Sam Francis

As has been noted of the artist, ‘Francis pursued works on paper with no less intensity than he did paintings on canvas.’ This beautiful and vibrant gouache drawing was executed in 1961, when Sam Francis was hospitalized for most of the year at the Tiefenauspital in Bern in Switzerland, due to a recurrence of tuberculosis. He turned his room into a studio and was allowed to paint, for short periods of time, with watercolours and inks. During this year of intense activity he produced a handful of paintings and almost five hundred small-scale works on paper; all characterized by combinations of blue and white tones. As William Agee has noted, between 1955 and 1963 ‘blue became Francis’s signature color, replacing red and gray…With blue, in a mural format, Francis could realize on a new scale his ambition for a more expansive and open space, aerial and seemingly limitless. The entire surface of his paintings now seemed to unfold and billow…while the boundaries of shapes became less distinct and discrete, pulling apart and even blurring, one fusing with another.’

Writing in the catalogue of a 1967 museum exhibition of the artist’s works on paper, the curator Anneleise Hoyer noted that ‘Sam Francis prefers to call many of his gouaches “drawings”, although they are not drawn with a pen or pencil but brushed in full color in wide areas. Drawings, as Francis conceives of them, have a special place in his work. They are, in fact, at the very root of it, its first and most direct manifestation…A painting by Sam Francis is a continuum, all-encompassing, a “walk-in” world in itself; a drawing represents a moment of creation made visible.’ Francis’s friend and dealer André Emmerich has pointed out that ‘Painting on paper…always held for him a special magic. He approached paper with a sense of freedom and spontaneity which is clearly reflected in the perceptible immediacy of the resulting works. Their gestural assurance and vibrant color endows them with a transcendent sense of joy and spirituality.’

The Sam Francis Foundation has documented this work in their archive under the number SF61-057.