Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis 9780520973923

Citation preview

Light

on

Fire

The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the following in aiding the publication of this book: The Ray and Wyn Ritchie Evans Foundation, Anthony E. Nicholas, Director Jonathan Novak Contemporary Art, Los Angeles Donald Rubin The publisher and the University of California Press Foundation also gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Leo and Florence Helzel Endowment Fund in Northern California Art. Additional support for this project provided by the Sam Francis Foundation, California.

Light

on

Fire The Art and Life of

sam francis Gabrielle Selz

university of california press

University of California Press Oakland, California © 2021 by Gabrielle Selz Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-31071-1 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-97392-3 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

part i

vii 1

1923–1950 color is light on fire

1.

Traumatic Beginnings

11

2.

First Love, First Muse

23

3.

An Unexpected Battle

35

4.

The Keys to the Kingdom

45

5.

A First Coalescence

54

part ii

1950–1956 paris was the psychic mother of me

6.

A Tiny Room at the Hôtel de Seine

67

7.

Ambition and Lies

78

8.

I Paint Time

87

9.

A Homecoming of Joy and Anguish

98

part iii

1956–1962 go as far as you can as fast as you can

10.

Wanderlust

115

11.

Feverish Intensity

131

12.

An Internationalist in New York

140

13.

I Am a Seismograph

150

14.

A Dance with Mr. Death

161

part iv

1962–1985 i am your change-bearer, i am your instrument of expansion

15.

Resurrection

175

16.

I Love My Desires

187

17.

The Space at the Center Is Reserved for You

200

18.

The Artist Is His Work and No Longer Human

215

19.

My Consciousness Is an Image

228

20.

Art Is the Heart of the Matter

240

21.

A New Era for Los Angeles

251

22.

My Virtue Is to Be Myself

261

part v

1986–1994 i am steering by the torch of chaos and doubt

23.

Don’t Be Sorry for Nothing

273

24.

Death Is a Curve in Harmony with Life

283

Epilogue Notes on Sources Illustration Credits Index

295 303 335 339

Acknowledgments

I began this book more than six years ago, sparked by a conversation with Debra Burchett-Lere, the executive director and president of the Sam Francis Foundation. Her encouragement, advice, passion, knowledge, and friendship have been a tremendous asset during the length of this project. Since this book relies extensively on primary source material, BurchettLere’s generosity in opening up the Sam Francis Foundation archives to my research—letters, notebooks, medical records, and negatives of pictures never developed, the whole vast treasure trove of material upon which this book is based—was an invaluable resource. Additionally, I am indebted to the board and the staff of the Sam Francis Foundation, and to the expertise and unfailing good humor of the foundation’s associate director, Beth Ann Whittaker-Williams. I am grateful to all the members of Sam Francis’s family: his widow, ex-wives, children, niece, and nephew. All were unstinting in sharing memories, pictures, and documents with me. Likewise, I am grateful to all of Francis’s assistants, friends, dealers, associates, and doctors. These gracious and talented people—who, I came to understand, were members of Francis’s extended tribe—entrusted me with stories, opinions, and even

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acknowledgments

intimacies of their complex relationships with Francis. I could not have written this book without their cooperation and insight. I owe several critics and scholars a special thanks for their comments on early drafts of this manuscript: William C. Agee, Lucinda Barnes, and especially Patricia Albers. Their perceptions and counsel were essential to my understanding of Francis, his work, and the art-historical period in which he plied his trade. I was helped by libraries and archives around the world, among them the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; the Stanford University Library; the Museum of Modern Art Archives; the Library and Archives of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; the UC San Diego Library; and the archives at Galerie Kornfeld in Bern, Switzerland. I spent a great deal of time in the Special Reading Room at the Getty Research Institute, where Sam Francis’s archives reside. No writer or researcher could have had a more helpful, patient, and generous staff to support her, nor could she have found a more beautiful and peaceful environment in which to focus on her work. At University of California Press, Nadine Little and Kim Robinson did a superb job editing the manuscript. I am especially grateful to Robinson’s illuminating insights and comments and the invaluable shepherding of her staff at various stages of book production. Thank you, too, to my amazing copyeditor, Erica Olsen, who made this book better in so many places. My extraordinary agent, Susan Golomb, was unwavering in her commitment to this project. Additionally, I am grateful to Susan Tillett and Peter Barnes of the Mesa Refuge for letting me sleep one night alone in Francis’s old house in Point Reyes Station; to my Japanese interpreter, Lora Sharnoff; to Elizabeth Block for her contribution; and to Sue Heinemann’s astute help with endnotes. Every book takes a village. The writers of North 24th populate my village. From inception to completion, these brilliant women gave me inspiration, support, and guidance. I am happily beholden to Allison Hoover Bartlett, Leslie Berlin, Jeanne Carstensen, Leslie Crawford, Frances Dinkelspiel, Katherine Ellison, Susan Freinkel, Julia Flynn Siler, and Jill Storey. All works on Sam Francis, and maybe especially my book, owe a deep debt to my father, Peter Selz. His monograph on Francis has been the

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fundamental benchmark and touchstone for all scholarship on the artist for the last fifty years. During the first three years I worked on this project, my father was still alive. I was able to talk with him at length about his friendship with Francis, and I was lucky to share with him the first half of this book and to benefit from his observations before he died. Finally, my love and gratitude go to Theo Mync. I am truly privileged to have a son who enjoys discussing narrative structure and the eternal questions of beauty. Theo, mi vida, you sustain me.

praise for Light on Fire “A balanced, fascinating, and at times suspenseful account of a complicated man. Discreet and thoughtful, the author has nonetheless pulled back the curtain on this lion of the twentieth century. I couldn’t put it down.” Anastasia Aukeman, author of Welcome to Painterland: Bruce Conner and the Rat Bastard Protective Association “A fascinating, meticulously researched account of an elusive and enthralling artist. A sheer delight to read.” Julia Flynn Siler, best-selling author of The House of Mondavi, Lost Kingdom, and The White Devil’s Daughters

Introduction

It was the winter of 1958. Along the rue de Domrémy in Paris, candelabra streetlamps cast pools of light on the cobblestones. In his studio, Sam Francis worked alone through the night, eager to complete what he described as his enormous dream: the massive Basel Mural triptych— three separate canvases, each measuring approximately thirteen feet high by twenty feet long, and, with their stretcher bars, weighing nearly eighty pounds apiece. To keep warm while he labored, Sam wore a wool overcoat and burned coal in the stove. Over the last month, he had all but forgotten to sleep. To his patron Franz Meyer Sr., he wrote, The brush is up and will not come down until they are finished. It is like filling great sails dipped in color . . . This is the work I have always wanted to do. Ripeness is all. Sam painted intuitively, standing so close to the canvases he could sense the rhythm and contour of the images as his brush pulled them forth, hear what he called the breath of the painting. For him, each canvas became a new skin, each form a new body. As dawn approached, he paused. Surrounded by his sensuous, billowing webs of radiant blues, Throughout the text, I have italicized quotes from Sam Francis’s aphorisms and letters, reserving quotation marks for remarks from interviews and his published writing.

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introduction

blazing oranges, and ringing golds, he waited. The finishing touches were always made in the natural light of day. Suddenly, one of the giant canvases toppled from the wall, trapping him underneath. He struggled to hold the immense painting aloft. His heavy overcoat and the viscous canvas on its wooden frame must have been smothering. At five feet six inches, Sam stood less than half the height of the canvas, and, though he was strong, he was compromised by fatigue and disease. About the murals, he had written friends and family, Perhaps I have created something now that will endure. To this I dedicate my life. Now, if he let the wet image drop to the floor, it would be ruined, and part of him would be lost as well. The abstract forms came from within his soul. The shaping of them was the shaping of himself. About his painting, he said, “It comes from me and is therefore me.” And so, while the coals burned out in the stove and daylight brightened the skylight, Sam held the wet eighty-pound canvas above his head for hours. By the time help finally arrived, his back and arms throbbed. His shoulders ached. The resulting injury to his abdominal wall would require surgery. But he had saved the painting.1 •

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Sam Francis was in the pantheon of American artists who ascended to international prominence during the post–World War II economic boom and the country’s rise to preeminence on the global stage. A complex and dynamic man, he embodied many of the romantic ideals of America’s first avant-garde art movement: Abstract Expressionism. He was heroically ambitious and committed to the revelation of the self as a vehicle to express the universal. Employing lyrical colors and organic forms on a vast expanse of white canvas, he envisioned painting as a transformative process. His abstract shapes continually explored the relationships between matter and void, finite and infinite space, life and death. Early in his career, he rose to world stature. He was a generation younger than fellow painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. All three were middle-aged by 1950, the year Sam Francis, not yet thirty, set off to explore the world, taking the vocabulary of Abstract





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Expressionism abroad. For the next forty years, his career spanned three continents. From Europe, he explored Japan and twice circled the globe. Along the way, he assimilated and seeded styles, not only taking Abstract Expressionism to Europe and Japan but also absorbing both Asian and French artistic traditions to disperse when he returned to America. Indeed, Pontus Hultén, the founding director of the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, labeled him “the first international artist.”2 According to Hultén, between 1958 and the mid-1960s, Sam commanded the highest prices of any living painter. In midlife, Sam settled in Los Angeles, but he continued to be fueled by a relentless artistic searching. He preferred a nomadic lifestyle, what he called a suspension. His growing wealth enabled him to maintain studios around the world. He refused to be tied to a single country or home (or even an individual woman) and refused to limit his representation to one gallery or dealer. His independent trajectory anticipated a larger cultural shift: the rise of the influential international artist embraced by a global art market that far outweighed the major urban art worlds of New York, Paris, or London. His earning power and control over his career challenged the stereotype of the struggling, impoverished artist and set the template for today’s blockbuster artists like James Turrell, Sir Anish Kapoor, and Jeff Koons—more than five decades later.3 Outsize in every way but physical stature, Sam Francis created more than ten thousand works of art during his fifty-year career. His paintings are found in major art museums and public collections around the globe. Indeed, his vaulting ambition and extraordinary impact reached far beyond painting. He was instrumental in the founding of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1979. MOCA went on to help launch the city of Los Angeles as the vital contemporary art center it is today. He also established a publishing company, a printing press, a holistic medical research center, a reforestation program, and an alternative energy company. Yet because he doesn’t fit neatly into the modernist chain of homogeneous art movements, his influence and vast achievements are still relatively unknown outside art-world circles. While the story of any one person reveals certain aspects of the culture and the times, and the biographies of artists must examine their bodies of

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introduction

creative work, this book is first and foremost the story of Sam Francis’s tumultuous and multifarious life. In the early 1970s, when my father, the art historian Peter Selz, was researching his monograph on Sam Francis, I met Sam. Though I’d studied and grown up surrounded by his monumental paintings, and I’d read my father’s book, it was Sam himself, the man as enigma, who intrigued me. At the time of our introduction, Sam was a stout little man with long gray hair who had just created the largest single canvas in the world (Berlin Red, 1969–70, measuring twenty-four by thirty-six feet). Ill most of his life and usually in pain, when he stepped, literally, onto his vast canvases, he felt his discomfort vanish as he painted. He leapt with the grace of a gazelle and flung paint as if his brush were a magic wand. Who was this incongruous man, propelled by such desire that he risked his body and soul for painting? I had to find out. Like many, I was drawn to both the euphoric painting and the mythic nature of his self-narrative. From a nearly fatal illness in his early twenties, which left him immobilized for three years, to his metamorphosis into an artist, Sam’s life evokes the archetypal story of rebirth: confrontation with death, a retreat from earthly matters, then, ultimately, the emergence of an altered self. His original aim had been to become a doctor, but his education was interrupted by World War II. While training in the Army Air Corps, he contracted spinal tuberculosis. Encased in a full-body plaster cast, he was often quarantined and alone. Given a set of watercolor paints as a therapy tool, he took up painting as a means of leaving sickness and pain and escaping from his plaster cage and hospital bed. From the moment he first picked up a brush, life, death, and painting became intrinsically linked. When he recovered, he was convinced he had cured himself through art. Suffering and pain have informed the work of artists as diverse as Frida Kahlo and Jean-Antoine Watteau. Both lived with injury or disease throughout their lives and sought out-of-body release through art. “The most powerful art in life is to transform pain into a healing talisman,” Kahlo wrote in her journal. “A butterfly is reborn, blossomed into a colorful party!” Watteau, who suffered from tuberculosis, painted Pilgrimage to Cythera in 1717, a fantastical depiction of an island paradise of love and light where no pain existed. Though Sam refused to be curtailed by tuberculosis, his work often evokes skin, veils, and blood cells. Time and again,



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matter and void battle for preeminence on his canvases, while art surfaces as the healing enterprise of his biography. •



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By 2014, when Debra Burchett-Lere invited me to lunch in Los Angeles to discuss writing his biography, Sam had been dead for a decade. On the recommendation of board member John Seed, Burchett-Lere, the executive director of the Sam Francis Foundation, had read my book Unstill Life, a memoir of my father and the art world. Each chapter of that book includes short biographical histories on an artist intimately connected to my father’s life and his work as an art critic, historian, and museum director. One of those chapters focused on Sam Francis. Burchett-Lere wanted to know where I had heard the story I’d related of Sam threatening to crash a plane, kamikaze style, into the compound of his greatest patron, the Japanese oil baron Sazō Idemitsu. Idemitsu had refused to allow Sam to marry his youngest daughter. “From my father,” I told Burchett-Lere. It was a tale I had loved as a child for its romantic, Romeo-and-Juliet quality. “We don’t think it’s true,” Burchett-Lere said. On reflection, I realized the story had always seemed inconsistent to me. It’s hard to reconcile the rotund and serenely smiling man who sat like Buddha in our home with this tale of a desperate, daredevil, take-no- prisoners pilot. And yet many art historians believed it, just as they believed and reported the false narrative that Sam had risen phoenixlike from the ashes of a fiery plane crash to become the painter of the heavens. I began to wonder what else about his story I, and others before me, had gotten wrong. As it turned out, a lot. Because of my position as both insider and outsider to Sam’s story, Burchett-Lere thought I was ideally suited to combine an intimate account and a neutral perspective. I’d met Sam and observed him. Yet although I was familiar with the art world he’d navigated, I didn’t work in that world or in the art academy that analyzed, lauded, canonized, and critiqued his paintings and his life. Given my father’s role in Sam’s career, I hesitated. But while my father had written Sam’s monograph, much of the biographical lore relevant to his investigation—and other scholarship—appeared to be false. Furthermore, as an art historian, my father focused on discovering artists

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introduction

and bringing their work to the forefront in exhibitions and books. As a writer of narrative nonfiction, I focus on illuminating the artists behind the images— in this case, piecing together the jigsaw puzzle of Sam’s experience and revealing how he transmuted events, ideas, dreams, and lies into works of art. Burchett-Lere first proposed this biography, and I am greatly indebted to the Sam Francis Foundation for the access it granted me and the funding it provided during the year when I was crafting a proposal. But the book is editorially independent. The research, scholarship, and writing are entirely my own. •

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In every artist’s life, there is a gap between wanting and becoming, between the person and the art. This biography strives to fill this gap, to elucidate and understand the boy Sam was and the artist he became. For, indeed, Sam’s desires, born out of tragedy, gave rise to an astonishing body of work. His appetite for life, for love, for spirit and matter drove an artistic exploration that sent him continuously back and forth around the world. By nature, Sam was a great fabricator with a trickster personality. He identified with Carl Jung’s trickster archetype: the mischievous breaker of taboos, the magical conjurer who tries with illusions to continually transcend the earthbound fate of man. Even though he entered into five marriages, Sam felt trapped by anything locked, firm, stable, or binding. He embraced chaos, believing it to be the wellspring of creativity and the antidote to ossification. Friends, wives, and associates referred to his demonic nature and his “dark side.” Yet these same people spoke of his dazzling, exalting canvases, his humor, his open heart, his deep generosity, and his unlimited support. Everyone I interviewed professed to know Sam best. Many had pet names for him, as if Sam were a character out of a Dickens novel, and each moniker emphasized a different reality. He was Chubby, Sammy, Beautiful Voyager, Global Sam, King Sam, and Sam-Chan (lovable Sam). I have chosen to refer to him simply as Sam. Given that Sam’s wives, children, brother, and parents shared his last name, I have also opted, for clarity and readability, to use first names when referring to Sam’s immediate family. Everyone else is referred to by surname.





