Sam Francis
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. 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.
If you own a work by Sam Francis
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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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.