ART REVIEWS : ‘Works’ Shows Pleasure, Pain of Francis

Modern art imitated nature less by reproducing it than by acting like it: enigmatically experimenting. The late California Abstract Expressionist master Sam Francis stands high on the list of painters whose work almost willfully defied definition. He even avoided being tagged with such trademark gestures as Pollock’s dribbles or Kline’s black skids on white fields. But before his death last November, Francis managed to complete a group of paintings that come close to an act of testimonial self-revelation. They are now on view at the L.A. County Museum of Art in an installation titled “Sam Francis: The Last Works.”

Making these paintings was not easy. The artist, riddled with cancer, was confined to a wheelchair and robbed of the use of his right hand, his painting hand. Characteristically indomitable, he learned to work with his left. The result was 150 canvases that average barely 2 feet on a side--dramatically smaller than his usual large-to-mural-size compositions.

The individual works are varied but united by unusual urgency. One shows five straight, flat, intersecting brush strokes that suggest both a stylized star and a schematized human body. Delicate linear dribbles explode from its center like fireworks. It seems to speak of a special kind of agony.

Another piece suggests hedonistic ecstasy. Its center is a blob of paint the color of a valentine heart and as thick as cake frosting. A depression at the center looks like the mark of a naughty child’s finger. Around the periphery swim short serpentine strokes evoking golden glow-worms.

These haiku-like units are telling but less so than the way the show is installed. Francis regarded all these works as modules in a single piece. They are hung close together, stacked to the ceiling in a cubical gallery. Each seems part of a larger universe while remaining a galaxy unto itself. Such an evocation of interpenetrating microcosms and macrocosms is a not-unfamiliar tendency of mystical thinking.

On a more secular plane these works-that-are-all-one-thing tell us that Francis, like most other outstanding L.A. artists of his generation, found his originality by combining several aesthetics. His basic matrix was Abstract Expressionism as practiced in San Francisco after World War II.

Into this mold he poured roughly equal measures of Japanese Zen, which appears to de-emphasize individuality, and European Romanticism, which appears to do the opposite. But Francis found a paradox. Zen thinking often leads to a marvelous kind of idiosyncratic eccentricity. Romantic individualism often leads to dissolving the ego in some great cause. Francis found both his individuality and his cause in the same place, in painting.

Born in San Mateo in 1923, Francis’ original aspiration was to be a doctor, a healer. Training for the air corps in World War II, he was badly injured. Enduring a long period of painful and confining recuperation, he discovered solace in painting. In that sense he healed himself. Painting became his lodestar and he was soon ranked among its renowned practitioners.

It gave him a good life. He married five times, fathered children and became a cosmopolitan figure. Although he had trouble talking about his own work, he possessed a curious and encyclopedic mind. He established a foundation to find ecologically sound alternative energy sources and a medical research center--emphasizing holistic and spiritual healing--to study infectious diseases. He also set up a publishing house for books on art, literature, psychology, philosophy and criticism.

No wonder he made paintings where pleasure and pain, the universal and the individual all commingle. He was, like any decent artist, simply recording his experience.

The exhibition was organized by LACMA curator of contemporary art Howard N. Fox, who wrote a brochure essay that is eloquent in its simplicity.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Sept. 17, closed Mondays, (213) 857-6000.