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Figure 1. Sam Francis painting the Basel Mural in Arcueil studio, Paris, 1958.

Like the art he created, Sam’s life was a profound act of mythmaking and self-transformation. In both, he endeavored to reconcile polarities: great love with tragic loss, extraordinary vitality with dissolution, the colors of desire with the white of oblivion. If his life could be only temporary, his paintings were meant to “stop-frame eternity.”4 In the early 1990s, when he was battling terminal cancer and descending into darkness, Sam

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continued to insist that art would once again, like a springboard, shoot him back toward the light. Ignoring medical advice, he instead trusted his own re-creation story. He painted until he could no longer hold a brush, then switched to pouring directly onto the paper and drawing forms with a stick. At least while he worked, he could “feel those parts of me healing.” The story of Sam Francis, his ascent toward art, health, fame, light, and life, begins like all stories of rebirth: with death.5

1

Traumatic Beginnings

Early in the summer of 1936, in the middle of the Depression, Sam Francis set off with his father and his younger brother, crossing the dust bowl on a journey from California to Nova Scotia. As they drove over the Rocky Mountains and across the Great Plains, a dome of heat locked into place. It was the beginning of the hottest summer in recorded history. By the time they hit Illinois, broiled grasshoppers were dropping off fence posts. They kept the car’s windows down, hoping for an occasional cool breeze. Across the continent, people tried to escape from the sweltering weather by sleeping under hay wagons, on their front porches, and in their cellars. In Toronto, thousands camped on the lawns of city parks. Sam and his family were also searching for relief but not from the Depression, heat, economic collapse, or poverty. Their escape was more personal.1 That summer, Sam’s father, Sam Sr., put nearly four thousand miles between his children and recent tragedy. They traveled on US Route 6, one of the first hard-surface two-lane roads and, at that time, the longest highway in the country. Finally, the wind picked up and thermostats eased as the family crossed the Gulf of Saint Lawrence by steamship. Once on the shores of the island of Newfoundland, they continued to the edge of the Avalon Peninsula. When the family came to rest, young Sam gazed at 11

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part one, 1923–1950

a spectacular expanse of rock, icebergs, sea, and sky. It was a landscape that, like the events that had transpired earlier that year, would haunt and inspire him for the rest of his life. They had arrived at Sam Sr.’s birthplace in the tiny fishing village of Broad Cove, a poor and religious community consisting of about twenty whitewashed clapboard houses, a post office the size of a shed, and a Methodist church. Though modest in scale, it was dramatically situated on a windswept hillside along Iceberg Alley. Most importantly for Sam and his family, Broad Cove was all but cut off from the outside world. For the next two months, thirteen-year-old Sam and his ten-year-old brother, George, played and fished with their father and family. In a photograph taken after they arrived in Broad Cove, the boys look dirty and happy. Next to them stand two of their cousins in cotton summer dresses. Everyone is laughing and circling a large bucket filled with ice and salt. They have just finished making ice cream. Towheaded George grimaces, maybe at the hard work of churning the cream. Sam’s face splits with a smile. A wave of dark brown hair curls over his left brow. Even in this black-and-white image, his blue eyes look electric. Having just entered the no-man’s-land between childhood and adulthood, he was already proving himself to be adept at finding methods of avoiding pain and showing endurance when it struck. In some ways, bringing his sons back to Broad Cove was an odd choice for Sam Sr., who hadn’t been home in twenty years. In that time, he had served as a gunner in the voluntary Canadian Expeditionary Force during World War I, traveled to England, and seen a bit of the world. After the war, he attended graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, where he met his wife, Katharine Ann Lewis. She was an accomplished pianist from Salt Lake City, Utah, a lover of opera, a French teacher, and a descendant of Roger Conant, the founder and first governor of Salem, Massachusetts. Theirs was a brief courtship. Both were already in their early thirties and eager to build a life together. At their wedding, Katharine wore a rouge red crepe de chine gown and carried a bouquet of gardenias and lilies of the valley. They celebrated at the posh Claremont Hotel, settled on the Bay Area’s peninsula, and got busy making a family. Now, at forty-eight, Sam Sr. was a professor of mathematics and engineering at San Mateo Junior College (now College of San Mateo) and a founder of





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Figure 2. Sam Francis (center) with brother, George, and cousins Kathy and Julia Hendrikson in Newfoundland, Canada, summer 1936.

the California Intercollegiate Soccer Conference. For four years straight, he had coached San Mateo to victory.2 While Sam Sr.’s life had altered radically, his hometown had barely changed since he’d left. The tumbling price of codfish was still the main topic of conversation at the dinner table, fishing and worship the staples of daily life. The effects of the Depression—of men leaving to seek work elsewhere—had caused Broad Cove to contract in size while expanding in religious fervor. Sam Sr.’s father, George, owned a schooner. He was a fisherman and seal hunter by trade who had whaled along the Grand Banks up to Greenland. During periods when the icebound coast of Newfoundland made fishing impossible, he practiced as a lay preacher. Without established clergy, scattered communities like Broad Cove relied on ordinary individuals to

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part one, 1923–1950

propagate the tenets of their Methodist religion. For the most part, men like George (and some women) self-identified as expounders of the faith. They traveled along Newfoundland’s coasts, seeding a form of Methodism that did not depend on clerical mediation but was, instead, revivalist. Exercising religious freedom, they created a dynamic personal religion that reached for ecstasy. Night and day, they would gather in homes, aboard ships, in schoolrooms, in chapels, even on the platforms where they dried their fish, to pray, sing, and inspire one another in the experience of the divine, shouting out, “I am bound for the Kingdom, will you go to glory with me?” They sang of God’s appearance in everything around them: “Where’er I turn my gazing eyes, Thy radiant footsteps shine.” And when words failed to express their souls, they sang, “Be Thou my Vision, O Lord of my Heart.”3 In 1888, Sam Sr. was born into a family that had a passionate, living relationship to God. The third of eight children, he assumed that fishing was his destiny. He was already sailing aboard his father’s schooner by age seven. But he was also good at his studies, particularly math. When Sam Sr. was just seventeen, he won a rare scholarship to attend St. John’s College. He left home, but after only a year of studies, he had to quit school and teach due to economic necessity. Traveling among the remote fishing ports of Newfoundland, he taught in one-room schoolhouses, his students ranging from first graders to high school students. In these isolated locations, there were few clergymen. As the most educated person in the villages, he was expected to conduct baptisms, marriages, and burial rites. Unlike his father, he experienced preaching the gospel not as a calling but as a chore thrust upon him. It was one thing to celebrate a wedding, quite another to comfort grieving mothers who’d lost their children to tuberculosis, infantile convulsion, or influenza. The dire circumstances of poverty and disease pushed Sam Sr. away from the tenets of his faith and toward the rational sciences and the elegance of mathematical equations. As soon as he could, he enlisted to fight for Britain in the Great War, then returned to complete his studies at the University of Alberta. He was thirty-two years old when he finally left Canada for graduate school in California. Yet the principles engendered by Methodism never entirely left him. All his life, he believed in pursuing the beauty of truth and in doing good work.



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He trusted that time in the natural world both toughened the soul and exposed it to wonder. As both a teacher and a father, Sam Sr. saw himself as the awakener of young people’s minds. In 1936, the mind and the soul riddled with loss and ripe for awakening were those of his son, Sam. In a far different form, a spiritual relationship with the divine would take root in his boy. Like his father and grandfather, who helped spread a faith across an island, Sam Francis would later travel the world absorbing and disseminating a vision. “If you are God’s eye,” he once said, “then you receive the gift, you see for Him, that’s just being a servant of vision, of God’s vision.”4 First, though, Sam was a little boy who liked playing with fire. •



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Just eleven months after his parents’ wedding, Samuel Lewis Francis was born at 6:30 in the morning of June 25, 1923. He inherited his father’s radiant blue eyes and his mother’s round face. As the cherished firstborn, Sam was jealous when, three years after his birth, his mother disappeared into the hospital for a few days and returned with baby George. Sam remembered his reaction: “I set fire to his carriage in the living room.”5 It is unlikely this incident happened right after the new baby came home. Probably it took place when Sam was a little older and capable of gathering wood and paper from the fireplace, building a small campfire under the baby carriage (which had been left in the middle of the living room rug), finding matches, and lighting them. He was not an evil brother, just envious of the constant attention the baby received from their mother. Besides, Sam loved playing Indians, and Indians built fires. Sam also knew that George was not in the carriage. Still, as soon as he saw the sparks, he realized he’d done something very bad, because he immediately ran and got his mother. The fire did not burn the carriage, but it did leave a hole in the rug. Other than this episode of sibling rivalry and another when the boys were wrestling and George’s finger ended up in an electric socket, they got along well. Together with the other children in the neighborhood, they built forts in the tall grasses covering vacant plots. “On those lots, we had underground passageways with sod going over the top with boards across . . . whole cities under there, where we could meet and plan mischief.”

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The family lived in San Mateo, twenty miles south of San Francisco. With its idyllic Mediterranean climate, its rolling hills, and its verdant forests, San Mateo was a child’s paradise. When Friar Junípero Serra first blazed a trail through Upper California beginning in 1769, he described the area in a letter to his friend Friar Francisco Palóu: “The valleys and banks and rivulets began to be delightful. We found vines of a large size, and in some cases quite loaded with grapes; we also found an abundance of roses, which appeared to be like those of Castile. In fine, it is a good country.”6 One hundred fifty years later, when Sam was growing up, the area was quickly becoming the preferred suburban outpost of middleclass commuters. The year of his birth, Sam’s parents bought a house at 464 Midway Avenue, at the end of West Poplar Avenue. Set back on the lawn, the threebedroom stucco home had pink and blue trim. With the help of his boys, Sam Sr. planted a redwood tree in the backyard. Sam and George shared a bedroom. Katharine’s widowed mother occupied another bedroom. She was known as Nanny, or, when her strict Victorian disposition annoyed the boys, Grandma Terrible. In the living room sat a grand piano, which Nanny taught Sam to play. Though he hated his lessons, he was skilled at picking out tunes by ear. When his mother noticed that Sam had a good sense of color, she began to ask for advice whenever she chose a new fabric for her curtains or coverlets. Katharine was a Francophile who endeavored to instruct her two children in the rudiments of the French language and culture. But when neither took to the language, she satisfied herself with conversing in French with Sam Sr. at the dinner table, hoping that her sons would learn a few words. School held no allure for Sam, who called it a suspension from life. And even though his mother drew in a sketchbook and Sam drew a little himself, he thought of museums as tombs. “I know I went to museums with my parents and I thought they [museums] were horrible.”7 It was mainly the great outdoors that appealed to Sam. He liked to collect animals: turtles and birds, cats and dogs, anything injured and in need of care. A creek ran below the property, and Sam spent hours on its muddy bank, collecting toads, snakes, and spiders, which his permissive mother allowed him to keep in cardboard boxes in his bedroom. He loved





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camping and fishing with his father and brother in an area near the Hoover Wilderness of northern Yosemite called Green Lake. In the carved glacial basin surrounded by gray and white granite, Sam Sr. showed his boys how to fly-fish for rainbow and brook trout: how to stroke the air with their feathered hooks, to lay their lines on the water, to patiently watch and wait for the explosion of a trout’s bite. Later, marching along the path with their dinner caught, Sam Sr. made up songs on the spur of the moment. “East Lake, West Lake, all around the camp. Up and down the rocky trails, hear those fishermen tramp.” Most of all, Sam loved pretending he was a Blackfoot. Known as the plains people of the buffalo, the Blackfeet were experts in bison hunting and trout fishing. Sam read everything he could get his hands on about the Blackfeet, and he learned their legends. In the beginning of time, the divine spirit created only two people, the Old Man and the Old Woman. It was they who decided that people must die forever. The Old Woman said, “For, if they did not die forever, they would never feel sorry for each other, and there would be no sympathy in the world.”8 Sam was six years old at the time the Depression took hold, and although the world was full of sorrow and needed sympathy, his life was only tangentially affected. His father retained his teaching job. Growth slowed in San Mateo but did not stop. In 1927, the Mills Field Municipal Airport (renamed the San Francisco Airport in 1931) opened on a mudflat in San Bruno, just fifteen miles from Sam’s front door. All through the 1930s, expansion continued on the airfield as additional hangars were added to accommodate both the Army Air Corps and commercial air travel. In 1933, construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. And the Bay Meadows Racetrack was built in 1934. Because Sam Sr. followed the academic calendar, he took the whole summer off from work. Occasionally, they rented a cabin an hour north, near Tomales Bay, where the boys fished for salmon and sea bass and dug for gaper clams and mussels in the muddy flats. However, during the summer of 1935, just one year before the family packed up the car and drove to Newfoundland, they decided to visit Hermosa Beach, southwest of Los Angeles, with Katharine’s mother, her sister, Lucy, and Lucy’s two daughters, Kathy and Julia. They loved the activities available at the beach: playing ball, sunbathing on the sand, and fishing off the dock. Fifteen miles

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north, at the Santa Monica Pier, they could ride the twin racer roller coaster. Sam celebrated his twelfth birthday. A Mardi Gras festival was held that August in neighboring Venice, and scads of women in bathing suits paraded along the boardwalk wearing giant papier-mâché heads and alligator masks. King Neptune arrived in an outrigger canoe. There were aquatic water events and a street carnival. Life couldn’t have been better. One night at the end of their idyll, the family picnicked at the Hollywood Bowl. Sitting on the grass, under the stars, Katharine and Sam Sr. listened to symphonic music coming up from the amphitheater while the boys played nearby on the hillside. Then Katharine, who had recently experienced a good deal of fatigue, became ill. Chest pains, pressure, trouble breathing, enough discomfort for the family to rush from the concert to the hospital. Sam’s and George’s memories of what happened next were vague. George saw his mother getting ill at a gas station, perhaps on the way to the hospital. Sam saw her lying in what might have been a hospital bed. A bout with rheumatic fever as a child had scarred her heart valves. In all probability, Katharine suffered from mitral stenosis, a narrowing of the orifice of the heart’s mitral valve. Her long-term prognosis in 1935, a dozen years before surgeons began operating on this condition, would have been grim. But Katharine recovered from her heart attack. Their mother was safe. It was the end of summer, and Sam Sr. needed to return to his teaching job. The Depression made everyone fearful of losing work. He decided to take the boys back to San Mateo and their school, while Katharine, still too sick to travel, would follow when she regained her strength. She stayed behind in a room at the newly opened, blue art deco Georgian Hotel in Santa Monica. She was probably in the care of her mother or her sister. The boys knew their mother was sick, but they didn’t understand the severity of her illness. They said their good-byes and walked out of the turquoise blue hotel and into the yellow sunshine. A little more than a month after they returned home, on October 10, Katharine Ann Lewis Francis died of a second heart attack at the age of forty-four. There was no obituary or service that the boys remembered. Katharine’s corpse and coffin were shipped to her family home in Salt Lake City. So even her gravesite was not easily accessible to her sons. To Sam, it was as if he’d turned away, and, when he looked back, she’d vanished. He would always remember his reaction: “I wanted to follow her.”9





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Sam felt his mother’s absence for the rest of his life. In his forties, he bought a compound on West Channel Road, around the corner from the Georgian Hotel, the place where he had last seen her alive. He drove by that blue hotel daily. Blue was the color of some of his most important paintings. In a 1974 canvas he titled Mother Blue, the blue arms of a square surround an empty white space. Sam dreamed about his mother often. It was how he spoke to her. He consulted mystics and shamans and explored Jungian analysis as a form of therapy. He not only recorded his dream life but said of painting, “It is like writing a dream.”10 But as a twelve-year-old boy, Sam felt guilty. He’d argued with his mother on the last day she was well. It haunted him that maybe the final words his mother had heard from him were words spoken in anger. All Sam wanted was to turn back the clock and have his life return to normal. At home, his father was overwhelmed by his job and his role of single parent. Sam’s school routine in San Mateo brought him some stability, but it didn’t last long. In early spring, just as Sam was beginning to recover from the devastation of his mother’s passing, another horrifying and lifechanging event shattered him. On Wednesday, April 1, 1936, an unseasonably cold morning, Sam’s best friend, Roy Powers, left his home with a .25-caliber pistol tucked in his pocket. On the way to San Mateo Park grammar school, Powers brandished the gun, telling a little girl, “Look, it’s loaded.” Then, laughing, he called out, “April Fool!” As soon as he arrived at school, Powers showed off the gun again, this time to Sam, who was suitably impressed. Powers slipped the tiny pistol back into his pocket, where he kept it concealed from his teacher, Miss Alice Smith. At the end of the day, after classes were dismissed, a group of boys including Sam met Powers in the boys’ washroom. Powers told them he’d found the gun in a drawer at home. He’d played with it before (children later reported seeing Powers, who lived around the corner from Sam, attempting to shoot the gun on Midway Avenue), but the gun wouldn’t fire. Then, to prove it, he aimed at the bathroom wall and pulled the trigger. Indeed, the gun failed to discharge. At that point, a boy named George Swett tried to fire the gun. Nothing happened. The gun was then handed to Sam. He never recalled if the safety was inadvertently released as the gun was handed to him or if he

