This lot is offered without reserve.

"I cannot imagine starting a painting with an idea. I have to start with a thing, a thing to touch--the canvas, the paint. Years ago I would start a painting with a shadow. The sun would shine on it and I would start with the accident of the shadow" (Sam Francis, as qouted in W. Agee, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 150). Sam Francis painted some of the most joyous and hauntingly sublime abstract works of the latter half of the 20th century. He was not only a West Coast doppelganger to the New York School's Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock but he was one of the first American painters to bring the dynamic new energy of Abstract Expressionism abroad, where he earned great acclaim and success in Paris as well as in Japan. All of the works in this No Reserve grouping were purchased by a private collector in Japan from Mr. Sadao Ogawa of the Yayoi Gallery. The owner acquired them from Yayoi over a period of many years. Pictured here in the 1990's with the artist, Mr. Ogawa was close to Francis for many years and an active collector and seller of his work. Francis created works on paper (as well as an important oeuvre of prints) throughout his career as can be seen in the following twenty-seven works, which span five decades. In fact, Francis's artist life as a painter began with watercolors, when he was convalescing from an illness in 1944. Although sometimes related to major works on canvas, his watercolors, gouaches and small paintings are meant to stand on their own. Whereas his mural size paintings conveyed grand gestures, Francis brilliantly was able to shift gears on the smaller stage, creating magic with minute detail and subtle gestures. The works are evocative of Francis's earlier interests in nature and science, specifically botany as the forms seem to grow with an inner logic, freezing in place before they can spread over the entire sheet yet still hinting at a larger scale of activity of which we may only be viewing a slight detail. William Agee suggests that "Francis achieved a fine balance between openness and density...by means of a centralized column or spine, of rich coloring surrounded at the sides by white areas punctuated with vertical dripping and random touches of paint. (W. Agee, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 38). Like his New York contemporaries, Francis worked intuitively, stepping out of the framework of daily life and linear narrative into a meditative realm where the artist's, heart, head and hand could create without the pictorial limitations of the known visible world. At the same time, the very subjective nature of the work allows for multiple readings that can change rapidly like a storm or drift slowly like misty layers of fog. Indeed Francis lets us into his psychology as he shares the following anecdote "I work from the whiteness of the paper to the darkness of my soul" (Sam Francis as qouted in W. Agee, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999, p. 27).

Sam Francis (1923-1994)

Untitled

Details

Sam Francis (1923-1994)
Untitled
signed, inscribed and dated 'Sam Francis 1958 Bern' (on the reverse)
gouache on paper
5 5/8 x 4 in. (14.3 x 10.2 cm.)
Painted in 1958.

Provenance

Acquired from the artist
Yayoi Gallery, Tokyo
Private collection, Tokyo

Special notice

This lot is offered without reserve.

Lot Essay

This work is registered with the Sam Francis Estate as archive number SF58-257.

Untitled

Lot Essay

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