Second generation Abstract Expressionist Sam Francis’s passionate use of color was evident throughout his career, but especially so in the seminal group of works he created in the 1950s. As the decade progressed, Francis increasingly used color on his canvases, and in 1955 he painted Black and Yellow, a rare large-scale work of edge-to-edge abstraction that is bursting with yellow, blue, red and black. Sotheby’s Contemporary art specialist Saara Pritchard introduces us to the expressive painting, which comes from The Collection of Mrs. John L. Marion and has not been in public since Francis’s 1972 retrospective.

Past Auction

American Visionary: The Collection of Mrs. John L. Marion

12 May 2021 | 6:00 PM EDT | New York