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was the one who released it. He would later tell the police, “I was holding the gun sideways in my hand when it went off.” Powers slumped against the wall. “Sam, you’ve shot me.” The bullet had torn into his chest. Handing the gun to George, Sam ran for the school janitor. Two teachers rushed to Powers’s side, and he was transported to Mills Hospital. But the thirteen-year-old boy was pronounced dead as soon as he arrived. Two days later, in the flower-filled chapel at the Sneider Funeral Home, Sam’s teacher, Miss Smith, was nearly prostrate with grief, wondering if she could have somehow spotted the concealed weapon and prevented the death of her student. Several classmates also attended, but Sam Sr. thought it inadvisable for Sam, still in shock, to be present. The San Mateo Times had already revealed Sam’s name and role in the tragedy, and the mayor had called for an investigation. The following week, the police inquest deemed the shooting accidental, and not even the Powers family blamed Sam for their son’s death. They, not Sam, had left the loaded gun in a drawer. But the gun had gone off in Sam’s hand. Compounding the remorse he carried because of his behavior toward his mother, he now felt responsible for his friend’s death. The two events conflated in his young mind. He didn’t talk of either for a long time. But both were always there in Sam, a bottomless hole in the center of his very being.11 Trying to detach himself from that well of pain, Sam remembered that as a little boy, he’d dreamed he was a bird, free of earthly bonds. What he experienced now was a different sort of flight. The safe world of his childhood collapsed in on itself. “Something happened that was more than I could possibly know about, or could grasp, or could influence.”12 Internalizing what he couldn’t comprehend, he became conscious of a darkness that surrounded the edges of life. He felt a stronger contrast between day and night, before and after, light and dark. He was no longer a child but not yet an adult. He’d crossed a border, and he wasn’t sure where he was. He knew he couldn’t follow his mother into death, so he began to think about infinity. Infinity was an abstraction, a safe subject to discuss in the family of a mathematician struggling to keep grief at bay. When his mother was alive, his father had loved to engage his sons in dinnertime conversations about the universe. Standing at the table’s head as





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if he were about to give a sermon, he’d quiz the boys on the distances between the planets and earth. “How far is Mars?” Sam Sr. bellowed. “Two hundred and forty-nine million miles,” Sam, and later George, replied. “And Venus?” “Only twenty-five million.” Now Sam asked about infinity. This time, his father did not bolt from his chair and expound on the subject. He looked at his scared son, valiantly trying to make sense of irrevocable events, and quietly explained it was a mathematical concept symbolized by a continuous loop, an immeasurable and endless expanse. What a wonderful notion to a boy who’d come face-to-face with so much finality! Stuck in the present, Sam could only imagine infinity as a vast space with countless outcomes. A time with no beginning and no end. A place the Blackfeet had named forever. In Newfoundland, a world away from their juggernaut of tragedies and escape across the scorching continent, the boys played outside in the long summer days. Whales frolicked off the coastline, and the ragged, abstract shapes of icebergs rose in the distance. Nights lasted only a few hours. Time became elastic. In the brief span of darkness, they might see the northern lights if they were lucky. Auroras were so prevalent during the summer of 1936 that they made front-page news. They interfered with radio and telegraph transmissions. An eerie glow was reported over Chicago. Auroras were seen as far south as Salt Lake City. On camping trips with his father and brother, Sam had gazed up at the coverlet of stars over the bowl of the Sierra Nevada. He’d traced the patterns of constellations and learned the distances between planets. But nothing would have prepared him for the remarkable phenomenon that lit up the dark in Newfoundland. A faint glow appeared along the horizon; then, up above, a curtain of burning reds and luminous greens rippled. The Inuit, the indigenous people of the region, said that if you whistled at the northern lights, they danced for you. The Vikings, the first Europeans to land in Newfoundland, thought the lights were Bifröst, the mythological arch of flames that connected earth to the kingdom of Asgard. Early Methodists looked on the displays with fear, as mysterious messages from an angry God.13

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When he was older and an artist, Sam claimed that beauty was the curtain of fire in front of truth. “Because it is always in movement, it is never static.” By then he had perfected the action of leave-taking in the face of hardship. In fact, it had become part of his creative process. Embedded in the incredible journey he took with his family, back and forth across the continent in 1936, was the lesson that movement was not only a distraction from pain but also revelatory. Departures and arrivals became Sam’s way of engendering new visions. Although Sam was but an inquisitive teenager, he was already sensitive to color and aware of the vastness and scope of space. His mind churned with dreams. His heart craved a sign of the infinite. The universe was random, as capable of bestowing pain as it was of presenting visions of heavenly splendor. Perhaps, like those who came before him, Sam glimpsed something wondrous and immortal in the night skies above Newfoundland. Thirty-eight years later, he would indeed claim: “Light is the evidence of the movement of eternity.”14 Where light and dark unite, there is color.

2

First Love, First Muse

Sam’s first love—indeed, his first muse—was Vera Mae Miller, a girl he met on a hayride. On the evening of September 29, 1939, Sam was invited by his friend Jean Decker to an event organized by the First Congregational Church. As soon as he clambered aboard the horse-drawn wagon, he spotted a girl sitting on a bale of hay with her knees pressed together. She had bright blue eyes and a head of tight brown curls. Pulling at a stalk that poked her skin, Vera looked up and smiled. When Sam playfully called her “curly,” she pointed to her hair and told him it was “torture.” Every night her mother set her hair by wrapping it around her fingers and fastening the coils in place. “She treats me like I’m her doll,” Vera said. Indeed, Vera looked like a porcelain doll. Like a small Loretta Young, people told her all the time. Her mother was a milliner and seamstress who doted on Vera, her only child. But Sam sensed that under Vera’s poise and flawless exterior burned a spark of rebellion. This, more than her captivating looks, intrigued him. That night, their group ate supper in a field and danced in the warm fall air. They were both sixteen. Sam learned that Vera attended high school a mile and a half north, in the neighboring town of Burlingame. The very next Sunday, Sam attended Vera’s church with George in tow. He confessed 23

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to the authority of the Holy Trinity and made George confess as well. Then both Sam and his younger brother became initiated members of the First Congregational Church so that Sam could see Vera every Sunday.1 Now connected, at least on the surface, by a common faith, Sam and Vera discovered they shared other bonds. When Sam met her father, Mr. Miller asked, “Are you any relation to Samuel Francis from Canada?” Sam’s and Vera’s fathers had attended college together in Alberta. Vera’s home life, like Sam’s, had remained largely unaffected by the Depression: her father was a civil engineer who had worked on the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. Both Sam and Vera were good students—Sam was on the honor roll—and both enjoyed drawing. Vera sketched birds and flowers, while Sam drew maps of his hiking and fishing trips, landscapes inspired by Krazy Kat cartoons, and naked girls from his imagination. Though they continued to attend their church group, each was exploring secret spiritual fellowships. For a short time, Vera joined the International Order of the Rainbow for Girls, a Masonic youth service that focuses on faith, hope, and acts of charity. At the same time, Sam delved into the mystical practices of the Rosicrucian Order, an esoteric movement that has its roots in the traditions and myths of ancient Egypt. In 1927, the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis had established its North American headquarters in San Jose, just thirty-five miles south of San Mateo. Twelve years later, by the time Sam attended his first meeting, the order had grown substantially. At churches, libraries, and colleges up and down the peninsula, leaders of the order lectured on subjects from colored auroras to immortality. His father thought the group and their claims absurd, but Sam was attracted by the promise that the mysteries of life and death would be revealed to him. Whatever magic powers and divine understanding Sam may have hoped to gain, the meetings must not have given him the answers he sought. After only a few visits, he stopped attending. At a Rosicrucian meeting, he would have been told about the law of rebirth and would have heard that the goal of the soul was to be born and die again and again until attaining perfection and union with God. Sam was not so concerned with union with God. Caught in the echo chamber of memory and trauma, he was trying to comprehend the loss of his mother and his best friend. Unfortunately, these were the two subjects





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that his recently remarried father most wanted to put behind the new family. A year earlier, in 1938, Sam Sr. had met and married Virginia Petersen Walker. Sam’s stepmother was a forceful woman. She hailed from Astoria, Oregon, where her father, Oluf Petersen, had been a banker and a real estate developer. Like Sam’s mother, Virginia was a sophisticated and well-educated woman whose family traced its heritage back to a great American hero. While Katharine Francis’s lineage connected her to Roger Conant, Virginia was descended from Brigadier General Zebulon Montgomery Pike, the explorer for whom Pikes Peak in Colorado is named. But here their similarities ended. Sam’s mother had kept a rather lackadaisical home where toads, turtles, and spiders lived in cardboard boxes under Sam’s bed and the living room rug still had a hole in the middle from the fire Sam had set there twelve years earlier. Virginia, on the other hand, insisted that people remove their shoes before entering her home. And while Katharine had been deeply attached to her sons, Virginia’s two children from a previous marriage, Gordon and Ann, were at a boarding school on the East Coast. Virginia would have preferred to send Sam and George off to school as well, but here Sam Sr. drew the line. He would not be separated from his children for nine months of the year. Another adjustment altered the makeup of the household. Virginia’s arrival made the presence of Nanny, Sam Sr.’s former mother-in-law, awkward and unnecessary. No longer needed to help care for the boys, Nanny returned to Salt Lake City to reside with her eldest daughter, Lucy. Though Sam’s relationship with Nanny had not been without conflict—he despised the piano practices she’d enforced—her departure was yet another loss. While Sam, as the self-confident elder child, adjusted to Virginia’s role in the family dynamic, George saw her as an interloper. George, younger and more irresponsible, had run wild since his mother’s death. In family photographs, George smirks behind a popgun or laughs, buried up to his neck in sand. He was always ready for fun and mischief. As soon as Virginia arrived, with her stricter regime, George rebelled by failing most of his classes. He was twelve at the time, much less autonomous than Sam, who worked part-time, tending the gardenias at Ah Sam’s nursery in the summer and delivering groceries during the winter.

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The most significant factor in shaping Sam’s relationship with Virginia, as well as his relationship with Vera, was the simple fact that he yearned for love. Though outwardly mature, Sam was inwardly almost childish in his craving for maternal comfort. Later in his life, Sam spoke of the sudden death of his mother and explained how it shaped his relationships with women. “I lost my mother when I was 12 years old. That was a momentous event in my life. As a child I choked back a lot of that stuff and internalized everything. Children have to do that. It’s a necessity. I had to re-find her.”2 This search to replace the irreplaceable was already exerting immense power over him. Almost every night, after his classes and his job, Sam biked or walked the two miles to Vera’s home on Neuchatel Avenue. Her father was firm about propriety and bedtime. Often it was late by the time Sam reached Vera, and she was supposed to be asleep. Instead, she lay awake listening for Sam’s quiet rap on the back porch, a signal for her to sneak downstairs. Standing on either side of the window, they’d talk for hours through the glass. Evidently, her father caught them more than once because a chastened Sam dashed off a note to Vera. Walking home tonight, I realized that you have been patient beyond reason with me. Everything I do in regards to your wishes is done wrong. I stay too late. Make up fictitious stories so that I can have a little word with you alone. . . . All I can say is I’m sorry. My action from now on will be my expression of all that has gone before. From now on I will do, as I should. Anything that is right from my taking you to church or home in your mind is right in mine. Now I remain your devoted but much wiser Sammy.3

Unsettled that he might lose Vera, Sam tried in vain to curb his emotional heart. He desired to be good: From now on I will do, as I should. An excellent student who now attended church regularly, he also worked, played sports, and hiked with his friends. To that, he added Sunday night dinners with Vera and her family. Yet all his frantic activity couldn’t completely mask his sadness or his craving for love. And so he proclaimed beliefs he didn’t hold, dallied at her house, in her company, elaborating stories to stave off dejection. He sent her notes, poems, and, when vacations pulled them apart, daily letters describing all that he saw and felt.





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Everything from taking a shower—Oh boy is the water swell—to typing on a typewriter for the first time—Isn’t it amazing what a typewriter can do to make your letter readable? He ended almost every message with a salutation in the French language, which his mother had so dearly loved and which Sam so endearingly mangled: Au revoir mon duese amie. Mes tendresse à tu. Though Vera’s side of the correspondence has disappeared, Sam’s letters show a suitor eager to impress a young woman who is keeping him at arm’s length, literally on the other side of the glass. Vera was a straight shooter, while Sam was more fanciful by nature. Not as scrupulous as Sam in her writing habits, Vera often left his letters unanswered, causing him to protest in frustration. Vera, it’s been 12 days since you wrote—a long week! Maybe he had better despair His love doesn’t seem to care Maybe she’s found one better Maybe there will be no letter.

Yet Vera was enchanted by Sam’s persistence, charm, and clean-cut looks. He was a handsome young man with an open face and those bright, penetrating blue eyes. He would never be taller than five feet six inches, but he possessed tremendously strong legs, wide shoulders, and, as he often reminded Vera, starved and kissable lips. Throwing himself into his romance with Vera as if he were diving into a swimming pool on a hot day, Sam lavished her with gifts. For Christmas that first year, just three months after their hayride introduction, he bought her a giant bottle of gardenia-scented Lucien Lelong French perfume with the money he’d earned as a grocery boy. In his note he wrote, I once heard you say you liked gardenias. It’s my favorite flower! Vera later told her daughter that she had never received such a generous gift from a beau before. It took her years to get through that bottle. Since they now had their own flower, Sam surprised her, for a Hawaiianthemed dance at her school, with not just a corsage but a whole flat of gardenias. (He did work at a nursery.) “I had them all over me that night,” a very impressed Vera recalled. “Around my wrist, in my hair, and on my dress. We had fun, we really did.”

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Figure 3. Sam Francis with Vera Miller, San Mateo, California, ca. 1941.

