine as the "hottest American painter in Paris."[2] Over the next four decades, Francis travelled extensively across the globe, maintaining studios in Bern, Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City, Santa Monica, and Palo Alto. Throughout his career, he moved between painting modes and expressions, producing a diverse body of work that oscillates between monochromatic and bursting with color, all-over compositions and solitary gestures. Francis passed away in Santa Monica in 1994.

The work of Francis has been exhibited worldwide both during his lifetime and through various retrospective exhibitions. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome; Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Japan; and National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, among many other venues.

CEJ

[1] Harriet Schoenholz Bee and Cassandra Heliczer, MOMA Highlights: 350 Works From the Museum of Modern Art, New York (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), 224.

[2] Carol Salus, Out of Context: American Artists Abroad (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 142.