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SAM FRANCIS:
Thomas McCormick Gallery Imagine it is autumn in midstate Illinois: trees of butterflies en route to Mexico take flight (the millennial instincts of Monarchs) -- patterns circumscribe the air. Schooling fish, following only the immediate movements of their fellow fish, again produce what man discerns, in movement and in form, as intricate ballets. And now, recall, the dynamic flow of leaves on a farmland creek: also a colorburst of autumn hues, and nonetheless, a scuttling down stream, through Mississippi currents, out to the open sea.... In all of these, there is a common currency. As philosopher, Friedrich Nietsche said: "Out of chaos, comes order." Life -- which will not be denied -- like water, seeks a balance of flux and flow, a something beyond the cut and dry: the 'rightness' of a common, if somewhat strange attractor. Here is a logic of durance, of the very much existing -- what is and what of sheer inevitability must be. And then, regard, with close attention, the prints of artist Sam Francis.... The gallery visitor has until February 10, 2001 to leisurely regard 15 color trial proofs of the late, leading San Francisco artist, Sam Francis, now on exhibit at the Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago The first impressions are neither so far-fetched, nor so indulgent. Sam Francis met Biomorphic trends in art early on while in France during the 1940s and 50s, and his own interests ranged from Matisse's color sense through the archetypes of Carl Jung and the sensibilities of Zen Buddhism. Art historian, William C. Agee, cited as well "... writers and poets such as Herman Melville, William Blake, William Shakespeare, Friedrich Holderlin, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams as formative influences." And Agee observed that: "The invisible world of organic cells and life was familiar to him from his courses in botany and pre-medical studies, as well as from his long stay in the hospital."
Sam Francis's studies -- botany, psychology, and finally medicine -- which began in 1941 at the University of California, Berkeley, were interrupted by the Second World War. The future artist joined the Army Air Corps as a fighter pilot in 1943. A year later, an emergency crash landing which severely compressed his spine, unleashed the previously undetected spinal tuberculosis which led to his turning to art, and which ultimately, in 1994, ended his life. He had been given a box of watercolors -- a gesture toward therapy. For the next fifty years, his art drew him into life, sustained and strengthened that life, and memorialized that life. But Francis himself asserted: "The personal lives of painters are tragic and inevitable and do not explain the artist. For the artist is his work and no longer human."
The artists first discovered that. And long before. They always knew it was 'there.' Sam Francis's studies, and that artist's personal experience of disordered illness -- artist, first as student and later as patient -- confirmed a sense for what science terms 'nonlinear dynamical process.' And he saw -- in blood samples through the microscope, as well as in a love of the very real world that was slipping by him -- the very vibrant hues of life and life's essential processes. This artist became a choreographer of contours, the artist of a dance of form and fundamental type. And he explored color and light's changing luminosities. Sam Francis, very much near his death, declared: "Color is fire... Color is light on fire." (Pontus Hulten, Sam Francis, exh. cat.: Bonn: 1994) The prints in this exhibit bear that declaration out. One of the artist's three sons, Shingo, living in Japan (where Francis often visited) wrote:
Sam Francis's color trial proofs at Thomas McCormick Gallery do bear out for the visitor that artist's sensing of dynamics and contour, his access to the intuitions of biomorphic form, and the artist's drawing of these all within a visceral color sense -- color as known only from the rafts of leaves seen in autumn... on intimate smaller rivers among the farmland fields... leaves splitting into swarms and merging back, but never once repeating any pattern lost before. And there is his feel for light, light reflecting from a bright and shallow sediment below. (These prints are on bright, archival paper.) They are the qualities which made Sam Francis a prominent leader in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene. None of which is to deny Francis's affinities with the art of his time. Agee cites the artist's responses to "the organic forms, color and vast space of Clyfford Still, tempered by the softer, more modulated surfaces of Mark Rothko, the two artists who most determined the direction of [San Francisco] Bay Area abstraction in the late 1940s." And, again, Agee also recalled Francis's move to Paris in 1950 that opened up to the artist "the great French tradition of color light exemplified in the work of Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, and Pierre Bonnard."