On Sundays after their church youth group (Vera was the secretary and, within months of joining, Sam was elected president), they headed into the hills above San Mateo to talk. Sam, a budding naturalist, would name the trees: Umbellularia, Cedrus, Sequoia. They’d discuss the war in Europe, still far away, but in the headlines and on everyone’s mind. During one of these Sunday conversations, Sam told Vera about the death of his mother and his subsequent dream. His mother rose out of the ocean, and Sam ran after her, trying to follow her back into the water until she forbade him. His description is poignantly similar to the myth of Aphrodite arising from the sea-foam. Sam’s unconscious had transformed the adored mother who vanished into the goddess of eternal love. But though Sam talked to Vera about his mother, he did not discuss Roy Powers; this story she heard from George. It was too traumatic, the injunction in the family





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not to discuss it too powerful for Sam to disobey. Only in midlife would Sam feel free to broach the topic of the guilt he carried for his friend’s death. Mostly, on those afternoons in the late 1930s, Sam and Vera, like teenage couples everywhere, went into the hills to neck. When they came up for air, they would laugh about their mutual friends, spin the radio dial, hoping to find their song—“All the Things You Are”—and, very likely, talk about the books Sam was reading. In his letters, too, Sam would mention different books, urging them on Vera. An avid reader by sixteen, Sam had made his way through his father’s shelves and was exploring those of San Mateo’s public library. He devoured the macabre short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare. He even penned verses of his own. Not surprisingly, given his grandfather’s days as a whaler, he loved Moby-Dick. He would reread the book a decade later, this time as an artist who identified with Ahab’s quest for a great white mythical beast. Moby-Dick became a symbolic touchstone for many painters: a metaphor for the absolute void they faced when approaching a giant blank white canvas. In 1939, Sam was not yet a painter. He drew, but by his admission, his drawings were not the works of someone who intended to become an artist. He recalled being kicked out of an elementary school art class for not doing his assignment. Like the artist Mark Rothko, who had been born in Latvia twenty years before Sam was born in San Mateo, the adolescent Sam Francis was more responsive to music and poetry than he was to painting. Sam’s high school English teacher thought he had talent and encouraged him to consider a writing career. Confident of his ability with the pen, Sam sent letters to Vera peppered with his meditations on landscape. The sky is a deep azure blue with stars close enough to touch, and The snow on Mt Shasta looms white and beautiful like a cloud. Though conventional, these descriptions show a mind stimulated by the natural world and reverent about color. Indeed, in 1969, discussing his love of poetry and literature, Sam told the art patron Betty Freeman that he regarded himself as a visual poet. If Sam’s imagination required color, light, and nature to create poetic works, the next essential ingredient was a philosophy of space. This arrived with Sam’s discovery of the Russian mathematician and mystic P. D. Ouspensky. Sam was never precise as to where he found

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Ouspensky’s writings or even how old he was at the time he read them. Sometimes Sam recalled coming across an Ouspensky book on his father’s shelves when he was twelve. Other times he said he was sixteen and at the library. Sam was even unclear as to which book transformed him. But since Ouspensky was primarily known in the United States in the late 1930s as the author of the national best seller Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, it was probably this strange, esoteric book. It is important to note that on the topic of his past, the adult artist Sam Francis embellished, mystified, and eluded precision, just as he had done as a young man with Vera, exaggerating stories for dramatic effect and attention. He enjoyed having an excitable imagination. But he was never imprecise about Ouspensky’s profound impact on his developing consciousness and later on his art. Like Sam, Ouspensky had lost a parent as a child and then embarked on a quest for secrets and hidden teachings that might lift the veil between the visible realm and the existence of something beyond. In Tertium Organum, Ouspensky explores ideas of higher-dimensional space, dreams, mystical experience, infinity, and its spiritual equivalent, eternity. “That moment of time corresponding to some event which was already passed— the beginning of life on earth, for example—has not disappeared, it exists still,” Ouspensky claims. “It is not outlived by the universe, but only by earth. . . . Time does not flow, any more than space flows. It is we who are flowing, wanderers in a four-dimensional universe.”4 To Sam, Ouspensky’s vision was a revelation and a relief from the painful reality of death: his mother’s life had not ended because every moment was eternal. At the dinner table, Sam talked to his father about Ouspensky’s concepts. Sam Sr. reacted much as he had when his son attended Rosicrucian meetings. He threw up his hands and told Sam he was crazy to be interested in a mystic. Sam was undeterred. Years later, in 1985, Sam described to the French philosopher Yves Michaud the deep and lasting impression Ouspensky had had on him. “I didn’t talk to other people about it because—it wasn’t explainable—it didn’t have anything to do with what my teachers were telling me in school. I knew he was right. He was absolutely on the button.”5 What Ouspensky was on the button about was how to perceive fourdimensional space and thus comprehend alternate, unseen realities.





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Starting from a point (which has zero dimensions) and proceeding to a line, to a plane, to a cube, one could access additional dimensions by moving each element perpendicular to itself. However, since the human eye can see only three dimensions, one has to use the mind’s eye to perceive four or more. This eye penetrates the impenetrable and visualizes everything, from the structure of an atom to the bottom of the ocean. What astounded Sam was not just the idea that he could travel anywhere through his mind’s eye but that the mind’s eye is the nexus of creation. Ouspensky details in scientific and philosophical language what Sam had experienced in his dreams. “Such a consciousness,” Ouspensky writes, “will be able to rise above the plane on which we move . . . will be able to see the past and the future lying side by side and existing simultaneously.” Ouspensky concludes his book with the statement that the visionary function of art and the ecstasy of love open the doorways to other worlds. In the summer of 1941, Sam and Vera, sweethearts for two years, graduated from high school and headed in different directions. Vera’s family relocated to San Diego, where she enrolled in college. Sam was accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, his father’s alma mater. Excited about the future, Sam was also preoccupied with the same thing as most young men at that time: war. Though the United States seemed a world away from a ravaged Europe, events unfolding in the Pacific—the Japanese occupation of French Indochina, followed by President Roosevelt’s order to seize Japanese assets in the United States—were pulling isolationist America into the conflict. For many, it was no longer a question of if, but when, America would go to war. As soon as Sam arrived on campus, he joined the ROTC program, a twoyear requirement for all male students at the University of California. His father had served in World War I and was now a lieutenant commander in the navy reserve. When war came, Sam intended to join the navy. Enthusiastic and naive, Sam wrote his Aunt Lucy that as a sailor, he’d have great adventures on the ROTC’s summer cruises to Alaska and Panama. Lodging at Barrington Hall, he decorated his room with his nude drawings and a photo of the curly-haired, distant girl he still loved. He played on the soccer team, joined the ski club, attended football games, and marched in the Pajamarino, students’ traditional parade around the campus in their nightclothes. Yet Vera never strayed far from his thoughts.

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Even though they both dated other people, Sam remained confident that one day he’d win her. If not, well I’ve done my damnedest! She was the only person to whom he had revealed his real self and the self he was striving to become. You know I’m not as selfish as I was . . . I’m still working a lot on the characteristics you didn’t like in me. His history with her— combined with the distance between them—allowed him to attach all his fantasies of love to her. She wasn’t there to refute him. I can’t let my dream girl change on me, can I? In many respects, Vera was the first blank canvas on which Sam projected all his desires. Frequently, Sam’s desires were conflicting. Freshman year, he took a course load that included botany, German, and psychology. At the same time, he complained to Vera that Men who do not create . . . are just cogs in a merciless, tireless machine. Then, switching direction, he scolded her for her set of courses at San Diego State, which, he wrote, looks like an Art Major to me. Why not take psychology? This objection to Vera’s artistic focus came while he enjoyed producing botanical illustrations for his botany course. Feeling rudderless without her and recognizing the positive effect she had on him, he pressured Vera to transfer to Berkeley. You know you are good for me—even 600 miles away. Most everything depends on my making good for you. By the winter of 1942, Sam’s tumult regarding his choice of major had subsided: he declared in premed. His first ambition, he told Vera, was to become a doctor. His second was to win her. His father approved of this practical choice. His maternal grandfather, who had died before Sam was born, had been a well-known physician in Salt Lake City. I must, I shall, god but I’ve got to do something for science, Sam expressed to Vera in the wee hours of the morning after cramming all night for an exam. He had been searching for something exhilarating to devote his life to. Now he committed to medicine. Since he couldn’t save the people he had already lost, perhaps he could redeem himself by helping others. I must make science my mistress. I must be her slave and obey her implicitly. I wish to know what is behind the curtain. Sam felt a deep obligation to help, as well as a yearning to be overtaken by passion. But this passion also frightened him. In that same letter, just a few paragraphs later, he worried about the health of Vera’s mother, who was well at the time. Why is it that I keep thinking of your mother tonight? Keep a watch on her for me, she’s the only





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mother you have. I have the strangest awful feeling she is very ill. It’s as if Sam’s entwined emotions about love, loss, and death surfaced when he embraced his new mistress, science. Perhaps it was also the urgency of the coming war that caused Sam to feel such unease. After the assault on Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941, and America’s entrance into the war, Sam, unable to sleep, dashed off a note to Vera: Congress is now in session and our country seems on the brink of modern chaos. Lord help us. I don’t like war, but now all I say is “we’ll give ’em Hell.” And just like that, the war came home. Within two days of the attack on Pearl Harbor, soldiers deployed along the coast to prepare for an invasion.6 With only sixteen modern fighter planes available to defend the state of California, officials took extreme measures. Barbed wire was strung for miles along idyllic Pacific beaches. The US Navy stretched a seven-mile antisubmarine net under the Golden Gate Bridge and from the Marina in San Francisco to Sausalito in Marin County. Lookout stations dotted the coast. Japanese Americans (including Chiura Obata, a famous art teacher at UC Berkeley) were ordered into internment camps. Ships were commanded to stay in port, and communities from San Diego to Seattle practiced blackout drills. Sam, out to make the most of every moment and excited by the patterns of searchlights on the black sky, climbed onto the roof of his dorm to watch as soon as the alarms rang. He wrote Vera about what he saw. The air raid sirens wailed and the lights all blacked out as if they were the eyes of one beast—controlled by the same mind. For the next year, he continued at Berkeley while working a part-time job as an orderly at Alta Bates Hospital. There he wheeled patients from the emergency room into surgery. If not yet fighting in the war, he was at least on callout at all times. Down in Southern California, Vera left school and joined the Red Cross. My V for Victory Girl, Sam called her. One weekend, he drove down to see her and gave her a bracelet, a delicate gold band with their names engraved: Vera on one side, Sam on the other. Eager to do more than wait to be drafted, Sam made another abrupt change of course. He decided that instead of joining the navy he would join the Army Air Corps. He wanted to fly a fighter or a bomber like the ones he listened to from the rooftop of his dorm. The US military had

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taken over both the San Francisco and the Oakland airports and built an auxiliary airfield in Alameda. The whole of the Bay Area, from Sam’s vantage point, transformed into a naval and air transport command center. Often it was so foggy at night that Sam couldn’t see the planes soaring above, only hear the sounds of their engines. Caught up in the zealousness of the country, he wrote Vera that, all evidence to the contrary, he was patriotic. He would gladly give his life for the ones he loved. He knew he sounded foolish, kid-like, Sam called it. Then, adding a postscript, he expressed his painful realization that the war might never allow him to consummate his love for her: I guess I’ll not live long enough to die without being in love with you yet.

3

An Unexpected Battle

As a small boy, Sam found buoyant joy in riding the teeter-totter up and down. He once dreamed that someone jumped on the other end of his seesaw, sending him soaring through space until he landed on a distant shore. He was not afraid. While he was airborne, he watched the sea, “enormous waves coming at me, but very slowly, quite far apart.” He loved this view of the world from above. Later, after his mother died and he needed to detach himself from pain or loss, he often dreamed he was a bird. “I could fly. It was natural, normal . . . . I made little trails, puffy white clouds. And pretty soon those puffy white clouds were around the world like lace. Then I came back.”1 Now, at twenty, Sam was a restless idealist yearning to participate in what President Roosevelt called the war for civilization. The thought of flying for the air corps exhilarated him. Pilots were dashing, romantic figures, gilded by silver wings and radiant with glamor. Sam chose to enlist so he could avoid the draft and have more influence over his fate; he hoped he would soon be called to duty. He was eager to see combat. But events conspired otherwise. Sam’s battle, when he came to fight it, was not the one he imagined. Even so, the lessons he learned in the air corps would serve him well. 35

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When his orders came through on March 1, 1943, Sam waved farewell to his younger brother, George, at San Francisco’s Ferry Building. Both of their eyes smarted with tears. Then, along with nine hundred other eager boys from the Northwest, Sam marched toward the trains singing a University of California fight song composed by Clinton Morse in 1896: We’re sons of California A loyal company, All shout for California While we strive for victory.

That evening, George wrote to Nanny and Aunt Lucy: “We are sure pleased and proud to have Sammy in it. I guess he is too.”2 Sam was proud. Shipped to Montana for boot camp and classification and eager to prove himself at the first opportunity, he volunteered to be a student officer. He was tested, along with all the other cadets, for his aptitude as a pilot, bombardier, navigator, and ground controller. Sam had all the characteristics of an excellent pilot. He was physically fit, selfconfident, highly competitive, and a good map reader. Like most pilots, he possessed a natural ability to perceive patterns and identify shapes even when he couldn’t see them completely. That is, Sam could envision the world in three dimensions, imperative when translating a blip on an instrument panel into an oncoming enemy plane. The prevalent belief was that this war, and all future wars, would not be won on the terrestrial front. Instead, combatants would be unhampered by geography and wars fought and won in the wide-open skies. In Montana, Sam weathered the measles and a chest cold but continued to drill. Of course, in the Army that’s nothing, he wrote Vera. Over the last year, their relationship had cooled. She refused to transfer to Berkeley and was now preoccupied with USO dances for the servicemen in San Diego, while Sam was involved with a girl named Ellen from his old church in San Mateo. Still, regardless of his new attachment, Sam was about to become a soldier, and Vera was the girl he’d never quite captured. Continuing to correspond, Sam asked Vera for some snaps and badgered her to write a soldier. . . . How about a nice juicy morale building letter? Assigned to the Morton Air Academy in Blythe, California, for flight training, Sam was dubbed Chubby by his fellow dodos—the name given to





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cadets who had yet to fly. Nonetheless, he bragged to Vera that boot camp had thinned him down and toughened him up. Notwithstanding the discipline. Life here is interesting. From the moment he awoke, Sam was surrounded by men rumbling like thunder through the barracks. By 5:15 a.m., he’d made his bed, swept the floor, and stood in formation with his squadron in full dress uniform with goggles and cap. Soon, the quiet skies roared with hundreds of planes—everything from the primary trainers the dodos practiced in to the coveted P-38 Lightnings. These sleek fighter planes were nicknamed the fork-tailed devils by the German Luftwaffe and were assigned to only top graduates. After eight weeks on simulators and sixty hours in Stearman and Ryan biplanes, Sam’s squadron began hopping cross-country, training on the nearly two hundred airfields that had been built—practically overnight— from Southern California to West Texas. It was on one of these excursions that Sam had a minor accident in a propeller plane. While taxiing in a high wind in Opolis, Kansas, on October 11, 1943, he steered the nose of his aircraft down into the runway. The plane came to rest in an inverted position. The accident, common among student pilots, was attributed to lack of experience. The air corps, rushing to produce ever more planes and ever more pilots, had decreased the number of flight hours to get those cadets off to war as quickly as possible. The result was a peak in training accidents. In 1943 alone, there were 5,600 training fatalities and more than 2,500 aircraft damaged. Sam’s tip-over wrecked the propeller, wings, and fuselage. The skylight, windows, and windshield all broke out. The plane, an L-4A Grasshopper, was lightweight, basically a tin can with wings. It provided little or no cushioning. If Sam was hurt during the accident, he did not let it prevent him from returning to flight training. He was as high-spirited and cocky as the rest of his squadron.3 It was wartime, and pilots were under constant pressure to learn fast and succeed or wash out. And a washout never received his wings. Even before they saw battle, these cadets faced high risks and a great chance of death. The air, their commanders told them, was no place for a Nervous Nelly. They were flyboys now. They didn’t fail, and they certainly never complained. The chief of the army’s air forces, General Henry H. Arnold,

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noted in his war diaries the dangerous culture of bravado in the air corps. As one pilot (and future brigadier general) said, as he walked away from a crack-up, “It’s all in a day’s work.”4 A month later, now in Arizona, Sam was soloing and night flying. He would take off in the pitch black, no city lights underneath him, no visual horizon line, nothing but a million stars in the sky and the glow from the instrument panel to guide him. Under such conditions, many pilots in Sam’s squadron grew disoriented. Had 3 crashes here the other day and 3 dead came of it—all cadets—saw them and was thoughtful for a long while, he wrote Vera. The sad thing is that in an airplane the first slip is the last. Regardless of the risks or slipups, flying got into Sam’s soul. His fivefoot-six-inch frame fit easily into the plane’s cockpit; he felt one with his machine. Accelerating down a runway and pulling on the throttle until airborne felt like riding a motorcycle into a soft, gray mist. Scudding across the sky, seeing the tapestry of the earth spread below him, he quickly realized that he preferred low-flying planes in which he was sandwiched between land and plumed clouds. In fact, Sam determined that he did not want to fly in the high altitudes of bombers or fighters from which he couldn’t see the land. He wanted to be a reconnaissance pilot, capturing images of enemy installations. He saw his role in the war as visual. A reconnaissance flight was dangerous. Recon pilots penetrated deep behind enemy lines, but their planes, strippeddown P-38s, replaced their guns and armaments with cameras. The task of a recon pilot was to fly back and forth over an objective in enemy territory, low enough to snap aerial photographs, sometimes so low and slow— treetop level and no faster than 150 mph—that it was easy to be hit by shrapnel. In World War II, aerial reconnaissance supplied 90 percent of army intelligence: everything from the placement of enemy concentrations and airstrips to the condition of bridges and roads. General Eisenhower routinely stopped the movement of his troops until aerial photos could be gathered and interpreted. Pictures, Eisenhower knew, saved lives. Through flying, Sam discovered the space that was to be his as an artist. The liminal dream space he’d envisioned as a child was now tangible. Later, when he could no longer rise from his bed, he would remember the exaltation he’d felt lifting free from the constraints of gravity. He would draw on the images his mind had captured while he was airborne: radiant light, jag-





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ged contours of landscape, distant horizon lines, grids of roads, geometries of plowed fields, and ever-shifting and regrouping cloud formations— masses of suspended vapor of every imaginable shape and color. All this became part of Sam’s visual reservoir. “Perhaps, it was my training in the Service that taught me that nature has form and structure. It makes sense. It is a structure that only seems to be formless, but underneath it is based on facts that act in a certain way,” he told Betty Freeman when she asked him about his philosophy of life.5 He said “underneath,” but he also meant a continuation, another side, or a perspective not always visible at first. Flying, Sam’s form of service, allowed him to see the essential structure of reality. None of this would have come to fruition, as least not in the form of art, if, at the end of 1943, Sam hadn’t suffered a terrible trauma that would leave him trapped in the hard shell of a full-body plaster cast and on the brink of death. There are different stories as to how Sam initially hurt his back. In some accounts, he said he had run out of fuel, in others, that his plane took “a strange twist” in a maneuver, causing him to crash in the Arizona desert. In all likelihood, there was no crash. It’s possible that Sam was banged up in an air drill while practicing a forced landing, a common exercise in advanced flight training. On November 17, 1943, he reported to the base hospital with complaints of pain in his lower back radiating down his legs, perhaps from lifting a heavy object. Though he also had a cough, the two ailments weren’t connected. He returned to duty. Just as he had done a month earlier when he incurred the taxiing accident in Kansas, he continued flying. A month later, Sam was again bedridden. I have to spend Christmas in the hospital with my wisdom teeth gone and my face like a melon, he wrote Vera, confident he would soon be on the mend. Then I shall fly P-38s. Can you imagine me in a P-38 a month from now—it takes my breath away. Instead, over the next few weeks, he became progressively worse. First, with a tooth abscess, then the mumps and a fever of 104°, then with continued back problems. One infirmity after another. His body began to fall apart. From here on, his memory of events became hazy. Dammit Vera, I don’t even know the date or how long I’ve been in this darned hospital. There was a long day and night of high fever and I lost touch. Looks like I’m in for a long time as the mumps must be cleared up before they go to work on my back or ship me to Santa Ana.

