Untitled (New York)

After spending the 1950's traveling abroad and living mostly in Paris, Sam Francis spent six months in New York in 1959 working on a mural project for Chase Manhattan Bank. Untitled (New York) is related to that project--in most of his works from this period, "the paint has become opaque and heavy" and "the spatial result is much more two-dimensional, a flat surface" (P. Selz, Sam Francis, New York, 1982, p. 70). The flatness and interlocking shapes evoke an abstracted New York coastline or a map and bear the influence of his hard-edged Abstract Expressionist colleagues in Paris, Al Held and Kimber Smith.