Francis, Home at Last

Getting a handle on the career of Sam Francis (1923-1994) has never been easy. Despite his stature and the apparent familiarity of his work, he’s always seemed to be something of an artistic odd man out.

Born in San Mateo, educated at UC Berkeley and a resident of L.A. for most of his artistic working life, Francis has nonetheless mostly been seen in one of two ways: with the Abstract Expressionist painters of the anxious New York School; or as a Tachiste (European action painter), because he went to live in Paris in 1950 and stayed for eight years, strengthening a bond with Modern French traditions that were largely anathema in New York.

Then there was the matter of prolific output. Francis made lots of work, especially prints, during a career spanning 40 years. Inevitable repetitiousness and considerable minor production confused an otherwise well-established reputation. Francis has been an acknowledged master that we don’t really know.

But we do now. “Sam Francis: Paintings, 1947-1990,” a lovely exhibition of 87 oils and acrylics on canvas and paper that opened Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s auxiliary space in Little Tokyo, offers a beautifully orchestrated, revealing analysis of Francis’ extraordinary career.

In a sense, the show brings Francis home. Guest curator William C. Agee, choosing carefully and well, locates Francis’ art within the crucible of Bay Area abstraction that developed in the late 1940s. Then he unfolds an artistic story in which it’s easy to see a context that includes the meditative 1950s abstractions of John McLaughlin, the 1960s environmental art of Light and Space pioneered by Robert Irwin, the contemplative images of Vija Celmins and more.

The show’s first painting is the magnificent “Big Red” (1953), a lush membrane of vivid, dripping color that shows Francis at his best. Translucent, thinly painted layers of small, corpuscular shapes in crimson, orange and blue-black wriggle across a canvas 10 feet high and 6 feet wide. (Think of a microscopic view of a blood sample smeared across a glass slide, then enlarged.) The tangle of runny pigment seems to glow from within.

A curious and compelling visual phenomenon occurs. You don’t just look at a painting by Francis; instead, you seem to look through it--through organic veils of shifting color to an expansive, luminous space. Amazingly, the internal light in “Big Red” seems not to come from the bright red and orange pigments occupying most of the surface, but from the small glimpses of deep blue-black appearing to hover behind them. The paradox of light emerging from darkness is at the heart of Francis’ stunning achievement.

The first gallery shows in part where it came from. A small, extraordinary 1950 painting on paper is made from black gouache, an opaque color ground in water and mixed with a preparation of gum. Loosely brushed, the black gouache is dense in the center and thin around the edges, where the paper’s whiteness shows through. The visual effect is a remarkable reversal: The whiter edges seem illuminated by light reflected from deep within the blackness of the painting, whose coal-dark core appears positively luminous.

Agee’s indispensable catalog essay traces Francis’ early artistic development in Northern California and the formative impact exerted by various artists working in an abstract idiom there between 1946 and 1950: David Park, Mark Rothko, Edward Corbett, Clyfford Still and more. Wisely, the curator builds on the thesis of art historian Susan Landauer, whose landmark 1996 book and exhibition, “The San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism,” demolished for good the old canard that Abstract Expressionism began in New York and radiated outward across the country. Instead, the American postwar phenomenon arose simultaneously in the West, the South, the Midwest and the East.

So Francis’ mature aesthetic was in place by 1950, prior to his move to Paris and critical visit to New York on the way. Both milieus were important to his art’s subsequent elaboration, but California was its undoubted crucible.

The MOCA survey tightly covers all those subsequent phases, usually with fine examples. The beautiful white paintings, Francis’ first great series, culminate in the breathtaking “Grey” (1954), whose watery patches of pale gray-blue-green seem to be expanding, pressing hard against the blue-black and crimson patches that huddle along the edges.

The curtains of gently mottled color begin to shatter and multiply around 1956, becoming volcanic sprays of exuberant color on big canvases typified by the famous “Basel Murals.” By 1960 the field goes mostly white, with color dispersed into bubble-like volumes (the radiant “Blue Balls” series).

Around then Francis also switched, as many other painters did, from oils to the new acrylics, plastic-based paints whose solubility in water allowed for ease of spread without losing chromatic intensity. Francis’ luminous color finds obvious precedent in early-20th century French Modernist painting, from Monet to Miro, but the “Blue Balls” made me think about early American Modernism, when many of the greatest achievements, from Burchfield to O’Keeffe, were in watercolors.

By 1970, Francis had begun to reconcile the organicism of his fluid color with a linear grid, derived from the edges of a stretched canvas. For a dozen years, he elaborated the oppositional theme, often in monumental murals of graceful complexity.

The show finally stumbles on the Geffen’s mezzanine, where 12 pictures from the 1980s are installed. Francis had struggled with a series of serious illnesses since his 20s, and now, in his 60s, his powers of reinvention were on the wane. No matter. By then the depth and sweep of his output in the previous three decades were enough to sustain the reputations of several artists.

More than half the show is devoted--rightly--to paintings from the 1950s, the zenith of Francis’ work. In his essay, Agee also displays welcome candor in charting the inevitable ups and downs of Francis’ artistic evolution. While asserting his achievement, he shuns hagiography.

Two disappointments need citing. First, several critical paintings aren’t here. “Opposites” (1950), Francis’ first Berkeley masterpiece, is especially missed. (No loans have come from Tokyo’s Idemitsu Museum, which owns this and several other major early works.) The otherwise convincing argument locating Francis’ mature development in California, not Paris, is weakened in a show whose first masterpiece was made in France.

Second, the book contains no checklist of the works displayed. Its value as an exhibition document suffers.

Still, there’s much to recommend this show--not least the carefully chosen abundance of exceptional paintings. Go and revel in the luxurious color of an often remarkable art, which can be decorative in the profoundest sense: as material tokens of a spiritual honor.

* “Sam Francis: Paintings, 1947-1990,” Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., (213) 626-6222, through July 25. Closed Mondays. Adults: $6. Students and seniors: $4. Children: free.