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A specialist examined his back. Although they nearly killed me tampering around as if I were made of rubber. I think I’ll get action soon. Sam did not get action soon. Unable to get up from a chair without help, he received conflicting diagnoses, including scoliosis, degenerative arthritis, a possible pathological condition, a virus, or a bacterial infection in his sacral lumbar region near the bottom of his spine. He was advised to reconsider his career as a pilot. Transferred to the Santa Ana Army Air Base hospital, he was placed in a plaster cast from his chest to his hips to prevent instability. In March 1944, when his fellow cadets graduated and received their wings, Sam wrote Vera, How I’m going to get flying out of my blood I don’t know. God how I love it! Though he sounded brave in his note—he was a flyboy, and flyboys did not complain—he was devastated. His father had taken on additional teaching duties at Stanford University, instructing military specialists in engineering and mathematics as part of the Army Specialized Training Program. His younger brother, George, had enlisted in the navy and was seeing action on the USS Norman Scott in the Pacific. Only Sam was grounded, no better than a washout. For the next six months, his doctors, confounded by his symptoms, shuffled him back and forth between the hospital in Santa Ana and a rehabilitation facility that was ninety miles east in Whitewater. Medical imaging in the 1940s was relatively primitive, his X-rays were blurry, and it was unclear if he was ill from the trauma of his taxiing accident or from an infection. To complicate the situation further, the doctors believed they had addressed his back problem by immobilizing him in the plaster cast, and Sam reported feeling better for a short period. Then his symptoms reoccurred with increased severity. Now they assumed he had a psychosomatic disorder, not uncommon in war. Moved to the psych ward, he underwent a neuropsychiatric exam. During the ensuing discussion, Sam revealed his personal history: the sudden loss of his mother when he was twelve and his subsequent relationship with his stepmother, Virginia, a connection he described as having made him more practical. He also told his doctor that a few months after his mother’s death, he had accidentally shot and killed his “closest friend in the lavatory at school.” The bullet, Sam explained, “went through the chest to the vertebrae of his back and severed his spinal cord.”



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What is striking about Sam’s description is that he locates his own back trauma at the exact site of his friend’s fatal injury. He’s internalized the wound. This may be why in future interviews, Sam was evasive about his accident and illness. On some level, he felt he deserved his affliction. His physical pain was real, but it also expressed his prolonged emotional grief, a palpable connection that allowed him to feel joined to his dead friend. Sam was declared sane and returned to convalescence. By this time, his situation was dire. He was suffering, he later told Pontus Hultén, “going down the drain fast.” Except for a few postcards, he stopped writing. His relationship with Ellen, the girl from his church whom he’d told Nanny he hoped one day to marry, ended. Finally his father intervened. Sam Sr. contacted one of his former math students who had become a general in the air force. With his help, Sam was sent to Amarillo, Texas. There, on November 23, 1944, a year after he’d first reported back pain, it was established that he suffered from spinal tuberculosis—Pott’s disease. Spread through the air, Sam’s TB almost certainly entered his lungs before it traveled to his lymph nodes and his bones. He could have contracted it in the barracks or harbored a latent form in his immune system for years until an incident—a cough, fever, trauma, any weakness—caused reactivation.6 By this time, he was critically ill. His doctors doubted he would live much longer, let alone walk again. But with an accurate diagnosis, they determined where he could receive proper care: Fitzsimons General Hospital in Denver, Colorado. •



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During World War II, Fitzsimons was the largest military hospital in the world and a pioneer in the treatment of TB.7 Denver, with its crisp, dry air and nearly year-round sunshine, had long been believed to benefit tuberculosis patients. In addition to American soldiers, Fitzsimons cared for German, Italian, and Japanese prisoners of war who were suffering from tuberculosis. At Fitzsimons, Sam underwent surgery to remove his impaired disk. His spine was fused with a three-inch bone graft from his leg. A plaster mold was taken of his torso from which a contoured celluloid jacket was

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formed to fit his dimensions exactly. Once the jacket was placed on him, it was laced up with straps. Encased in his celluloid corset, Sam was then sandwiched between two full-length sheets of canvas, which were tied to a Bradford frame bed. This was a recent invention that allowed his nurses to turn and reposition him while still keeping his back immobile. “Every so often they could lift ½ of it off. I couldn’t move, just lie there, and they’d clean that ½ of my body. Then they’d put it back on, turn me over and clean the other side.”8 The boy who had once dreamed of soaring over the earth as free as a bird lay immobilized. Given morphine for his pain, he began to hallucinate, most memorably a series of visitations from an old Chinese couple. He’d become interested in East Asia while in the hospital in Santa Ana, first reading about Zen Buddhism and learning how to meditate, then studying some Chinese. He knew how to draw the characters for “good morning” and “see you soon.” When the old couple appeared to a very drugged Sam, they were dressed in green and gold robes and sat hovering on the metal bar just out of reach above his head, speaking to him in their language. Even though he couldn’t understand what the couple said, their presence reassured him. He liked them better than his doctors and nurses, who he felt would toss him back in the loony bin if he even mentioned hallucinations. Aside from the old Chinese couple, Sam was very much alone and depressed. The nurses were overwhelmed with the wounded, his doctors doubted his survival, and the other soldiers around him were struggling through their own recovery. Frozen in celluloid, he was just another flat, horizontal object that needed care, tending, turning, feeding, and washing. At twenty-one, he found the life he knew and the future he’d dreamed of to be over. He would never pilot a plane. A medical career was probably out of reach too, as he couldn’t walk, stand, or sit. He might never rise from his Bradford bed. As he stared at the white walls and ceiling of his room, his mind began to unravel. He swore they bled colors. He was suffering from the mild hallucinations and fever dreams that accompany tuberculosis. His stepmother, Virginia, came to Denver to visit him. She sat beside his bed in her straw hat and read to him from the books the Red Cross ladies dropped off at his room. When he was wheeled out to one of the hospital’s





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open porches, she accompanied him into the fresh air. In the distance rose the snow-covered peaks of the Rocky Mountains, above, the vault of Colorado’s blue sky, summits that Sam knew he couldn’t explore. Though Virginia held out hope that Sam would one day again be an eager and promising young man, Sam felt as if he’d become “the cockroach in Kafka’s Metamorphosis.”9 This might have been the end of Sam Francis, if not for two events. The first Sam never even knew about. In November 1944, the same week as his diagnosis with spinal tuberculosis, the recently discovered antibiotic streptomycin was administered for the first time to a critically ill tuberculosis patient. The effect was immediately impressive: the disease visibly arrested. The only problem was that streptomycin made the patient deaf.10 However, this experiment opened the door for the development of other antibiotics useful in treating tuberculosis, and the US Veterans Administration began carrying out clinical trials in veterans’ hospitals. Sam would just have to live long enough to benefit from the antibiotic cure. The second event, triggering the passion that sustained Sam until he received antibiotics, occurred on March 7, 1945. As part of his therapy to alleviate depression and boredom, Sam was given a set of watercolors. By this time, he’d read most of the books on the carts the Red Cross ladies pushed through the ward and had begun leafing through a few art history books. Sam later divulged that his primary attraction to art books was erotic. What caught his eye and his lust were the risqué reproductions of Goya’s Naked Maja and Manet’s naked Olympia. Both paintings of women lying prone on couches are startling for their frank depictions of nudity and for the women’s brazen gazes. Sam was a desperate, passionate young man, stifled in a cast, unable even to touch himself. With the gift of the watercolors, Sam started to paint and draw. He copied from art books, cartoons, postcards, magazines, movie posters; he tried unsuccessfully to paint the Chinese couple from his hallucinations. Eventually he began painting remembered landscapes from his childhood. Soon he was working on his art sixteen hours a day. He kept his paints, jars stuffed with brushes, bottles of turpentine and water to thin his colors, and towels to dab up any excess or mistakes on his bedside tray table. He hung his finished work around him, transforming his room into a studio and his nurses and aides into assistants. The kitchen staff saved egg yolks

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Figure 4. Sam Francis in the Bradford frame hoisted above his bed at Fort Miley Veterans Hospital, San Francisco, April 16, 1946.

for him to use as an additional binding agent, turning powdered pigment into rich, pure colors of paint. Because of his surgery, he couldn’t sit propped up in bed. However, the Bradford frame allowed Sam to lie on his stomach, suspended in a cot over his mattress. From this angle, he could reach around the sides and work with his brush and palette on a small canvas positioned directly below him. Wrapped in bandages and draped in sheets, Sam hung over his created landscapes, experiencing the same view from above that he’d loved as a child levitating on a seesaw and later as a young pilot unimpeded by gravity. Though no longer able to play a reconnaissance role in the war, the metal bedframe became his airplane. Miraculously, it granted him access to the same unique space: the threshold between earth and clouds, structure and vision. Immersed in the boundless topography of his imagination, Sam was again free. At least for him, Eisenhower had been right. Pictures saved his life.

4

The Keys to the Kingdom

On May 12, 1945, five days after Germany surrendered to the Allies in Europe, Sam was flown by military transport from Denver to Fort Miley Veterans Hospital in San Francisco. Situated on the bluffs of the Presidio district, Fort Miley was less than an hour’s drive from his birthplace in San Mateo. Still encased in his plaster corset, Sam hoped that within a few months, he would gain enough strength to remove it, sit up in bed, leave the hospital, and begin his convalescence at the new home of his father and stepmother in Palo Alto. Instead of months, Sam’s recovery took almost two years. He was plagued with fevers and relapses, and in his words, he couldn’t seem to lick this darn TB. Itchy rashes bloomed under his celluloid corset that nothing, not even the long bamboo back scratchers the nurses gave him to reach beneath the plaster mold, alleviated. Stuck inside his room, bored with confinement, able to escape only through reading and painting, Sam felt depleted by his powerlessness and continued setbacks. His mind festered. His world contracted to the hard shell of his corset. At his darkest moments, he wondered what it was all for—not just his suffering but also the pain of the other patients at Fort Miley. Men who’d witnessed grueling combat and returned from the war 45

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damaged physically as well as psychologically. And then there was the horror of the atomic attacks three months after his arrival in San Francisco: Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, and Fat Man on Nagasaki. These bombings, with their sudden, nearly total destruction of life, left Sam profoundly shocked. He was no longer the eager, zealous patriot who’d marched off to join the air corps but an outright and vocal opponent of war. It was only when he painted that Sam felt close to understanding, if not the suffering of the world, then at least his own. He was enduring a sort of hibernation, and the cast was his chrysalis. A shell within which he’d been forced to retreat. He was imprisoned in what he described as “a state of melancholia. A place with a leaden sky.”1 Later, when Sam told the story of his illness, he never failed to mention two important points. First, how sick he was, how—despite the surgery, corset, and medication—he couldn’t rise out of bed and lick this darn TB. Second, a vision. He was awake when a great orb of light like an enormous electric current appeared at the foot of his bed. It seemed to have come out of the wall, yet he could see the wall behind it. Slowly, the swirling, brilliant, transparent ball of energy moved toward him. Then the current was inside him, and it traveled through his entire body. One week later, Sam claimed, his doctor said he was almost cured. Whether or not he was cured so suddenly, Sam believed that the transparent orb he’d seen completely altered him. Trapped in the darkness of his cage, he had beheld a light. “It was a gift,” Sam said.2 From then on, he determined to move toward this apparition, toward the current. After that experience, whenever the darkness enveloped him, he would visualize the orb of light. The heavy, leaden contour of his shell began to feel spacious and open. He could see a structure to it, faceted like a gemstone, and so he named his mood “the diamond of melancholia.”3 Indeed, the further Sam descended into the diamond of his melancholia, the more he perceived. He saw a room. Eventually, Sam would see many rooms, “Rooms with glass and walls. Rooms with different realities. Rooms where I saw light all at once. Rooms where I saw space all at once. Rooms where I saw time all at once.” In these rooms were visions. He realized that space wasn’t just outside him, space was inside his mind, and this space felt infinite. “This was my real studio.” His job, what he called his “privilege,”



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was to go again and again down to his room and see a painting. “It’s mine,” he said. “If I only look hard enough.”4 It’s a startling and symbolic description, mythic in its portrayal of a descent into darkness, a place of entrapment where eventually light is discovered. Sam had been reading Carl Jung, and his narrative is loaded with Jung’s archetypal imagery.5 In Jungian terms, a diamond can represent the unconscious self, for, like the depths of the psyche, it is forged in darkness, far below the surface. A diamond, like the unconscious, requires tremendous effort to be brought forth and seen. It is a hard crystal structure that can be transparent—something one can gaze into like a room. And like a prism or a painting, a diamond can transmit light, color, and vision. Sam’s light, real or imagined, was foremost an image. As an image, Sam perceived it with his eyes; it then moved as a “current” through his body the way paint spreads across the surface of a canvas. Once internalized, the orb belonged to Sam. It was his room, his source and energy, giving him the ability to transform his chrysalis into a diamond. It should also be noted that Sam’s vision bears an uncanny reference to the atomic attacks. A great ball of current appearing out of nowhere that completely alters the landscape could just as easily describe a bomb, except that Sam’s ball of energy did not splinter the world. It did not destroy matter. Instead, his swirling energy sheltered and nurtured him. It enabled a state of reintegration. Like an alchemist, he turned his leaden sky into gold. “Art saved my life,” Sam confessed on multiple occasions. “It was really a matter of life and death to me. I felt that too. I knew it.”6 •



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Outside the hospital, California was also transforming. A surge of expansion not seen since the gold rush had begun with the buildup to war. Millions of people had streamed into the port cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco to work in the manufacturing and defense industries. The prominence of the region didn’t end with the fighting. Low-interest loans for servicemen fueled the housing and automobile boom, while the federal government continued to pour billions of dollars into military programs.

