Stop and Look: Untitled by Sam Francis

Born in San Francisco, growing up in the Bay Area, and much influenced by his experience of Impressionist painting when he studied in Paris, Sam Francis took up the ideas of the Abstract Expressionists practising in other parts of the United States, and his pictures add to the language that artists forged for the national voice in the decades immediately after the Second World War. 

It was a strange moment: at the height of the Cold War, America was looking for some vital demonstration of the nation’s cultural significance, a contemporary answer to the achievements of European Modernism, from Cubism on, and Soviet Modernism – Constructivism and so on. Abstract Expressionism seemed to be a solution: original and challenging, and in visual terms undeniably impressive. What these usually very large and colourful paintings actually meant was less important than their exhibitability. And being abstract, there could be endless discussion about what exactly they were about.  

Discussion there certainly was. For a start, what was meant by “abstraction”, or “form”? The English critics Clive Bell and Roger Fry had dealt with this question early in the century. They had famously posited the notion of “significant form” divorced form representational reference. Some of the Americans produced great, sonorous statements that are clearly very earnest attempts to answer such questions. But Sam Francis’s paintings seem to rise, if not soar, above technical issues of that sort. They are in fact among the most engaging of the abstract works of the time: fluid, often calligraphic, and using bright colour on a white ground, they are in many ways like drawings, though generally conceived on a large scale. In common with the other major figures of the movement, Francis confines himself rigorously to the uncompromisingly abstract: we are not invited to read landscapes or figures into his compositions, but must take them literally as arrangements of forms without ulterior significance. The word “untitled” that he and many of his colleagues used when asked to give their work a name, is not a lazy evasion of the artist’s duty to inform us of his or her intention: it is a candid declaration that what we see is what we must work with. 

But Francis’s pictures don’t feel like hard work: they are what they are, lyrical, relaxed and attractive to the eye. There is a clear relationship between the marks on the canvas and the medium the artist uses: usually very liquid pigment that splashes in visible drops and trickles without too much evident control. At the same time, they make up compositional schemes that are visually quite complex and contain subtle rhythms and unexpected harmonies – Francis was much influenced by the sophistication of Japanese prints – but don’t impose an obligation to analyse them for deeper meanings. They aren’t offering large metaphysical suggestions: he tends to spatter small quantities of colour over his surfaces, rather than creating large clear spaces (as in “colour field” painting) that seem to invite contemplation or meditation. His work is basically congenial, pleasant and “chatty”. The strong associations of the red, gold and black in this picture with fire, building to a white-hot intensity, are there if you choose to make something of them. But they are not conveying information about combustion: they are colours, not symbols. Amid the portentous seriousness of so much European Modernism, they present a splendid glow that makes an exhilarating, and none too solemn, contribution to the national – and international – debate. 

Write to us with your comments to be considered for publication at letters@reaction.life