It is all here.... The Thomas McCormick showing offers a small, but representative range -- what, in the end, are recognized as Sam Francis's established typologies. Within Francis's use of biomorphic themes -- and with his acute sense of color resonance -- arose his tropes. Prior works represent what historian Agee terms the "Matrix [which was the artist's own term] and random 'beam' paintings," done since the 1950s. A viewer finds, as well, the 'Open Center' or 'Edge' paintings which predominant within the years of 1966-69. In addition, the McCormick showing offers some examples of Sam Francis's explorations of grid modalities [his focus in the years 1974-1980]. William Agee himself felt that "The Matrix and random 'beam' paintings accounted for some of the true high points in Francis's art, for he was working with the greatest intensity and consistency since the late 1950s." A visitor here may very well agree. Long Blue (24 3/4"x35 1/4":1964) and Damp (26"x37 1/2":1969) are fine examples of Francis's 'Open Center' or 'Edge' works. In these lithographs, the active visual interest follows the image edge -- the central area remains a crisp and open void. Pontus Hulten, in the 1994 catalogue Sam Francis, quotes the artist: "The center is reserved for you...." A viewer may consider whether the artist was prompted by a Buddhist sense that empty space equally defines the attendant and dynamic elements; or whether the artist followed his perceptions of fluid dynamics: a tendency for surface tensions to pull free articles into a framing bond. Here, the colors, as is the norm for this artist, are bright, strongly contoured; there is a liquid deployment of compositional elements. "Nature forms patterns." "[Sam Francis] loved nature. He would sit next to the river...." These prints capture and epitomize essential forms, natural patternings. In this exhibition, Doubled Cross (27 1/2"x41 1/2":1973) well represents Francis's exploration of Matrix or random 'beam' compositional dynamics. Although a frenzied 'noise' pervades the overall image, the skewed '#' configuration graphically emerges from that immediate, deliberative chaos. And here, the scattering 'noise' contributes a tension, an excitation, resolved by the greater unity in the ordered beams of coherent pattern. King Corpse (42"x59":1986) seems a link between the 'Matrix' themes and the artist's more overtly, discernably biomorphic inspirations such as the 1964 Untitled lithograph (15 1/2"x 22 3/4"). King Corpse recalls so many microscopic slides, rods and spirochetes, random and coherent forms -- membranes. In fact, Sam Francis carried many archetypal elements throughout his art, although the art varies in periodic expression and in each specific execution. Dates and trends swing in intelligible, but analogical relationship. The works in this exhibition range from 1961 to 1988. It is a brief, but well-chosen overview: a sampling. And it does create distinct impressions; impressions which linger on; and even now remain. Color Trial Proofs: experiments: a primal, basic art. Francis's Untitled (1964:15 1/2"x22 3/4") seems explicitly cellular, diatomaceous... blood cells. There is good reason.... The artist had gone through so very many blood tests. A viewer may indulge the freedom denied a responsible reviewer -- that is, to speculate upon the relations between an artist's personal experience and its influence upon his art. One nonetheless perceives cells, the flow of bodily fluids, and, as well, the creeks and streams of a living land. And there are indications that such speculations are legitimate -- at least, to a certain degree.... Certainly, William Agee, a competent commentator on Sam Francis, noted of the 1960-63 'Blue Series' paintings: "Once more his work made specific and painful autobiographic reference, for the blue of this series embodies the experience of sheer pain, the dysfunction of his kidneys, the discoloration and enlargement of his testicles. The images refer to his condition, but they continue the biomorphic shapes that long predominated in his art, since the blood cells suggested in his work of 1949-1950, now isolated and floating in the sea of white that had appeared in his painting of 1957." The gallery visitor speculates, and to his own revelation; and, perhaps, that is the greatest virtue of this art. It presents engaging visual, open-ended and unending queries. There is indeed content. Some prints here, such as Red and Green (31 1/8"x23":1966), reveal the freest composition and expression. Others -- Her Blue Deeps (30 1/8"x22":1972) or Coral Marine (25 5/8"x35:1973) -- prefigure the anarchy before the artist's hand of order. These are works which point toward the artist's last paintings, works of the late 1980s and early 90s, (works like the acrylics: Untitled (1989:89"x179") or Blue and Red in Yellow (1990:72"x38")). Francis's last works seem to recapitulate the 'Action Paintings' of Pollock and the New York schools. But they display a greater, albeit elusive integrity of implied motion; a coherence within the chaos of color and free-fall splatter paths. Even within the proffered prints at Thomas McCormick Gallery, Sam Francis's variety of working method comes to the fore. Among 'Edge' paintings, White Deeps (38 1/2"x 26 1/2":1972) presents a broader synthesis which reaches to the 'Matrix' work. This print seems as if a farther, fractal perspective on Francis's Her Blue Deeps (1972). Inherent in this art is the 'fractal coastline' described by Chaos theorists such as Polish mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot: that is, the insight that 'coasts' themselves have smaller coasts, which then have smaller coasts, ad infinitum. Subtle, fundamental actualities -- Francis intuited patterns science, without such delight, is only now discovering. And this is an exhibition first and foremost of visual delight; the truths which nourish and inform its art can be left to science and to math; but they are there and very real. On first encounter, one approaches the art of Sam Francis with scepticism. An ex-G.I. is given paints for therapy... But, in this case, spark hit tinder: There was an intuitiveness, and a considerable talent. And it grew.
Not so for the artists. Not so for Sam Francis. His lithographs are a testament to that. It is precisely that order implicit in erratic, dynamic pattern -- 'chaos' --, emergent and primordial, which the artist senses and from which he draws his strength. "Out of Chaos, comes Order." Sam Francis, artist, was all-the-more a poet and philosopher. The gallery visitor has until February 10, 2001 to examine 15 color trial proofs and confirm that testament. It is now at the Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago. --G. Jurek Polanski Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net. Editorial Note: Books mentioned in www.artscope.net reviews are often in print and may be purchased through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Particularly recommended is William C. Agee's Sam Francis: Paintings 1947-1990, with chronology and bibliography (Museum of Contemporary Art/Los Angeles: 1998). The reader may also refer to The Prints of Sam Francis: A Catalogue Raisonne 1960-1990, by Connie W. Lembark and Ruth E. Fine (Hudson Hills: 1992). These latter two volumes in slipcase offer 383 colorplates and 141 duotones. James Gleick is quoted from Chaos: Making a New Science (Viking: 1987). |
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