Pasadena Box - No. 3 by Sam Francis, 1923-1995

Sam Francis, 1923-1995
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Pasadena Box - No. 3

Original lithograph in four colours. 1963. Signed in pencil. Numbered in pencil as: State No 1 10/100. From the first variant of the printing with the first group of colours - edition of 40. (After 40 impressions Francis changed the colours and inscribed the prints as 'State no 2, numbered from 41 to 100). Total edition of 100.
Ref: The Prints of Sam Francis no L 59 (1)

Printed at the Joseph Press. Issued by Pasadena Art Museum. Brilliant fresh impression with excellent vibrant colours. On pale cream BFK Rives paper. Excellent fresh condition; slight traces of old mounting on the reverse only. Printed to the full sheet size, as issued. Sheet: 15 x 11 1/4 ins (381x286mm)

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This composition from the 'Pasadena Box' series (a group of prints created for the Pasadena Art Museum) shows the invention and free evocative colourism of Sam Francis's work in lithography at its most beautiful. His work combines wonderful sensitivity to colour balance and relationship with constantly inventive handling of free form. When both are perfectly in harmony, as here, his art reaches great peaks of lyric beauty.

Sam Francis was one of the very greatest of the American 'colour abstract' painters of the post war years. After his earliest art education he went to Paris in 1950. Paris was then the hub of the colour abstract movement. He met very many of the leading painters of the Abstraction-Création circle and his own work began to attract critical acclaim from his first exhibition in 1952. From the beginning he displayed the sensitivity the balance of free form and colour which is central to his art, but the most important event of his early career was certainly his world travel in 1957/58 for it was during that trip that he first visited Japan.

The traditions of Japanese art, and also calligraphy, had the most profound effect on Sam Francis's approach to form. It was after that first visit that he began to develop his unique feeling for the light strokes, dabs and splashes of colour which give his work its wonderful movement. It is this feeling of constant movement, linked to brilliant colour, which gives his art its unique quality, a quality of immediate visual impact which then evolves and grows as the eye rests longer on the picture. Passionate about lithography from a very early moment Sam Francis made some of his most beautiful and most sensitive images in colour lithographs. The Pasadena Box prints are one of the great moments of his art in the 1960's.