Lot 619
  • 619

Sam Francis

Estimate
4,500,000 - 6,500,000 HKD
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Description

  • Sam Francis
  • Untitled
  • acrylic on canvas
  • executed in 1988-1989
inscribed SFP88-230 on the reverse

Provenance

Galerie Jean Fournier, Paris
Private European Collection
Sotheby's, London, 13 February 2013, lot 118
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

Exhibited

France, Paris, Galerie Jean Fournier, Sam Francis: Toiles de Grand Format, 1988 et 1989, 27 May - 1 July 1989
France, Toulouse-Labège, Centre Régional d'Art Contemporain Midi-Pyrénées, Sam Francis, 15 November 1991 - 2 February 1992, pp.52-3, illustrated in colour

Literature

Debra Burchett-Lere ed., Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946-1994, Berkley 2011, cat. no. SFF. 1558, illustrated in colour

Condition

This work is in very good condition with only very minor surface accretion. No evidence of restoration under UV examination.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

Catalogue Note

Colour is Light on Fire
Sam Francis

Colour is light on fire. Each colour is the result of burning, for each substance burns with a particular colour.
– Sam Francis1

What we want to make is something that fills utterly the sight, and can't be used to make life only bearable; if the painting till now was a way of making bearable the sight of the unbearable, the visual sumptuous, then let's now strip away... all that.
– Sam Francis

Untitled (Lot 619) and Untitled No. 13 (Lot 620) hail from the breathtaking heights of Sam Francis’s distinguished fifty-year career in the 1970s and 1980s, constituting exalted vibrant summations of the artist’s diverse artistic and philosophical lineages spanning Europe, the United States, and Asia. The earlier Untitled No. 13, with its bold use of vast empty white, achieves a consummate compositional and sensual symphony of line and colour, void and form, radiance and opacity; while the later Untitled presents luminous jewel-like swathes and throngs of radiant colour floating and undulating in dynamic biomorphic metamorphosis within a white abyss. Both lots exhibit the pioneering colourist’s virtuosic mastery of light, colour and composition coupled with a sublime use of space, presenting Sam Francis’s signature cosmism in which, in the artist’s own words, “everything floats—where I carry this unique mathematics of my imagination through the succession of days towards a nameless tomorrow”.3

A Californian by birth, Sam Francis was first influenced by the works of Clyfford Still, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko who converged and taught in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1940s. Digesting these stylistic precedents, Francis relocated in 1950 to Paris where he became immersed in the rich mesmerizing colours of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists. During this period the critic Arnold Rüdlinger wrote that Francis’s works “remind the European of Monet’s late period. Let there be no mistake – it is not the semblance of colours and the atmosphere that justifies this comparison with Monet, but the miracle that, from an abstract conception, bursts forth the image of a lyrical pantheism to which Monet and Bonnard arrived at by means of the figurative”.4 It was also during this time that the first artists from China and Japan congregated in Paris in the early 1950s, including Zao Wou-ki, Chu Teh-chun, Imai Toshimitsu, Domoto Hisao. Deeply intrigued by Asian philosophies, Francis adapted his style in the mid-1950s to introduce large areas of white, creating an airiness and lightness that breaks up his earlier grid-like all-over compositions of colour.

In 1957 Francis visited Japan along with Michel Tapie and encountered the Gutai group. Living and working in a temple in Tokyo, Francis studied haboku (traditional Japanese flung-ink painting) and ikebana (the art of flower arrangement). Henceforth his execution grew to be even more gestural, incorporating such influences in dynamic dripped splatters of watercolour and turbulently calligraphic compositions. Francis kept a studio in Japan throughout his life; from then on the dual importance of emptiness and white space became crucial to his composition and aesthetic philosophy. Still biomorphic and cellular, Francis’s forms seemed to increasingly pulsate with a mysterious inner light and energy, at once tangible and elusive, visceral and ethereal. The influence of Asia thus resulted in Francis’s unique brand of Abstract Expressionism defined by veils of colour finely honed in varying intensities hovering within expanses of white – resembling planets or atoms, cellular or galactic, microscopic or cosmic.

Perhaps noting the East Asian sensibilities in Francis’s work, James Johnson Sweeney wrote in a catalogue in 1967 that Francis was “the most sensuous and sensitive American painter of his generation”.5 The current lots evidence Francis’s unique marriage between vitality and serenity that result in a singular stunning aura – bearing an emotional charge that is at once joyful, boundless, and meditative in spirit. In a career spanning half a century and three continents, Francis charted his own course through the global landscape of abstraction, creating a corpus that is at once a synthesis of diverse inspirations and a deeply personal endeavour toward self-discovery. A consequence of Francis’s travels was that he spent a lot of time in airplanes gazing down at the variegated patchwork of earth and water below. Aerial topography with vast planes of colour became a major source of inspiration for his compositions, and he started using maps as source drawings for his rough outlines. At its most transcendent, the art of the groundbreaking colourist is a celebration of colour conceived as light, air, and space; Francis spoke of being “intoxicated” with light, “not just the play of light and shadow, but the substance of which light is made,” seeking to make each painting “a source of light”.6

1 Sam Francis cited in Jan Butterfield, Sam Francis, Los Angeles 1980, pp. 9-10
2 Sam Francis in a letter to Museum of Modern Art curator Dorothy Miller in 1957
3 Peter Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1975, p. 80
4 Arnold Rüdlinger in Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Culturel Américain, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, 1958, n.p.
5 James Johnson Sweeney in Exh. Cat., Houston, Museum of Fine Arts (and travelling), Sam Francis, 1967, p. 21
6 The artist cited in “New Talent,” Time, New York, January 1956, p. 72