Sam Francis

Sam Lewis Francis was born in San Mateo, California, in 1923. The American artist belongs to the current of abstractionists and expressionists.

 In California, he attended the University of Berkeley from 1941 to 1943, where he first took a major in botany, then psychology and medicine.

During the Second World War, he interrupted his studies to enlist in the Air Force as a pilot (in the US Army Air Corps). A flight accident forced him to spend three years in the hospital, during which time he became interested in painting, which he regarded as a kind of therapy and became totally absorbed in it.

Sam Francis in Paris, the abstractionist influence of Jackson Pollock

He painted his first compositions in 1947, and lived in Paris between 1950 and 1957, where he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie du Dragon in 1952.

He painted his first compositions in 1947, and lived in Paris between 1950 and 1957, where he held his first solo exhibition at the Galerie du Dragon in 1952.

He is credited with the lyrical and sensual use of colour within abstract expressionism: thin paints, the striking drops and splashes, the rich oranges, yellows, reds and blues.

He later bent the values of abstractionism to his own particular minimalist tendency, colouring only the edges of his canvases.

He exhibited for the first time in a museum in 1955, with 7 paintings, at the exhibition Tendances Actuelles at the Kunsthalle Bern. The following year, he participated in another exhibition, 12 Americans, at the MOMA in New York, and in the following periods travelled between New York, Mexico and Japan.

In 1961, he was forced into a long hospital stay in Berne. During these years his works participated in exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi in Venice, and at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, in New York.

In 1963, he produced a series of colour lithographs.

Sam Francis, engraving technique and printing

In 1970, he founded the Litho Shop, a facility for print artists, and in 1984, the Lapis Press, a publishing house that is now considered one of the most prestigious publishing houses specialising in philosophy, visual arts and the production of artists’ books.

Fame and death

 Sam Francis’ works are exhibited in museums all over the world – Museum of Modern Art in New York, National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Museum of Modern Art in Shiga, Japan, Tate Gallery in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris – and in numerous private collections.

He spent the last years of his life in California, where he died in 1994, in Santa Monica.