Back from the Rim

By R.H.

A lot of ink has been spilt this past decade on the question of who was or was not a "first-generation" Abstract Expressionist. Since America is apt to regard its artists as either seed bulls or vicarious aristocrats, the squabbles over lineage tend to be obsessive. But the historicist view of priorities has its shallows. Several fine painters who came to maturity in the 1950s have been blurred by the filter of Who Did What First.

A case in point is Sam Francis. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in the early '50s he provided Europe with its first intimations of those U.S. Abstract-Expressionist characteristics that would colonize Paris and London by the decade's end: the glowing, saturated color, the vigor of handling, the expansive scale. Yet Francis, who moved to Paris in 1950 and took Europe as his ground (with much traveling in Mexico and the Orient, especially Japan), suffered the common fate of Homo transatlanticus: rebuked for his Frenchery, he was nudged to the outside rim of the Abstract-Expressionist hierarchy, so that to this day one rarely finds more than a few sentences about him in the official histories. Ten years ago he returned to the California coast where he was born, buying a house in Santa Monica that once belonged to Charlie Chaplin. He still keeps studios in Europe, and, at 49, remains the compleat internationalist.

The residual prejudice should at last be corrected by the Sam Francis retrospective--150 paintings on canvas and paper, spanning 25 years from 1947 to the present--which began at Buffalo's Albright-Knox Art Gallery earlier in the fall and opened last week at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C. It reveals no thin eclectic, but a painter of extraordinary robustness and sensitivity. Halfway through the show one realizes the irony of his situation in the 1950s: that an artist criticized as an appendage to Europe should have made such advances amidst the general flabbiness that the School of Paris was suffering at the time. Sam Francis, as Robert Buck Jr. notes in his catalogue essay, "was almost alone [in Paris] as a contemporary artist furthering one of the strongest traditions in French art--a joyous and unrestrained love of color."

Ceiling Watcher. Color and its vibrations have always been central to Francis' work. Son of a California mathematics professor, his career as a painter began in 1943 when, age 20, he was bedridden from a spinal injury sustained when his Air Force fighter crashed. The hospital was on the coast of California, and Francis spent weeks watching the shift and bloom of light on the Pacific, and its reflections on the ceiling--projected, as it were, on a blank canvas. Here Francis discovered a motif to which he would constantly return: the specific qualities and the substantiality of light. It permeates his earliest grand-scale painting, Opposites. 1950: the radiance flickers through successive depths and opacities, and even an eye tired by the scale of recent American art can still experience some of the surprise that, more than two decades ago, the size of Francis' canvas (8 ft. by 6 ft.) provoked. But rather than engulfing the viewer, Opposites caresses: a sea, but of rosewater. Its character--like that of the huge Monet water-lily panels which Francis studied in Paris--is openness.

Whale White. Later, in paintings like Blue Ball series--Untitled, 1961, the diaphanous mists and blots of color were abolished in favor of a snowy white field on which dense blue circular shapes were deployed; later still, the series that included Untitled, 1970, pushed the activity of color from the center of the canvas altogether, leaving the white void itself as the subject, speckled and edged with exquisitely laced drifts of color that Francis blurred, wet into wet, in imitation of Japanese sumi ink painting.

In 1957 Francis titled a canvas The Whiteness of the Whale, an open invitation to connect his work to Melville, who wrote of Moby Dick in a celebrated passage: "But not yet have we solved the incantation of this whiteness...why, as we have seen, it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian's Deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind." Naturally, to invoke Melville does not make Sam Francis the Melville of painting. Yet his best work sometimes touches an epic quality that makes sense of his ambitions. "There is no conflict in my painting," Francis once remarked. "The conflict is in my life. I feel trapped by gravity. I would like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud, but I am tied down to a place. Painting is a way out."

qedR.H.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.