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Though fewer European émigré artists fleeing Nazi persecution had settled in San Francisco than in New York or even Los Angeles, the Bay Area was emerging as a vital art center. Artists and writers had long been attracted to the region’s bohemian ethos. At 623 Montgomery Street, a building known as the Montgomery Block had housed illustrious visitors over the years, including Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Mark Twain, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo. Now, the war over, returning vets from all parts of the country flocked through the Golden Gate. In 1946, three-quarters of the student body at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute) comprised returning vets subsidized by the GI Bill of Rights. Mostly older, these students were seasoned by life and events. They’d either witnessed the chaos of war or had been impacted by its violence through newsreels, photographs, and radio reports. Now, they wanted to create art capable of expressing the savagery and truth of their experience. Many turned to surrealist imagery. With its juxtaposition of desire and violence, its melding of conscious action and unconscious thought, surrealism was the ideal form to capture both an artist’s inner demons and the angst of a postatomic world. The San Francisco Museum of Art also contributed much to the vitality of the art environment. Though it would not add the word “Modern” to its name until 1975, it opened in 1935 as the only museum west of Chicago dedicated to modern art. The museum’s first director, Grace McCann Morley, a powerhouse with avant-garde taste, gave artists like Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Robert Motherwell their first solo museum shows. She brought landmark exhibitions from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to San Francisco, including a 1940 Picasso retrospective that was so enthusiastically received that 1,300 visitors sat down on the floors of the museum on the last day of the exhibition, refusing to leave. She also instituted a program that brought to San Francisco at least one exhibition per year by European émigré artists working in the surrealist mode.7 Cloistered inside Fort Miley, Sam was at first only tangentially aware of what was happening in the Bay Area. Over the last year, he’d worked his way through what resembled paint-by-number kits, then very traditional seascapes and portraits. He gained popularity—and a following—by asking nearly every candy striper who passed through Fort Miley to sit for him, usually sending her off with the gift of her likeness. But by 1946, a





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year after he’d begun to paint, he started to focus on his own form of surrealistic landscapes. He created several paintings inspired by reproductions he’d seen of the enigmatic Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico’s images of lonely spectral figures inhabiting barren dreamscapes. Two memorable examples of Sam’s work are The Secret Room, probably referring to the place where he received his vision, and Able Day Eclipse, titled for the first atomic test, code-named Able, on Bikini Atoll in July 1946. As the title suggests, the latter shows a landscape devoid of humanity, a place shattered and forsaken. Able Day Eclipse uses the same horizontal configuration as is seen in the photos of the radioactive cloud over the Pacific. The paintings share a muted, opaque palette of blue and ocher, and, as in de Chirico’s work, Sam’s shapes occupy space like isolated statuary. Sam submitted both paintings to the sixty-sixth annual exhibition of the San Francisco Art Association, where they won acceptance and were included in the show held at the San Francisco Museum of Art from October 10 to November 3, 1946. Sponsored by major museums (the Whitney in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago), art annuals were judged by established artists and were extremely competitive. Considered to be evaluated survey exhibitions, they were the primary way for the public, press, and critics to examine new art. At Fort Miley, it was not uncommon for veterans to pursue art. The Red Cross Arts and Skills Service offered instruction in leatherworking, weaving, metalsmithing, drawing, and painting to wounded soldiers. What was unusual was Sam’s determination to be taken seriously and to contact a larger and more significant art community outside his hospital room. “I’m going to be a painter someday,” Sam told a reporter who came to profile the “Crippled Vet Artist” for the San Francisco Examiner. “I dream about it.”8 The Red Cross arranged for the motor corps to take him by ambulance and wheel him through the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art that included his work. Strapped flat to a gurney, a sheet draped over his plaster corset, Sam posed for the camera as, for the first time, he saw the art of his contemporaries: Hassel Smith, a figurative painter and a fellow member of Sam and Vera’s old church; Claire Falkenstein, a sculptor who would become his good friend in Paris and would design the wedding rings for his second marriage; Erle Loran, Margaret Peterson, and Edward Corbett, all of whom would be his professors at UC Berkeley when he

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returned for his art degree; and, most importantly, the painter David Park. Park was not only included in the exhibition but also had served on the jury that selected Sam’s work. A wiry man with a long face, big ears, and a crooked smile, Park was known and loved for his forthright amiability. He lived for playing the piano (he formed an artists’ Dixieland ensemble called the Studio 13 Jazz Band) and for painting. Sometime during the summer of 1946, David Park began visiting Fort Miley as a volunteer in the Arts and Skills Program. Park’s older brother had contracted polio while serving in the Pacific, and because he’d recuperated far from home, Park couldn’t be with him. Instead, Park took it upon himself to reach out to other young men who had fallen ill during the war. One day, he appeared at the door of Sam’s hospital room. Age thirty-five and gaining renown, David Park was the first professional painter Sam had ever met. When he strolled into the room wearing his customary tweed jacket and smelling of cigarettes, turpentine, and oil paint, he brought into Sam’s life the possibility that he, too, could turn his passion into a profession. “He was like a beacon to me,” Sam later told Park’s biographer Nancy Boas. “He pulled me out of myself.”9 Though Park painted stylized figures in abstract settings of impastoed pigments, he didn’t adhere to a particular doctrine as a teacher at the California School of Fine Arts. Instead, he encouraged his students to develop originality, independence, and simplicity in their work habits. He believed that four things were essential to an artist’s survival: food, water, shelter, and recognition from fellow artists. The latter is what he gave to students and, on his weekly Friday afternoon visits at Fort Miley, to Sam. On those occasions, Sam would lie on his stomach listening to Park as the older artist talked to him about the history of art, the source of images (for Park, they were found in the everyday actions of people around him; for the isolated Sam, with his mystical nature, they were discovered in his secret room), and handling positive and negative space in a painting. In painting and in life, Park believed that an integration of elements was essential. Just as color was united with shape, humans were part of the warp and weft of their surroundings. To Sam, sequestered and withdrawn, Park was “the living example of the principle of brotherly love.”





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Park performed two other acts of generosity that had a profound impact on Sam. He borrowed three small paintings from his friend, the collector and heiress Charlotte Mack, and brought them to Fort Miley for Sam to study: a Paul Klee, a Joan Miró, and a Pablo Picasso. “He left them for me overnight,” Sam said. “That really impressed me.”10 Three paintings for twenty-four hours. For the excited patient trapped in bed staying awake all night to absorb them, they might as well have been the only three paintings in the world. Finally, Park arranged for Sam to visit the Legion of Honor. On a Sunday morning, before the museum opened, the motor corps again picked up Sam, this time to be rolled through the marble hallways of the Legion. “It was the first time I saw the masterpieces. It was a big shock. I saw El Greco, a painting of St. Peter with the keys. Sickening!” El Greco’s Saint Peter, with his distorted and elongated facial features, appeared to the prone Sam as a towering specter hovering above him, gaunt with ecstasy. In his rippling blue robe, Saint Peter glowed against a stark, dark backdrop, and his pale fingers clutched the keys to the kingdom of heaven. Still susceptible to low-grade fevers, Sam was so overpowered by the painting that he nearly relapsed. “I got very sick.” The impact of the image stayed with him. “I remember thinking to myself, I have those keys in my own hand. The key to my future.”11 Perhaps in response to this visit to the Legion and as a tribute to Park’s influence, Sam began Portrait (of a Lady), 1946–47. This painting merged the blue and yellow color scheme of the El Greco with the integration of dark and light tones that Park favored. (The combination of blue and yellow would continue throughout Sam’s artistic career.) A Cubistinspired image, Portrait shows multiple viewpoints of a head with one side bathed in light, the other in darkness. Within the delineations of the dark half of the lady’s visage, a figure that Sam claimed was himself hovers like a dream specter. The art historian and curator William Agee points out the influence on Portrait of Pablo Picasso, particularly his masterpiece Girl before a Mirror. If Sam had seen a reproduction of Girl before a Mirror, it would have been in one of the art books Park brought with him on his visits. In both paintings, the artists have engaged with representing dualities on one plane: profile and frontal, light and dark, and—what most concerned Sam at this time in his life—outer and inner realities.12

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Gradually, Sam was emerging from his hibernation and melancholia and returning to the world. Some of Park’s students from the School of Fine Arts visited him, bringing him brushes and paint. San Mateo’s public library displayed a selection of his landscapes. He began receiving fan mail. He made friends with an orderly named Sam Smith, who stopped by his room on his midnight shifts. The big, powerful, dark-skinned man would bend over and “lift me off the god damn bed onto a gurney and take me down to the kitchen and fry me a steak.” Then they would set off on rounds through the sleeping ward, Big Sam wheeling the bedridden Sam in front of him, laughing and talking as they checked on the other patients.13 Among the other visitors who appeared one afternoon at Sam’s hospital room door was his old girlfriend, Vera Miller. During the period of his severe illness in Denver, their correspondence had dwindled, but in the last year, as he progressed toward health, Vera’s parents had come to see him, bringing with them a cold beer. Soon Sam began entreating Vera to see him. I keep wondering when if ever you shall visit dear old San Francisco. Engaged to a boy named Cal, Vera hesitated. She wasn’t sure she loved Cal, and she knew she cared deeply for Sam. Now he was sick, and he needed her. She did some sketches of her dogs and brought them when she drove up to Fort Miley. When she opened the door to Sam’s room, she saw paintings tacked to the walls and paints, brushes, paper, and canvas on every available surface. In the middle of this chaos lay Sam. He was on his stomach, head poking out of the top of the hard shell of the corset like a turtle. For Vera and for Sam, all their shared history swept back into the room: the hayride where they’d first met and danced, the gardenias he’d covered her with from head to toe the night of her prom, the talks they’d had through the porch window when she’d snuck out of bed to see him. They were still separated, not by glass or distance but by his plaster cast. Sam promised he would shed it soon. Within a few months, Vera split from her fiancé in San Diego. The familiarity of Sam, combined with the pull of his vulnerable condition, was too compelling for her to ignore. She transferred to UC Berkeley for the fall term of 1946 and moved in with her parents on Fourteenth Avenue, a short walk down the hill from his hospital. Sam encouraged Vera to take a beginning painting class from David Park at CSFA. Together,





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they discussed Park’s lessons. Vera, too, liked Park. He was enthusiastic and always found something beautiful in her efforts. Each evening when she came and sat with Sam, she helped prime his canvas boards. One day, he noticed that she wore the bracelet he’d given her, the little gold band with their names engraved: Vera’s on one side, Sam’s on the other, the side next to her skin. As promised, he was soon able to sit up, and Vera could wheel him outside where together they watched the fog roll off the ocean, spreading a blanket of softness over the rocky coastline. Finally, in January of 1947, after three years in bed, Sam was discharged from Fort Miley Hospital. He proposed to Vera, presenting her with the one-carat diamond solitaire from Tiffany that his Nanny had given him. A few weeks later, on February 8, surrounded by family and friends, Sam and Vera married in the First Congregational Church in San Mateo. With the help of a back brace, Sam stood beside his old sweetheart, his new bride.

5

A First Coalescence

Three years of immobility had atrophied Sam’s muscles. He wore a corset under his shirt and a leg brace strapped over his corduroys. Though he never saw action, he received an honorable discharge from the air corps. With Sam entitled to both disability payments and the GI Bill, the newlywed couple could afford a bungalow on Monterey’s bluffs, an ideal place for Sam to convalesce. Their new home had a spare room that Sam converted into a painting studio. He needed to work on an art portfolio so he could return in the fall to UC Berkeley, not in premed but in art. Surrounded by scrub oaks, pine trees, and huckleberry thickets, Sam felt his senses awaken. He noticed the tingling of fresh air, the smell of mint, and the taste of salt carried on the ocean breeze. In the dark of night, while Vera slept, he listened to coyotes howling in the hills. At sunrise, sea lions barked from the rocks. Like the coyote, Sam was now nocturnal. It’s not uncommon for an artist to paint through the night, but after spending so long in the hospital, he found his circadian clock completely altered. He was attuned to a different rhythmic cycle. He went to bed at dawn. While he slept, Vera ran errands. She loved driving Rita, the 1933 maroon REO sedan with a rumble seat that Sam had fixed up before the war. Roaring into the nearby gas station, she’d 54





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smile as the pump jockey filled her tank, washed her windows, checked the air pressure on the tires, and gave her a set of free steak knives, sometimes even a drinking glass, for her thirty-five-cents-a-gallon purchase. Soon, Sam and Vera had a complete set of dishware. Vera was still a flirt, and their life in Monterey was happy and cheap. Ever since the early 1900s, Monterey had attracted an odd assortment of creative types, writers, musicians, and painters who, the poet Kenneth Rexroth observed, “could easily find work as forest watchers, clam diggers, fruit pickers, fishermen for the summer.”1 Stretching from Carmel to Big Sur, this bohemian scene was baptized the New Paris. The association with Paris was partially due to the presence of the writer Henry Miller. Returning from his nomadic years in France and Greece, Miller had settled in Big Sur in 1944. His books, banned in the United States, gained notoriety after American GIs smuggled them into the States. His reputation as an uncensored outlaw, frolicking writer, and fuck-anything man drew admirers from across the country. He mapped the road for improvisation in life and art not only for Jack Kerouac and Ken Kesey but also for Sam Francis. Indeed, it was during his period of recovery in Monterey that Sam became friends with Miller and, through him, the writer Anaïs Nin. The seed of an idea took root in Sam: a journey to bohemian Paris, to France, the place his mother had always talked about, the country she longed for but never had a chance to visit. Up until this point, Sam had explored fairly traditional styles in his paintings: surrealist imagery, cubist structures, rudimentary portraiture and landscapes. Now, up on the bluff overlooking the ocean, in response to the soaring space around him, he altered his picture plane. A small gouache, California Grey Coast, is one of the earliest examples of this transformation. In this watercolor—done on paper, a medium he loved for its absorbent quality—almost all figurative elements have vanished. The image, painted in monochrome gray, is nearly abstract as he fuses aerial and topographic vistas. It is almost impossible to delineate land from sea from air, for all have merged. The vision simultaneously suggests his memories (as a pilot flying over land), his current actuality (as one looking at the seacoast below him), and his imagination (the combination he has depicted.) Though Sam’s aesthetic was in its infancy, California Grey Coast shows that his pictorial perspective had begun to

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shift and distort. The painting’s spatially ambiguous landscape marks a significant departure in his early career, one that he would eventually explore again and again.2 This quality of ambiguity, of floating suspension between different viewpoints, permeated more than Sam’s painting. He was teetering on the brink, the edge of the continent as well as the edge of his new life as an artist. Released from the hospital, he found that more than his sleep habits had altered. He was a changed man. Before his illness, he’d been an ambitious, church-attending young student. Though still very driven, he was now certain only that he wanted to paint and to experience life. Unfortunately for Vera, this meant extramarital love and the sexual encounters his bedridden condition had denied him for so long. And Vera’s feelings toward Sam turned out not to be the romantic, passionate sort both had envisioned. High school sweethearts reunited when he was ill, they’d not had sex before marriage. Try as they might, they did not find bliss in bed now. Vera realized that Sam felt more like a brother to her. What she enjoyed was the cuddling. Sam wanted it all. By the time they moved inland in the fall and Sam reenrolled as an art major at UC Berkeley, friends noticed the friction between the couple. Sam was no longer melancholy, but his experiences had left him somewhat detached. To Vera, Sam’s dreamy remoteness, his ability to expound on the abstract, was at first alluring, then frustrating. She started to find his esoteric conversations about multiple dimensions silly. His self-assurance, which in the past she’d applauded, began to sound grandiose. Sam had just exhibited a number of his paintings at the Lucien Labaudt Art Gallery in San Francisco, an important space dedicated to displaying the work of emerging young talent. That exhibit provided him with a much-needed sense of traction and accomplishment. At a party soon after they arrived in Berkeley, he introduced himself as an artist, while Vera quipped, “No, you’re an art student.” Nancy Francis, Sam’s sister-in-law, later observed, “It was obvious they were a mismatch.” Sam was fluid. “Vera was very straight.”3 Like Sam, his younger brother, George, had been altered by the war. George had served in the Pacific, where he’d worked in the boiler room of a destroyer, participating in six landings, including Iwo Jima and the Battle of Luzon. The mischievous rebel who’d flunked out of grammar school was now a straight-A student of forestry at Berkeley. In contrast to





