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Lot Essay
Francis spent most of the 1950s in Paris, where he produced his first mature body of work, achieved international recognition, and in 1956 was called "the hottest American painter in Paris" by Time magazine. That same year his paintings were featured in the important Twelve Americans exhibition at New York's The Museum of Modern Art, which had itself by then acquired two of his works from the 1950s.
Francis' first Parisian paintings were predominantly hazy, gray-white atmospheric fields. By 1954, and continuing throughout the rest of the decade, his style became more organic and free, employing expanses of white to interact with the increasingly intense color-forms. As in many of the later works from the 1950s, in Untitled Francis employs the white fields to provide depth to the composition in much the same way as Cézanne used barely-primed canvas for modelling landscapes and still-lifes in his late work.
The new-found freedom of expression in Francis' work, evident in the spontaneous brushwork and drips that further illuminate the canvas of the present painting, owes much to the haboku "flung ink" style of Sesshu, a 15th Century Japanese master of landscape painting. It is likely that Francis had been exposed to this style of painting while in Tokyo on a nine month trip around the world in 1957. While there, he executed the monumental Tokyo Mural at the Sogetsu School.
Of paintings executed just before and after the present work (Towards Disappearance II, 1958; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Round the World, 1958-1960; Fondation Beyeler, Basel), William Agee writes:
. . . blues moving to virtual blacks, mixed with high-pitched reds and yellows in brilliant ensembles. It is as if Francis had combined the freedom of brush of the late Monet, the color veils of Matisse and the surface opticality of Bonnard's shifting passages (W.C. Agee, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 38).
In 1958 and 1959, curvilinear blue forms come to be increasingly predominant in Francis' work, as in Untitled, and as such it clearly prefigures the celebrated Blue Balls series he was to begin the following year, 1960.
Francis' first Parisian paintings were predominantly hazy, gray-white atmospheric fields. By 1954, and continuing throughout the rest of the decade, his style became more organic and free, employing expanses of white to interact with the increasingly intense color-forms. As in many of the later works from the 1950s, in Untitled Francis employs the white fields to provide depth to the composition in much the same way as Cézanne used barely-primed canvas for modelling landscapes and still-lifes in his late work.
The new-found freedom of expression in Francis' work, evident in the spontaneous brushwork and drips that further illuminate the canvas of the present painting, owes much to the haboku "flung ink" style of Sesshu, a 15th Century Japanese master of landscape painting. It is likely that Francis had been exposed to this style of painting while in Tokyo on a nine month trip around the world in 1957. While there, he executed the monumental Tokyo Mural at the Sogetsu School.
Of paintings executed just before and after the present work (Towards Disappearance II, 1958; The Museum of Modern Art, New York and Round the World, 1958-1960; Fondation Beyeler, Basel), William Agee writes:
. . . blues moving to virtual blacks, mixed with high-pitched reds and yellows in brilliant ensembles. It is as if Francis had combined the freedom of brush of the late Monet, the color veils of Matisse and the surface opticality of Bonnard's shifting passages (W.C. Agee, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 38).
In 1958 and 1959, curvilinear blue forms come to be increasingly predominant in Francis' work, as in Untitled, and as such it clearly prefigures the celebrated Blue Balls series he was to begin the following year, 1960.