Sam Francis

Martha Jackson Gallery, New York
Galerie Arditti, Paris
Private Collection, United States
Sotheby’s, New York, 24-25 October 1974, Lot 561
Private Collection, United States
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Switzerland
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 1980

London, Gimpel Fils Gallery, Collectors Choice X, March 1961, n.p., no. 9, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the background is slightly lighter and the blue is more vibrant in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals evidence of light frame rubbing with associated wear along the edges. Further close inspection reveals some thin drying cracks to the white paint throughout the composition, and a few unobtrusive rub marks in isolated places. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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“The Blue Balls paintings reflect an artist determined to bring the emotional fervor of Abstract Expressionism (especially that of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning) forward into a brave new world of 1960’s art, a world in which coolness, style, emotional understatement and formal overstatement were the paramount goals. In them, Mr. Francis progressively intensified his color, broke up and magnified his cellular vocabulary and created enormous ovoid shapes – partly organic, partly calligraphic – that he boldly played against great expanses of white canvas.”

ROBERTA SMITH

“Sam Francis, at the Height of His Powers,” The New York Times, 7 June 1991


Standing as a powerful testament to the artist’s unique visual language, Untitled (1960) combines the most essential forms of Sam Francis’ oeuvre: vivid, radiant colour and intricate, meandering form. Harmonious and elegant, this work belongs the artist’s prominent Blue Balls series, executed in Paris in the early 1960s. Other important examples from this series, Blue Balls V (1962) and Blue Balls VIII (1961-62), are housed in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, respectively.

“I am fascinated by gravity,” Francis wrote, “I like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to a place… Painting is a way in and out” (Sam Francis quoted in: Peter Selz, Sam Francis, New York 1975, p. 14). Like swirling galaxies, or clouds pulsating with mystery, the forms of Untitled exist in constant metamorphosis. The rich blue forms hover in an expanse of white, their dynamic nature suggesting a constant drifting in and out of the extreme edges of the canvas. With deft mastery and confidence in his medium, the artist manages to compose organised chaos: every gesture, spontaneously calculated, leaves its trace on the surface of the work, recalling the directness of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.

Despite the artist’s proximity to the Abstract Expressionists during his early years, Sam Francis felt his affinity lay more closely with the French tradition of Claude Monet, Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse, whose luminous, incandescent colours he so admired. The years 1960 to 1963 which he spent in Paris, were marked by difficulty and became known as his ‘blue period’. Overwhelmed and limited by a period of illness, Sam Francis abandoned his previously hedonistic use of colour, turning instead almost exclusively to the colour blue –in the intense shimmer of cerulean, azure and indigo, the artist found the suggestion of infinite freedom he so desired. “I live simply suspended in a hell-like paradise of blue balls,” he wrote wistfully to his friend, poet and critic Yoshiaki Tono in 1961. “Everything is in suspension. There, day after day, looking towards a nameless tomorrow, I do nothing but perform the unique mathematics of my own imagination” (Sam Francis quoted in: Sam Francis. Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, Berkeley 2011, p. 194).

Beautifully capturing the artist’s obsession with the colour blue, the present work is not only an outstanding example from one of Sam Francis’ most acclaimed bodies of work, but indeed an excellent work that perfectly captures the artist’s creative spirit. Departing from the legacy of Abstract Expressionism but with a decidedly original approach to abstraction, Untitled stands as a testament to one of the masters of post-war painting.