Sam Francis

Gimpel Fils Gallery Ltd., London
Joseph H. Hirshhorn, New York (acquired from the above in June 1958)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (Gift of the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, May 1966)
Sotheby's, New York, November 19, 1996, Lot 10 (consigned by the above)
Private Collection, United States (acquired from the above)

Tokyo, Tokyo Department Store Gallery; Osaka, Kinetsu Department Store Gallery, The Adventure of Today's Painting: The Art of Sam Francis and Toshimitsu Imai, October - November 1957
New York, M. Knoedler & Co., Inc.; Manchester, Currier Gallery of Art; Pittsburgh, Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute; Evansville, Evansville Art Museum; Utica, Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art; Louisville, J. B. Speed Art Museum; Minneapolis, Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Seattle, Seattle Art Museum; San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art; Colorado Springs, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; Dallas, Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Oklahoma City, Oklahoma City Art Center; Memphis, Brooks Museum of Art; Atlanta, Atlanta Art Association; Saginaw, Saginaw Art Museum; Montreal, Museum of Fine Arts; Allentown, Allentown Art Museum; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts; Brooklyn, Brooklyn Museum, Paintings from the J. H. Hirshhorn Foundation Collection. A View of the Protean Century, October 1962 - April 1965, cat. no. 29, not illustrated 

Vivien Raynor, "New York Exhibitions/In the Galleries: Paintings from the Hirshhorn Collection," Arts Magazine 37, no. 3, December 1962, pp. 45-46 (text)
Edgar J. Driscoll, "The Art World: Contemporary Exhibit at Boston Museum," Boston Morning Globe, December 13, 1964, p. A38
Debra Burchett-Lere, ed., Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of the Canvas and Panel Paintings 1946-1994, Berkeley, 2011, cat. no. 229, illustrated on DVD

This painting is in excellent condition. Please contact the Contemporary Art department at 212-606-7254 for the condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. The canvas is in a wood frame, painted white with a small float.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

In a career that spanned almost half a century and three continents, Sam Francis charted his own course through the landscape of Abstract Expressionism, creating a corpus that is at once a synthesis of diverse inspirations and a deeply personal endeavor toward self-discovery. Composition, 1957, with its flurry of painterly bravura dissipating into absolute calm, is archetypal of a group of works executed in the last part of the 1950s, considered to be among the very best of the artist’s oeuvre. Previously held in the personal collection of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, and later in the permanent collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. for thirty years, Composition is an unequivocally superb testament to the art of one of the foremost painters of the Twentieth Century. At its most sublime, Francis’ aesthetic was a celebration of color conceived as light, air, and space, as brilliantly demonstrated in the bewitching and beautiful Composition.

Floating weightlessly upward and gathering at the uppermost confines of the canvas as if unshackled from the laws of gravity, the body of densely layered hues in Composition serves primarily to heighten by contrast the predominant zone of depthless white, the evocation of a higher realm of existence. William C. Agee described this compositional trend in Francis’ paintings of the late 1950s: “With this new openness, we are given more breathing room in which to move around the paint and the surface, with areas of white now modulating the color zones, pulling them back as we would part a curtain and affording us a glimpse of another kind of space…the space of infinity.” (William C. Agee in Debra Burchett-Lere, ed., Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings 1946-1994, Berkeley, 2011, p. 74) Francis never left his canvases bare to create this openness, insisting instead on painting or gessoing the white areas in order to imbue them with a distinct tangibility and texture. While the artist’s favored cobalt blue hue remained at the forefront of his palette throughout his career, paintings such as Composition bear direct witness to the radical change that occurred in his coloristic practice in 1957. In the same year as the present work’s execution, Francis began to shift the compositional balance between white and his theretofore vibrant pantheon of pigments, first so that the two seemingly opposed forces appeared equally prominent and finally, as in Composition, so that the white came to dominate the colored areas and the spirit of the painting moved deliberately and distinctly away from the material world. Francis’ long pursued ambition to establish a sense of journeying into a new and vast space for his viewers, thus becomes a continuation – as is also seen in the art of one of his great inspirations, Mark Rothko – of the Romantic tradition in its evocation of a sense of yearning for the faraway.

Sam Francis’ resplendently melodic abstractions belie their physical appearance as expressions of pure painterly energy, instead conferring upon their viewer a profundity of philosophical import. Robert T. Buck, on the occasion of the 1972 retrospective of Francis’ art at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, described the artist as a man with his “mind and spirit far above the actual world.” (Robert T. Buck Jr., “The Paintings of Sam Francis,” in Exh. Cat., Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1972, 1972, p. 14) Though he is often closely associated with his Abstract Expressionist forebears of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Francis never lived in New York, bypassing the city on his move from the Bay Area in California directly to Paris in 1950. It was in France, surrounded by the inimitable influence of the giants of Impressionist art, that his mature style was established and came to flourish. Indeed, in the year immediately following the execution of Composition, Francis’ early champion Arnold Rüdlinger outlined perhaps the crux of Francis’ aesthetic when he wrote, “Right or wrong, Sam Francis’s works remind the European of Monet’s late period. Let there be no mistake – it is not the semblance of colors and the atmosphere that justifies this comparison with Monet, but the miracle that, from an abstract conception, bursts forth the image of a lyrical pantheism to which Monet and Bonnard arrived at by means of the figurative, with Francis continuously transposing it and casting a spell over it.” (Arnold Rüdlinger in Exh. Cat., Paris, Centre Culturel Américain, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Kimber Smith, 1958, n.p.) Entirely representative of this contemporaneous statement, Composition transmits a stunning aura that pays homage to the art historical progression toward abstraction whilst categorically shifting the paradigm of what abstraction can achieve.