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
More on Wikipedia.
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.
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