Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California in 1923. After a visit from David Park while hospitalized for Spinal Tuberculosis in a military hospital in 1945, a visit by Bay Area painter David Park changed the course of his life. It was there, during his years-long hospitalization, that he began to paint. After being discharged from the military, he received undergraduate and graduate degrees in art from the University of California, Berkeley in 1949 and 1950, respectively. At UC Berkeley he belonged to a student cohort that included fellow Bay Area artists Fred Martin and Jay DeFeo, who remained lifelong friends.
Responding to the heavy influence of abstract expressionists Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, who taught at the San Francisco Art Institute in the late 1940s and early 1950s and left lasting impressions on artists in the region, Francis adopted an abstract painting style early on in his career, and quickly became recognized internationally for contributing to the second wave of Abstract Expressionism, which embraced the expressive potential of color. Francis’s work in particular became noted for its emphasis on the interactions of color and light and its unorthodox compositions.
Beginning in 1950, Francis began to travel regularly for international exhibitions, spending long stretches of time in Paris, Tokyo, New York, and Mexico City. In 1956, his inclusion in MoMA’s influential “Twelve Artists” exhibition catapulted him to art world stardom. Francis’s art expanded to include a robust printmaking practice and works of various scales, from mural sized works to small works on paper. He eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he became a fixture in the location art scene but also maintained a studio in Japan during the 1970s.
In the 1980s, he opened a printmaking studio in Palo Alto, after years of being away from the Bay Area, and produced a significant body of work while in the region. Having been exposed to so many different settings and visual cultures, his work was heavily influenced by French modernism, East Asian mysticism and traditional painting, and psychoanalysis. His interest in Eastern philosophy and how it translated to the visual in addition to the use of painting to represent the unconscious were also central to so many painters living and working in the Bay Area during the 1960s through 1990s. This not only stemmed from the region’s Pacific Rim history as a hub of exchange between the U.S. and Asia but also from the influence of early post-war artists like David Park, who explored how art could draw from other disciplines.