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Sam, George had seen enough action to know that he wanted a quiet life. He’d settled down and married Nancy, a girl he’d known in childhood. They lived in the same married student housing complex as Sam and Vera, a cluster of barracks on San Pablo Avenue called Codornices Village. As California residents, they got free tuition. The only cost was a $25 incidental fee. Both Sam and George had GI benefits. As for art supplies, Vera took a part-time job at an art store, which provided Sam with free paints, brushes, and canvases. The second university in the country to open an art department, UC Berkeley had a reputation for intellectual rigor. Even for an art degree, the academic requirements were strenuous. They included art history lectures as well as studio work. This set the program apart from traditional art schools, which focused almost exclusively on studio work. In the late 1940s, UC Berkeley’s art department was still dominated by the ideas and methods of the German transplant Hans Hofmann. A native of Bavaria who had studied in Paris before World War I, Hofmann synthesized German Expressionist energy, Fauvist color, and Cubist structure into his famous principle of “push-pull” in art. According to Hofmann’s philosophy, movement and drama were created in modern painting not by forms in illusionary space but by opposing compositional forces: warm versus cool colors, and hard, geometric shapes versus fluid, biomorphic ones. Though Hofmann taught only two summer sessions in Berkeley (1930 and 1931) before starting his own school in Provincetown, Massachusetts, many of his protégés ran Berkeley’s art department, including Erle Loran, James McCray, and Glenn Wessels. They carried on his rhythmic methodology. Right from the start, Sam charted his own course as an art student. Because of pain and the handicap of his back and leg brace, he rarely attended classes. Of his relationships with his professors, he said, “They did not pay much attention to me . . . they let me go on, which was the best.” Another student remembered thinking Sam was a smart-ass who preferred pursuing his own ideas. “There’d be a still life set up, and Francis would come in and do the blue version, the green version, the red version, the yellow version, while the rest of us were struggling just to get at what it looked like.” Sam could be a smart-ass, but, even as a student, he trusted his intuition about painting. His isolation in the hospital had amplified his independent, autodidactic nature. Regarding his restricted use of color, he said, “I approached

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color in the beginning with the caution of a big game hunter in a new territory because I felt that I was dealing with something that could swallow you up. Therefore, I was very much involved with one color at a time.”4 In one of his first painting classes, taught by Margaret Peterson, a prominent painter steeped in the influence of primitive art, Sam met fellow students Fred Martin and Jay DeFeo. Both were a few years younger than Sam. Soon Martin was sharing a painting studio that Sam found in an old dairy barn near the Berkeley campus. DeFeo remembered visiting them and thinking they were “doing some very progressive things . . . . They were a little more aggressive than I was about getting out, crossing the Bay and experiencing some of those people like Rothko and Still when they came to teach at the California School of Fine Arts.”5 The back trouble that prevented Sam from attending classes regularly didn’t stop him from exploring San Francisco. By this time, he was absorbing and assimilating various sources into his personal art education, emulating not past but contemporary styles. He spent a good deal of time at the Legion of Honor with his pad and pencils, copying the soft biomorphic forms in the work of Arshile Gorky. He viewed Jackson Pollock’s defining painting, Cathedral (1947), an early drip canvas in black and white. At the Legion and the San Francisco Museum of Art, he discovered the small, Asian-inspired paintings of looping lines by Mark Tobey and the bold, classical forms of Robert Motherwell. In 1946, the San Francisco Museum of Art had established the country’s first rental gallery, which allowed visitors to rent artworks either for study or as a prelude to purchasing. Martin and Sam would sometimes pool their resources and rent paintings to take to the studio for prolonged examination.6 Though some artists and teachers figured prominently in Sam’s education, he never attached himself to a mentor. In all likelihood, he would have found that kind of relationship too confining. Without a mentor, he had no set of rules to struggle against. Unrestricted, he was free to discover and absorb his own influences. There were, however, three artists whose work guided him at this juncture of his education: Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, and Edward Corbett. Never studying formally with Still or Rothko, Sam nevertheless came into contact with their paintings and their ideas about art’s mythic status during his frequent visits to San Francisco.





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Back in 1946, while Sam was still in the hospital, Still had mysteriously appeared at the doors of the California School of Fine Arts, dressed in his customary black coat and holding crumpled snapshots of his paintings. Captivated by the man and his work, the school’s director, Douglas MacAgy, hired him to fill a vacancy in the painting department. An authoritative and commanding man, Still soon took over the graduate department. Like Sam, he was mostly self-taught. Born in 1904 and raised on a wheat farm in a remote, impoverished area in Alberta, Canada, Still learned to paint by copying reproductions found in magazines. For a year, he studied art at Spokane University, moving in rapid succession through explorations of old masters to modern ones, but then dropped out, in order, he said, “to paint my way out of the classical European heritage.” Unlike the Hofmann disciples at Berkeley who believed in learning from the rich academic past, Still challenged his students to follow an intuitive path and “cut through all cultural opiates.” Though his puritanical, moral streak and superior attitude alienated many on the faculty, including David Park, his rejection of tradition inspired his students.7 Sam, too, had worked his way through the history of painting. He viewed Still’s solo exhibition at the Legion in 1947, and the large, dark canvases cut through with jagged bolts of color left an indelible imprint on him. They proclaimed the grandness of the landscape and an expansive artistic vision that felt akin to his own aspirations. After the show at the Legion, Still noticed Sam “hanging around the studios on weekends talking to the students.”8 In this way, Sam got close enough to Still’s messianic intensity without getting burnt by the great man’s fire. However, Still’s heavily textured opaque paint did not resonate with Sam. In a class with Erle Loran at Berkeley, Sam appeared one day with a painting Loran thought was influenced by Still “but more sensitive in color.”9 Sam had replaced the heavy, opaque oil paint that Still preferred with watercolor, giving his canvas a more delicate, translucent finish. By this time, he had become attracted to the romantic, thinner surfaces of Rothko and Corbett. In the summers of 1947 and 1949, at Clyfford Still’s invitation, Mark Rothko came west from New York to teach in San Francisco. Rothko, an urban man compared to the rural Still, brought with him the idea that color could carry the main burden of the painting. During this period, he

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was still creating quasi-abstract images in pinks and blues, but soon he started working with simple, rectangular floating shapes. The thinly colored surfaces and sensitive edges of a Rothko painting contrasted with the forceful, rugged hardness of a Still. Rothko seduced the viewer, while Still’s paintings were confrontational. Several of Sam’s paintings from 1949 show him exploring Rothko’s rectangular format with softly blurred and rounded edges but with a more dappled brushstroke. In the spring of 1949, Sam studied with Edward Corbett, who had previously taught at the School of Fine Arts and was now an instructor at Berkeley. He was a witty, sensitive man, fond of quoting Kierkegaard. At the time of Sam’s class with him, Corbett was painting moody abstractions that evoked the Bay Area’s billowy fog. Eventually, Sam would take Corbett’s airiness—his light and atmosphere—to another level. He would incorporate a luminosity not present in Corbett, integrating landscape and abstraction. In fact, California Grey Coast, Sam’s early painting from Monterey, had already accomplished this atmospheric melding of landscape with his artistic consciousness. With the oil painting For Fred (1949), Sam’s process coalesced. Dedicated to his friend Fred Martin, it marks the fusion of his art education with his personal themes. Small, saturated, deep red organic forms swarm across the surface like gathering masses of blood or bacterial cells. The painting incorporates the push-pull energy of Hofmann, the rectangular shapes of Rothko, the fluidness of Corbett, and the biomorphic shapes Sam had studied in Gorky’s work. Its size conveys the dominance of Clyfford Still. At fifty-nine by forty inches, it was Sam’s largest painting to date. Most importantly, as William Agee points out, it was Sam’s “first foray into the brilliant color that characterizes his later work.”10 During the two years it took for Sam to complete his bachelor’s degree in art, Vera held out hope that they would start a family. But by the fall of 1949, when Sam began working toward his master’s, Vera was not pregnant, and it had become evident that Sam did not want a settled, faithful married life. Their love for each other had been primarily based on a shared history and need: Sam’s to be cared for, Vera’s to caretake. Now they separated. Moving out of married student housing, Vera found an apartment with a friend, and Sam rented a room a few blocks from campus at 2620 Regent Street. There he slept in a single bed with rows of his





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framed canvases stacked deep against the walls. Friends since they were teenagers, Sam and Vera continued to spend time together, even when living apart. With Fred Martin, they looked at art, listened to jazz, and enjoyed the emerging beatnik scene in North Beach, where the sign outside Vesuvio Café read, “Don’t envy beatniks . . . Be one!” (Henri Lenoir, the proprietor of Vesuvio and two other bars, let young artists like Sam Francis and Fred Martin hang their works for sale on his walls.) One day, while Vera and Sam were lunching together in the Berkeley cafeteria, a girl stopped by their table to say hello. Sam introduced her as Muriel Goodwin. She had short, wavy, dark hair, a round face, and inviting brown eyes. She was a fellow artist. After she left, Vera asked Sam if he was dating Muriel. Instead of answering, Sam changed the subject, but his gaze followed Muriel as she wound her way among the tables, books balanced on one hip. Vera had the distinct impression that something was cooking between Sam and this new young woman.11 She was right. Sam and Muriel had met in Erle Loran’s painting class after he’d playfully stolen her stool. When she confronted him, demanding the return of the stool, Sam gave her a paintbrush. Their flirtation blossomed into a romance. Twenty-one-year-old Muriel was from Modesto, California. She’d grown up with a self-sacrificing mother who taught migrant workers and a father who frequently abandoned the family when he went on drinking binges. Of her childhood, Muriel retained two vivid memories: religious programs continuously blaring on the radio, and her mother coming into her bedroom, fumigating the air with DDT. Muriel had married young to escape her family but divorced after only two years. A former kindergarten teacher, she had a patient, serene, and modest nature, which balanced with Sam’s fervent self-confidence. A student of Buddhism, she spoke extemporaneously, but gently and deeply, about poetry and art. To Sam, she was luminous.12 That summer, after he graduated with his MA, a fire ripped through his father and stepmother’s home in Palo Alto. Caused by an explosion, it burned so hotly that the toilet melted. Everything, including more than one hundred paintings Sam had stored in a spare room, was destroyed. Though Sam was grateful that his father and stepmother had escaped the blaze and no one was hurt, he was devastated to learn that most of his artwork up through 1949 was ash.

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On the heels of this disaster, a grief-stricken Sam sought consolation not from his new love interest, Muriel, but from Vera. If Muriel represented fresh desire, Vera was a familiar connection to the past. This pattern of seesawing between women would repeat for the rest of his life. Suspension was his most comfortable state. And it’s interesting to note that, just as Sam oscillated between Vera and Muriel, he drifted between the influences of painters at UC Berkeley, on one side of San Francisco Bay, and the California School of Fine Arts, on the other. Unfortunately, when Sam appeared at Vera’s apartment looking for solace, he did not find her ready with open arms and sympathy. Instead, she was embracing a man named Buzz Fulton. Fulton was Sam’s physical opposite, tall and dashingly handsome compared to the compact, robust Sam with a brace around his leg. Perhaps Sam shouldn’t have had a double standard and have expected Vera to hold a torch for him. Yet in his vulnerable state, he was unprepared to see her smitten and hand in hand with another man. Vera was his victory girl. He’d turned his back, just like he had when he was a child and his mother fell ill, and, when he looked around again, Vera, too, was gone. Even though they were separated and he was dating Muriel, Sam felt betrayed. Bursting into a fit of rage, he yelled at both Vera and Fulton and stormed off into the night. With much of his artwork lost and his connection with Vera severed, even his country and campus felt alien. The dark grip of McCarthyism had taken hold. The UC Board of Regents was demanding that faculty members take an oath stating that they were not members of the Communist Party. His professor Margaret Peterson resigned her position. For a short time, Sam had belonged to the American Youth for Democracy. While not a communist organization, the group advocated student rights and battled racism. It was an offshoot of the Young Communist League of the war era. For years, perhaps since his mother died, Sam’s compass had been pointed toward Paris. Though Clyfford Still had told his students at the California School of Fine Arts to throw off the ties of European heritage, he had also advised they bypass New York—it was too corrupt—and assert their independence by going to Paris. Henry Miller proclaimed the joys of self-liberation. Sam determined to start over. He’d learned from years of confinement that, regardless of attachment, regardless of trauma, there





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was sheer joy in moving, in pressing forward and seeking what was over the horizon. Though Sam intended only a short stay abroad, he would not return to live in California for twelve years. By then, he had twice circumnavigated the globe. In 1950, when he set out for Paris at age twenty-seven, he shed the last layer of his chrysalis. As a sign of emancipation, he threw away his corset and his leg brace. Like many young American men, he was bankrolled by the GI Bill. He did not travel alone. Muriel was by his side. “I wanted to get out of the country,” he said. “Out of myself. To have a look at myself.”13

6

A Tiny Room at the Hôtel de Seine

Arriving on the SS Île de France in early October 1950, Sam and Muriel expected to find “the movable feast,” the divine Paris once inhabited by Ernest Hemingway and the Lost Generation. Instead, they discovered a city in fragile convalescence. Six years after liberation, Paris was wrestling with memory, mourning, and hope of rebirth. Though the city had escaped destruction under Nazi occupation, the years of war had left the country’s infrastructure in tatters. Much of Europe was still gripped by housing, fuel, and food shortages. France had lost its economic position on the world stage, and Paris her reputation as the bastion of Western civilization. “The Holy Place of our time,” the critic Harold Rosenberg had named Paris in 1940, just as she’d surrendered. Writing his acclaimed tribute to the City of Light, Rosenberg described prewar Paris as the place where Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and Cubism were born. The place where Viennese psychologists, Russian ballet dancers, French Cubist painters, English poets, and American writers mingled in cafés and created “a magic island” above the world. But on June 14, 1940, when Nazi tanks rolled down the Champs-Élysées and soldiers flew an enormous swastika flag from atop the Eiffel Tower, that ideal, that “laboratory of the twentieth-century,” shut down.1 67

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Many artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Marc Chagall, and Max Ernst, fled to America. Up until then, transatlantic exchange had been limited. Then, war and desperation forced these artists out of one world and into another. They brought with them not only their art and talent but also their ideas about community and serious respect for the artist’s endeavors. It was an attitude that the US art world hadn’t fully experienced before. They left behind an emptied, hushed shell, a ghost town overrun with Nazi propaganda, which sought to convey the illusion that life was normal in the occupied City of Light. Compared to what was taking place on the rest of the European continent, life was relatively normal in Paris. The city was not bombed, and though people went hungry, there was not widespread starvation. Jews and other “undesirables” were rounded up for extermination, their art and belongings looted. But salons and galleries reopened. Dealers chose to or were forced to do business with Nazis. What wasn’t confiscated was sold or destroyed. More than 2,242 tons of books were burned. Outside of the Jeu de Paume gallery, the Nazis stacked canvases by Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Fernand Léger and lit them on fire. Though condemned as degenerate, Picasso and Matisse were allowed to continue to work, and German officers routinely visited Picasso’s studio to purchase paintings. On one such encounter, a Gestapo officer, seeing a postcard of the painting Guernica, depicting the atrocities of fascism and war, asked the master, “Did you do this?” To which Picasso replied, “No, you did.”2 By and large, Germany showed great leniency, even respect for French culture. After Paris was liberated four years later and the euphoria—the kissing, dancing, and drinking in the streets—subsided, the city, like the rest of Europe, faced gruesome realities. In the wake of peace came revelations about Nazi collaborators, and, as refugees and survivors staggered off the trains, the full horror of the concentration camps became known. As Simone de Beauvoir commented, “The war was over; it remained in our hands like a great unwanted corpse, and there was no place on earth to bury it.”3 Burdened with the realization that many citizens had collaborated—if not for gain, then for survival—a wave of retributions and revenge killings swept through France. Women who were suspected of having had liaisons with Nazis had their heads shaved and were paraded through the streets in





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their underwear. Paris had been tarnished. To rescue France’s honor, to save her from internal rupture, General Charles de Gaulle called for national unity. Turning back the clock, Paris embraced her prewar ideal, celebrating the golden period before the Nazi conquest. In 1946, eighteen months after liberation, the Musée de l’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries exhibited, as “rediscovered masterpieces,” works by artists who’d been labeled degenerate by the Nazis. By 1948, France sent out a call: “The French, it should be added, are also anxious to help foreign students and scholars and will do everything possible to facilitate opportunities to visit monuments or collections or to consult any type of documentary material.”4 Paris had opened her arms, and droves of artists, including Sam and Muriel, answered her appeal. During the early 1950s, some three to six hundred American painters funded by the GI Bill traveled to Paris to pursue educational adventures. This throng of expatriate American artists came to be called the “second occupation.” Soldiers, students, and more than one hundred thousand tourists swarmed the wide nineteenth-century boulevards and crowded the medieval cobbled streets of the Left Bank. Clothing and other necessities were so expensive that Sam immediately wrote home, asking for two pairs of wool socks and a packet of razor blades. With the help of friends, Sam and Muriel eventually secured a room at the cost of one dollar a day at the Hôtel de Seine in the bohemian SaintGermain-des-Prés quarter. Their tiny room was barely one hundred square feet and four flights up—the higher the floor, the lower the cost. Squeezed into this space were a narrow bed, a small three-legged table (on which they placed their illegal alcohol burner), a sink, and a bidet. The walls were covered with a dusty, peeling floral wallpaper. One dull yellow light bulb dangled from the ceiling like a spider at the end of a long strand of web. The sink was under the only window in the room. Sam used it as an easel. From then on, they washed everything, including their vegetables, in the bidet. There is not a crumb on the floor, Sam wrote his father and stepmother, but neither is there a piece of toilet paper in the one toilet on the étage ( floor) and I am alive.5 They soon discovered that the cramped but congenial Hôtel de Seine was packed with expats. Artists, writers, musicians, and philosophy students generated an ambiance somewhere between that of a student dormitory and a theatrical boardinghouse. Down the hall lived the African

