Sam Francis
Sam Francis (actually Samuel Lewis Francis, born June 25, 1923 in San Mateo, California, † November 4, 1994 in Santa Monica, California ) was an important American painter and printmaker.
Life
Before he found his artistic calling, Francis studied in the years 1941-1943 botany, medicine and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. After that he undertook for the following two years as a soldier in the U.S. Air Force. Towards the end of the Second World War he suffered in a plane crash severe spinal injury that forced him to a long-term stay in hospitals and clinics. During this time he came into contact with the painting that no longer let him go.
After his recovery, Francis took in the years 1948-1950 at his old university, the study of art history and the visual arts to. He was influenced in this period, in particular from the abstract expressionist Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky and in particular of Clyfford Still. After successful studies visited Francis Paris and taught there permanently. Numerous artists contacts, especially to the circle around the painter and sculptor Jean -Paul Riopelle, determined his style that made him one of the most important representatives of Tachism. He became known to flow with his technique, colors in varying degrees of rivulets on the painting surface into one another, which then mixed to partially large Farbkleksen. In Paris he received in 1952 his first solo exhibition at the " Galerie du Dragon". Where he met Muriel Goodwin, whom he later married.
1957 Francis undertook a world tour that also took him, among other things to spend several months in Japan; there he led as part of a commissioned work from his first large-scale wall paintings. Such, partly large murals he installed in a later period of creativity, inter alia, in the Kunsthalle Basel or in New York's Chase Manhattan Bank. In 1959, Sam Francis took part in the 5th Biennale of São Paulo and in the documenta II in Kassel.
After a period of restlessness with studios in Paris, Berne, Tokyo and New York, which drove him through the world cities, Francis returned again in 1962 back to California and settled in Santa Monica. In 1964 he took part in the 32th Venice Biennale and the documenta III. In the 70 years of the now established artists turned to the Action Painting, whose most notable representatives, he is counted. During this time he began to other art techniques - lithography, monotype, etching - to care.
Francis moved into 1988, a residential house and studio in Inverness, California. A decision made in 1992 order to realize a large mural for the German Bundestag in Bonn, was rejected.
Sam Francis belonged to the circle of friends and acquaintances of the art collector and patron Theodor Ahren mountain.
In addition to his art, Sam Francis was also active in the peaceful struggle against the American war in Vietnam. In consequence of its social and environmental commitment of artists founded in 1987, the Sam Francis Medical Research Center, the cause of research in diseases caused by environmental degradation, operates.
In 2009, some of his paintings, which were located at the time in a warehouse of a Norwegian gallery, stolen and sold to a Dutch gallery owners. The fence could be arrested in cooperation with the German customs and Dutch and Norwegian authorities.
Sam Francis was issued worldwide in many prestigious museums and galleries, most recently, inter alia, in Germany in the Samuel Baumgarte Galerie Bielefeld in 2009 and 2011 at Galerie Thomas Modern, Munich.