The 1970s were a pivotal time in Sam Francis’ career, and arguably the decade where he reached the peak of his abilities as an artist. By the time the decade came about, Francis had already established himself as an imposing figure in the art world. Having already shown at MoMA and helped engineer the Tachisme movement in Europe, he worked extensively with artists all over the world, from Joan Mitchell to Walasse Ting.
Untitled could be considered to be a transitional piece between the white expanses that defined his late-60s Edge series towards the Greenbergian formalism present in his works from the 80s and 90s, where he aligned his practice more with the conventional abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Mark Tobey. However, considering this era in Francis’ career to be ‘transitional’ is somewhat disparaging to an artist that was in constant evolution, experimenting with new ideas and techniques in a revolution of painting, redefining the parameters of the medium. Moreover, transition implies stylistic interruption, when Francis’ oeuvre could only ever be considered as a layered concentration of the following key elements: sumptuous control of colour, a masterful employment of thinned-out paint and most importantly, a profound preoccupation with negative space.
The Country of Oblivion
Each of these concerns are brilliantly exhibited in the present lot, where Francis employs ballads of teal to form intersecting bands that divide the composition into a poetic balance of pigment and canvas. The artist flexes his technical abilities here, using a range of techniques from a roller to create bands, then adding pools, drips and splatters of paint — producing an accomplished variation in the materiality of paint. Indeed, what underlies this concerto of forms and hues is a dedicated, almost architectural approach to compositional space. Francis used water and tinted gesso to demarcate the nexus of beams, over which he would apply paint on already dampened areas, working wet-on-wet and revisiting the surface before it had been given the opportunity to dry and develop chromatic agency.
“Painting is about the beauty of space and the power of containment.”
— Sam Francis
One Foot in the West, the Other in the East, Straddling the World in Tradition
Francis had always been fascinated with the concept of white space, though upon his first visit to Japan in 1957 upon commission from Teshigahara Sōfū, who was the master of the Sōgetsu School of ikebana (Japanese flower arranging), this preoccupation took on new bearings and a heightened sense of urgency. This can be seen in his Japan Line series of the late decade where long lines of dripped paint and nucleated forms that climb across the canvas create new fields of perspective for the swells of uninhabited white oceans that envelop them. The works here, which form the theoretical and functional foundations of Untitled, and display striking semblances to two of the finest eras of Japanese art: the splashed ink Haboku scrolls of the Muromachi period and the monochromatic divergences of the Azuchi-Momoyama period Kano School. Francis demonstrated an exceptionally intuitive grasp of the concept of ‘ma’ — the dynamic interchange between form and non-form, object and void, mass and space. He would manifest ma through existential white holes that allow the accompanying forms to breath, these mini universes assume primacy within the composition, offering a footpath through the composition and a blueprint for reaching a state of zen — rendering infinity, tangible. His finely attuned sensibilities paved the way for a close relation to some of the country’s leading post-war figures: for poet Takahiko Okada, the artist’s lyrical white was ‘straining, tense, a magnetic field’; for writer/artist Shūzō Takiguchi, it was ‘the space of effusion, filled with amorous tenderness’; while for critic Yoshiaki Tōno, one of his closest devotees in Japan, Francis had summoned ‘a white world that spells a rumbling, sensual, and fatal horror.’ i.
This would bring the art historian Peter Selz to posit that ‘Japan, with a tradition that considers art, above all, as meditative experience, almost immediately responded with sympathy to Francis’s work.’ ii. Such a position was shared by many critics in Japan, who aligned the quality of absence in his painting with further Asian theoretical concepts, such as mu (nothingness) in Zen Buddhism, and yohaku (unpainted space) in ink painting. Devotion to the aesthetic sensibilities of Buddhism was underpinned by a long-standing interest in the religion — during his time at UC Berkley before the Second World War, he studied Zen texts at length. His attachment to Japan was made consecrate by two marriages and divorces with Japanese artists Teruko Yokoi and Mako Idemitsu, fathering two sons by the latter — and learning to speak and write basic Japanese, which reinforced his understanding and connection to ma.
A Psychological Temperance
Through the 1970s, Francis’ exploration of the interior, the spiritual, was tempered by a furthering commitment to science, and thus a balance between intuition and method. A student of psychology at college, the artist took this one step further when he began Jungian analysis in ’71 — a detailed, analytical approach to talk therapy that seeks to bring balance and union between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. Indeed this turn to psychology has been credited for the incredible creative surge and flowering in innovation that Francis enjoyed during the decade; the exploration of the psyche uncovering a well of boundless productivity and vision.
i Yoshiaki Tōno, quoted in Richard Speer, Points of Entry: Sam Francis — The 70s, ext. cat., Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, September 2019, online ii Peter Selz, quoted in Debra Burchett-Lere, ‘Sam Francis: A Biographical Timeline’, in Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings 1946–1994, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2011, p.179
Provenance
Estate of the artist, California Private Collection, Belgium Guy Pieters Gallery, Saint-Paul-de-Vence Private Collection, Belgium Christie's, Hong Kong, 11 July 2020, lot 271 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
Exhibited
Los Angeles, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Sam Francis, June 1975 Paris, Galerie Jean Fournier, Sam Francis, de 1947 à 1988, sur papier, October - November 1988
Literature
D. Burchett-Lere, ed., Sam Francis: Online Catalogue Raisonné Project, plate SF74-92, online (illustrated)
inscribed by studio assistant '1974 Tokyo 36 1/2’’ x 72’’ SFT74 92' on the reverse; further stamped with the Sam Francis Estate logo and facsimile signature stamp on the reverse acrylic and gouache on paper 92.7 x 182.9 cm. (36 1/2 x 72 in.) Executed in 1974.