Sam Francis valuation
Learned to paint flat on his back in a military hospital, and spent fifty years pushing colour to the edges.
Sam Francis was born in California in 1923 and began painting while immobilised for years in a military hospital after a flying accident in the war, working on his back.
What a work by Sam Francis is worth
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Bio
Sam Francis was born in California in 1923 and began painting while immobilised for years in a military hospital after a flying accident in the war, working on his back. He studied in Berkeley, moved to Paris in 1950 and became the American painter most at home in Europe, then travelled and worked in Japan, where the treatment of empty space in the Edge and Bridge paintings found an obvious kinship. The mature work leaves the centre of the canvas open and drives cellular blocks of saturated colour to the borders. He founded The Litho Shop in Santa Monica and died in 1994.
Francis was an exceptional and very prolific printmaker, and lithographs, etchings and monotypes make up the bulk of what comes to market, catalogued by Lembark. Monotypes are unique and are frequently offered as if they were editions. The acrylic and watercolour works on paper are numerous and vary greatly in scale and ambition. The Sam Francis Foundation runs the authentication process and the catalogue raisonne, and unsigned studio works and works completed by assistants are a known area of difficulty that the Foundation exists to resolve.
At a glance
- Born
- 25 June 1923, San Mateo
- Died
- 4 November 1994, Santa Monica
- Movement
- Abstract Expressionism
The catalogue raisonné, Basel and The Litho Shop
The Sam Francis Foundation published, with the University of California Press, a catalogue raisonné of the canvas and panel paintings from 1946 to 1994, recording 1,855 paintings, and is preparing a second volume of the unique works on paper. A painting should be found there, and a work on paper should be referred to the Foundation.
He painted large murals for the Kunsthalle in Basel between 1956 and 1958 and for the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York in 1959. Much of the later printmaking was done at The Litho Shop in Santa Monica, which he owned, and Lembark's catalogue identifies the prints.
Big Red, Blue Balls and the Lapis Press
Francis began to paint in hospital after a visit from the painter David Park in 1945, and took his BA and MA at Berkeley in 1949 and 1950. His first exhibition in Paris was at the Galerie Nina Dausset in 1952, where the critics Michel Tapié and Claude Duthuit, Matisse's son-in-law, took up his work, and his reputation rose quickly after Big Red, painted in 1953, was shown in the Museum of Modern Art's Twelve Americans in 1956.
The Blue Balls paintings of 1960 to 1963 followed a bout of renal tuberculosis in 1961. In the early 1970s came the Fresh Air pictures, colour poured and splattered onto wet bands laid down with a roller, then the grid or matrix paintings of 1973 and 1974, some as long as six metres, and in 1984 he founded the Lapis Press in Santa Monica to publish books. His work is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Idemitsu Museum of Arts in Tokyo and the Centre Pompidou.
Best auction results
- Composition in Blue and Black $13.6m
- Oil on canvas, 1955 · New York · 9 November 2022
- Publicly reported
- From the collection of Paul Allen, and double the high estimate. An auction record for the artist.
- Summer #1 $11.8m
- Oil on canvas, 1957 · New York · 11 May 2016
- Publicly reported
- Bought by the collector Eli Broad. The artist's record until 2022.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
