Sam Francis

American, 1923–1994

Sam Francis was an American artist known for his exuberant 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, his work is more closely associated to the paintings of Helen Frankenthaler. Works such as Around the Blues (1957, 1963) show the artist’s interest in the formal arrangement of the picture plane as well as his love of flying in airplanes. “Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment,” he once reflected. Born on June 25, 1923, in San Mateo, CA, he 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, including to Japan where he was influenced by the Gutai group of artists and Paris where he was closely aligned with the Art Informal movement. Francis died on November 4, 1994, in Santa Monica, CA. He was a founding trustee of Los Angeles’s Museum of Contemporary Art, today 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.

Courtesy of Artnet

Photograph by Michael Childers