A leading second-generation exponent of Abstract Expressionism, Sam Francis created some of the most innovative explorations of colour and light in twentieth-century art. His work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide, including MoMa (New York), Tate Gallery (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Idemitsu Museum of Arts (Tokyo) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). He was the first Post-War American painter whose reach was truly international.

Francis began painting in his early twenties after being diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis, resulting from a U.S. Army Air Corps accident. He was forced to abandon his career in medicine, though continued to study botany, medicine and psychology at the University of California, while privately learning painting under David Park, pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative School.

Instead of remaining in Berkeley, Francis decided to pursue a long-desired ambition to study painting in Paris. He enrolled at the Fernand Léger Atelier in Paris where he became familiar with Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse’s explorations of colour and light. The lessons he absorbed from his time in Paris resulted in immediate critical acclaim and led to his association with Art Informel, though he was never formally tied to any movement. Equally, the bleaker winters resulted in Francis’ palette instantly changing from vibrant Californian hues to the white and grey of Paris. Whilst in Paris, Francis was immediately embraced by numerous important art historians and curators, including Michel Tapié, Pierre Schneider, and Georges Duthuit. In 1956 Time magazine described him as “the hottest American painter in Paris these days” and that same year he was included in the seminal 12 Americans exhibition curated by Dorothy C. Miller at MoMa, New York.

Francis travelled widely throughout his career, spending several years in Japan, where he embraced calligraphy in his treatment of ink and colour when he discovered ‘haboku’ (‘flung ink’). In addition, the growing importance of whiteness and the idea of the void was already present in Francis’ work before he first travelled to Japan. Writing about Francis’ first exhibition on 1957, the art critic Rudlinger predicted that a trip to Japan would be extremely meaningful to Francis: ‘he knows how to employ the silence ad void of Oriental painting as artistic means of expression’. Indeed, a sense of Zen-like white spaciousness defined Francis’ oeuvre more than ever after his first visit to Tokyo. In particular, Francis’ work struck a chord with the Japanese aesthetic sensibility for viewing paintings as a meditative experience. His paintings, as the Japanese poet and critic Yoshiaki Tono aptly noted, are of a “completely calculated Innocence”, a reference to the intuitive simplicity and understated nature of Francis’ oeuvre.