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Artist or Maker: Sam Francis (1923-1994)
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Provenance: Acquired from the artist, circa 1953
Franz Meyer, Zürich
Anon. sale; Christie's New York, 13 November 2001, lot 44
Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
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Exhibited: Museo d'Arte Mendrisio, Sam Francis, May-July 1997, p. 66 (illustrated in color).
Konsthall Malmo; Madrid, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia; Rome, Galleria Communale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Sam Francis, January 2000-January 2001.
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Notes: This work is registered with the Sam Francis Estate as archive number SFP 55-16.
"I make the late Monet pure," Sam Francis stated shortly after arriving in Paris in 1950. Encountering the great tradition of French color and light through the work of Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, the young painter grasped the possibilities of their extension within the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism. In particular, the French Impressionist's Nymphaés--holistic entities and curtains of color--catalyzed a career breakthrough. In "purifying" the grandfather of Modernism, Francis edited the specific figural associations of Monet's lily pads and distilled them into non-objective shapes suspended in immense veils of color.
Yellow evinces the maturation of such vision and the articulation of his signature stylistic tropes. Beginning in 1952, Francis executed a group of paintings in brilliant, high-keyed, virtually monochromatic color, running the gamut of the spectrum over the course of the following year. Encapsulating color within his classic "cellular" imagery of interrelated biomorphic forms, he fused continuous screens that seemed to observe and mimic organic growth. Interspersed on the surface with raw canvas for breathing room, these irregular shapes were woven together with the continuous stitching of dripped paint that ran down the full length of these paintings. They seemed to go on forever and past the physical bounds of the painting as if possessed of a vital life of their own. Indeed, the shapes seemed possessed movement, constantly dissolving and emerging, even breeding.
In this group of paintings, Francis assumed an almost systematic investigation of the formal and emotive power of color. Starting his career as a Bay Area painter, he worked through the influence of Clyfford Still, but began to distance himself from the rawness and physicality of Still's work in the late forties. It was Mark Rothko to whom he turned. Francis was drawn to the liquidity and fluency of Rothko's shapes and surfaces which were in tune with his own penchant for light, shadow, color and space. Indeed, one senses the vestige of Rothko's abstractions from the late forties, with their myriad of adjacent and interconnecting biomorphic shapes in Francis's work, albeit further refined. The thin, almost transparent blocks of color had their direct precedent in Rothko, but also in Arshile Gorky. The latter's influence is also evinced in the downward dripping that Francis used to great effect like tears running down the face of the canvas. Although Pollock was best-known for the drip, rather than pouring paint from above, Francis let it fall to the force of gravity. This appealed to his fondness for an almost watercolor-thinness of paint and its accompanying fluidity. Francis matched Abstract Expressionism's formal features--immense scale and allover fields of color--with a voice of his own. He was singular among the American artists of the post-war generation to embrace the French tradition. "Color is fire," he said, "a firing of the eye color is light on fire."
Nowhere is this analogy more apt than in Yellow. Simply put, the painting dazzles. Its modulated gradations of hue and tone ripple through its mesh of amoeboid shapes to cohere into a frontal, planar sheet of sunshine. Basking in its golden light one experiences a burst of summer sun; indeed, the glowing intensity of Midi, where Francis had visited, filters through in a sudden rush. Yellow is reminiscent of Vincent van Gogh's paintings executed in the same locale; their surfaces spread with the light of the rising, omnipresent sun.
Matisse is an equally strong presence. Francis stated that he wanted to make his paintings a "source of light." The yellow shapes in the painting are so filled with light that they seem almost transparent as if the sun itself was illuminating them from behind. Indeed, they suggest stained-glass windows, especially those that Matisse created for the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, France in 1951. In transit to Paris in 1950, Francis had stopped in New York to visit the Museum of Modern Art; among other things, he would have seen Matisse's The Red Studio.
Indeed, it is the very same Museum of Modern Art that precipitated Francis's meteoric rise on the heels of paintings such as Yellow. A close relative, Big Red, was acquired by the museum and exhibited at its "Twelve Americans" show of emerging talent in 1956. Shortly thereafter, Time magazine singled Francis out as the "hottest young painter in Paris." Francis became an overnight sensation on the international scene and was soon actively collected by the astute ranks of Alberto Giacometti and the Matisse family. The present work was singled out by the one-time curator of Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, Franz Meyer, who gave Francis his first one-man museum show in 1955. Purchased directly from the artist, Yellow remained in his Meyer's private collection for almost fifty years. A remarkable achievement in its own right, it is certified with the distinct air of European connoisseurship.