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American painter Haywood “Bill” Rivers. Occupying the room on the opposite side of a thin wall was a young artist couple from Brooklyn, Norm and Pat Gollin. Sam and Muriel could hear them making love, which undoubtedly meant that the Gollins heard them as well. Their exasperated concierge tried to exert control—who came and went into whose room, who snuck in the forbidden Sterno burners, who wasted electricity by forgetting to unscrew their single light bulb each day—all to little avail. They did what they wanted when the management wasn’t looking: climbing through one another’s tiny windows, opening their doors, and throwing spontaneous beer parties in the hallways. Sam enrolled at the Atelier Fernand Léger in order to receive his GI Bill stipend of $75 per month. After the war, Léger had returned from America to reopen his workshop-studio in Montmartre. In America, students learned art in schools; in Europe, they acquired their craft alongside the master, in his workshop. Sam soon realized that he had no real interest in Léger’s bright mechanistic forms—his mix of Cubism and Futurism to depict the chaos of urban life. No grades were given or attendance taken, so just as in Berkeley, Sam went only when Léger doled out his criticism. When he showed Léger a painting he was working on, Léger said, “I don’t like it much, but it is very much what it is. It has nothing to do with what we are teaching here.”6 Sam’s education—his real artistic edification—took place around café tables, among his contemporaries. Unlike their cheap hotel rooms, cafés had central heating. There, a traveler, a poor artist, or a tormented philosopher could nurse a coffee or a beer for hours. For a Frenchman, the café was his club: the hub and rendezvous spot of the French revolutionaries, the retreat where Hemingway had penned The Sun Also Rises, and the place where the Surrealists had crafted their manifesto. Adept at sniffing out talent and influence, Sam had the self-assurance and stocky good looks of a young Orson Welles. The luminous and poetic Muriel immediately put people at ease. Soon they were swept off the street and into a circle of expat painters: Jean Paul Riopelle, Norman Bluhm, Shirley Jaffe, and later Al Held, Kimber Smith, and Joan Mitchell. This small band of artists formed an island unto itself, separated from the contemporary Parisian art scene by the language barrier and from America by the Atlantic Ocean.





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In those early days, the Canadian Jean Paul Riopelle was the best known of the group, perhaps as much for his unrestrained personality as for his paintings. He had wiry black hair, heavy eyebrows, and the large nose of a Roman general. He was married, with two young daughters, but domesticity didn’t contain or restrain him. Fueled by alcohol, he painted layered, jewel-colored canvases with a palette knife, fast, skidding over the surface as if his blade were one of the race cars he coveted. Indeed, in a few years, when he gained renown and money for his art, he immediately went out and bought five Bugattis. In Riopelle, Sam found a comrade, someone equally ambitious, who shared his zest for life and his appreciation of a fast-moving vehicle. Within a few months, they jointly purchased a Peugeot motorbike and took turns whipping around the still nearly empty streets of Paris. Though neither liked to converse in the other’s native tongue, they hit on a way to communicate. Riopelle talked in French, which Sam was learning, while Sam replied in English, which Riopelle understood. More than anything, though, they shared a self-identity as committed artists. Riopelle, and soon Sam, began to draw attention. “More than the rest of us, Sam’s style matured very swiftly,” fellow painter Al Held said. “Paris was where Sam found his truth.”7 Almost daily, this coterie gathered at Les Trois Marronniers, a nondescript café-tabac on the rue du Dragon, where the lack of charm was redeemed by the charismatic presence of the dynamic art historian and man of letters Georges Duthuit. A Byzantine scholar and the editor of the art journal Transition, Duthuit was devoted to dialogue. He wrote in the mornings and then, starting at noon and lasting into the night, held conversations at Les Trois Marronniers. Sam described him as “a Baudelairean dandy, very emotional, always on stage.” In addition to his enthusiasms, Duthuit spoke English. He had been displaced to America for six long years during the war. He was a generation older, and the young artists began passing word among themselves: “Come to Les Trois Marronniers, Duthuit is a man you can learn from.”8 Married to Henri Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite, Duthuit provided a direct conduit to the work of the voluptuous colorist. He invited this band of student artists to his office on the rue de l’Université. There, an enormous table held a six-foot-long, narrow wooden Inuit vessel into which

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Duthuit randomly stuffed his papers and notes. Against the wall was a cranky stove around which everyone gathered to smoke. On the wall hung a miner’s lamp, its crystal glass sending faceted light darting through the room. Sometimes Marguerite would sit under the lamp, scissoring colored paper for what were to be her father’s final works: his paper cutouts of swaying dancers and bright flowers. It was in this magical room that Sam encountered images he had never seen before. A small portrait of a woman by a window, done by Matisse in Nice around 1920, transfixed him.9 He filed away for future reference the way the artist captured the morning sun in the shimmering gray fabric of the curtain. Duthuit had written a book about the Fauves, the “wild beasts” of early twentieth-century modern art. It included the passionately intense paintings of Henri Matisse and André Derain. However, the paintings that had the most profound impact on Sam during his first years in France were those of Pierre Bonnard and Claude Monet. Influenced by the simplicity and the flat perspective of Japanese prints, both had used color to describe light and space. To Sam, Bonnard’s color-saturated depictions of domestic scenes felt sensate, almost gustatory. Some fifteen years later, in 1968, Sam would write of encountering Bonnard’s paintings in Paris: “He reminds me that the best way to know a thing is to eat it, to lick it.”10 Yet in the early 1950s, the work that most resonated with Sam’s idea of color and light as rhythmic substances was Claude Monet’s late panoramic Water Lilies. Even before the Musée de l’Orangerie reopened in 1953, these magnificent, colossal canvases could be seen at the Galerie Katia Granoff on the Right Bank. The idea that color was embodied light and thus gave dimension and candescence to space had been flickering below Sam’s consciousness ever since he’d gazed for hours at the play of light on the ceiling of his hospital room and stared at its white walls until he’d seen colors bleed through the plaster. Now he wanted to depict “the substance of which light is made.” Though Sam had experimented with this idea when he’d painted California Grey Coast above Monterey Bay, he hadn’t grasped until he came to Paris how to render and capture light’s essence, its birth, on canvas. “I had come from California with my dreams of space and big trees, of clouds and everything, and I arrived in Paris, a gray city, soft, in this graceful setting, with its feminine quality, like a lady who receives. Duthuit was my guide for this culture.”11





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Another attraction of Paris was the ability to mingle with great artists. The casual accessibility of the ateliers made it possible to see the masters’ studios, even their homes. With Shirley Jaffe, Sam paid a call to the studio of Constantin Brancusi and, at the sculptor’s invitation, held his chisel. “Here, feel it.” Though Jaffe refused, Sam did not. On another occasion, Sam was invited to a dinner party at the home of Nina Kandinsky, the widow of Wassily Kandinsky, the great Russian abstract painter, who had died in Paris in 1944 during the occupation. There he met the German artist Bernard Schultze. As soon as Nina Kandinsky excused herself to make tea, Sam leaped from his seat and raced across the room to a stack of Kandinsky’s paintings he’d spotted leaning against a wall. He motioned for Schultze to help him. The two men rapidly went through the pile, searching for the earliest works: Kandinsky’s brilliant suspended images, floating as light as feathers, shaping into forms. That’s when Schultze asked Sam what sort of paintings he was working on. Sam eagerly informed him, “I want to make the late Monet pure.” He had been studying examples of Monet’s late paintings. In these final works, Monet had abandoned the familiar anchors of ponds, lilies, and haystacks. His space was now ambiguous, his light luminous, his brushstroke bold and nearly abstract. Al Held described viewing these last Monets with Sam. “We saw them as prologues to Pollock and Still. Big field paintings.” This was the way Picasso and Braque had once looked at Cézanne, and the way Cézanne had once looked at Poussin—as a jumping-off point.12 Coexisting with the nostalgia for the prewar, pre-Holocaust Paris of Monet, the Paris that Harold Rosenberg had called “a magical island,” was the Paris of the Existentialists, who offered up the challenge that it was possible to start again, from zero. Just three blocks from the Hôtel de Seine, at the Café de Flore on the boulevard Saint-Germain, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir presided over a large table on the first floor. Sam and Muriel were sometimes invited to join Sartre and his congregation: Eugène Ionesco, Alberto Giacometti, and Samuel Beckett. (One evening, Beckett, a friend of Duthuit’s, invited Sam and Muriel to see the first rehearsal of his new play, Waiting for Godot.) I am living in Sartre’s sphere of influence, Sam wrote home in December 1950. His followers are all over the place, mostly disillusioned French writers and painters who have latched onto the more obvious, flamboyant and easy aspects of his philosophy.13

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Postwar intellectual Paris had enthusiastically embraced Sartre’s viewpoint on existence, particularly his statements on freedom. “Man is freedom,” Sartre proclaimed, adding that “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.”14 Without a deity, people were free to decide their own destinies. This emphasis on self-determination and action intoxicated a nation desperate to overcome its recent history. Since there was always the present moment, it followed that there was always the possibility of starting anew. Arguing that people, like artists, create meaning and shape their purposes, Sartre borrowed from the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. MerleauPonty had proposed that the act of perception was not just reflexive but rather about grasping and transforming reality. For Sartre, for Camus, for Merleau-Ponty, for de Beauvoir, artists were the purest examples of their philosophy. It was artists who showed how humans could choose, could recreate, could recover, a new world out of the world they were given. If the idea was to begin anew, Sam had come to the right place. “We were like babies, sponges,” Muriel said, “soaking up everything.”15 They wandered beside the stone walls of the quays of the murky brown Seine, Muriel careful to adjust her pace to Sam’s as he adapted to walking without a brace. They lost their way among the sagging, cream-gray limestone buildings. Sam dreamed of a large studio filled with light, and periodically they stopped for him to knock on a wooden door, call up a spiral of stairs, and ask in hesitant French for “une chambre pour une painter.” But with art students overrunning Paris, studios were not readily available. When they weren’t drifting through the web of Paris streets or mingling in a café, they worked on their art in their cramped room at the Hôtel de Seine. While Muriel sat on the bed, writing poetry and sketching, Sam painted. The room’s one window overlooked a courtyard that, like a deep well, trapped the light. In the fall, the light was the color of warm amber; by winter, it had shifted to a cerulean-gray, heavy and vaporous with rain. Sam had brought a few canvases with him to France, unfinished work that had not been destroyed in the fire at his parents’ home or stored with Vera. Because of the cramped space, he had to paint incrementally, unrolling his large canvases a few inches at a time. How else to work on a canvas seven by three feet in a room that was only ten by ten feet? When his stepmother





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sent him charcoal (too expensive to buy in Paris), he sketched cellular shapes that accrued across the page like gathering energy.16 Sam never used prepared canvases. They were too expensive, and he loved the touch and color of a span of raw beige linen before it was stretched. He enjoyed the process of transforming it. First, he tightened the canvas with rabbit-hide glue, then layered on coats of gesso. That was the real moment of beginning, the moment when a painting started to reveal itself. From there, it could become a beautiful failure or a miraculous, accidental triumph. In the beginning, anything and everything were possible. The first painting Sam created in Paris was the luminous Red and Pink. He might have continued along that vein using primarily red—he did return to that color a year later—if not for an unplanned opportunity. One day, when he was priming his canvas with gesso, a white stain appeared, a drip of gesso that, as it spread across the surface, looked to Sam like skin. White was the cheapest paint color, so Sam could afford far more white than red, blue, or yellow. However, the White paintings, begun with that accidental stain, are not entirely monochromatic. They vary considerably, from the dirty white of White Green Earth (1950–51) to the frothy powder of White Painting (1950–52) to the glowing moonscape of Other White (1952). Sam blended and erased many traces of colors as he sponged over their surfaces. Covered with clusters of pale cellular forms that Sam applied with textured brushes onto stone-gray and chalky fields, the canvases are luminous and atmospheric washes that capture light trapped behind laced veils. A year later, when Georges Duthuit described these canvases in an essay subtitled “Animator of Silence,” he called the images “shrouds of mist” and “fine-nets” that existed between the painter and the beholder’s eye.17 The Swiss art collector Franz Meyer saw these paintings when they were first exhibited at the Galerie Nina Dausset in 1952 and wrote that he was stupefied by the constant swirls of movement on each canvas. The critic Robert T. Buck Jr. wrote that the paintings “appear to be a window onto another, more vast world of which we are only seeing a detail.” The idea of each painting being a segment of a larger, perhaps infinite, space had been haunting Sam. He was on the lip of an idea about the possibilities of abstraction. At the cafés, he’d told his friends that unlike contemporary French paintings, which were too bounded by the four sides of the frame,

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his canvases, as he conceived of them, were small fractions of an enormous cosmos of form and thought. This concept paralleled his painting experience of unrolling his canvas and working on it incrementally. He couldn’t see the whole, just the fragments. Indeed, like wind shifting through an open cockpit or matted clouds, the white of Sam’s paintings moves from one canvas space to another. Although the White paintings were not produced by premeditated consideration, they have a quality of collision—the moment when an idea and its execution meet in the material world.18 When the poet and critic Yoshiaki Tōno saw Sam’s paintings, his impression was that “they capture the origin of picture-making, or image formation in the raw.”19 The White paintings drew inspiration from multiple sources. In 1949, in Berkeley, Sam’s teacher Edward Corbett had worked on diffused, grayish atmospheric paintings. And since the 1930s, the Seattle artist Mark Tobey had been painting scratchy, white calligraphic canvases. There was also the soft gray detail of a curtain Sam had studied in the portrait by Matisse that hung in Duthuit’s office. The ambiguous, formless space of the paintings even suggests the influence of the dilemma inherent in Existential philosophy: how to depict consciousness or presence through absence.20 However, the single painting that had the most impact by far on Sam was one he and Muriel had seen on their way to Europe. Before they boarded the SS Île de France, they had a brief layover in New York, where they visited the Museum of Modern Art. There Sam stood for hours in front of Kazimir Malevich’s White on White (1918), a painting of a tilting white square on an even whiter field. A painting, Sam said later, that was “pure feeling.” Of White on White, Malevich wrote, “I have overcome the lining of the colored sky . . . . Swim in the white free abyss, infinity is before you.”21 Malevich, like Sam, had been influenced by P. D. Ouspensky’s ideas about using art to represent and explore higher dimensional space, the space of eternity. Begun in 1950 in his tiny room at the Hôtel de Seine, the White paintings occupied Sam for more than a year. He said later that “It was like painting with my whole body . . . I still remember.” He’d been thinking a lot about his center, not in an abstract way, but literally about his navel, a connection to his mother, whose unfulfilled dream had brought him to Paris, his mother city. Furthermore, he described Paris as “a beautiful





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basin for my ideas to settle out of solution.” His canvas was positioned over a sink, a basin into which water flowed down a small round drain (navel). And so the color is also the white of the porcelain sink, the white of bare walls, the white of hospital rooms, and the white of rolling fog glimpsed from a window, beautiful and unreachable. He wondered if “white wasn’t the color of the space stretching between things.” What things did he mean? The space of light trapped in the hotel courtyard, the expanse of the cerulean-gray Parisian sky between winter and spring, the space between existence (Sam) and nonexistence (his mother), or all spaces between all things, including the spaces between Sam and others? For, of course, the white that Sam used was also the color of his plaster corset— the hard shell (a second skin) that encircled Sam’s center for three long years, separating him from the world. And the space between the artist and the viewer is always the work of art (the canvas skin) itself.22 Although Sam insisted he was trying to eliminate all personality from his paintings, Muriel, who watched many of these canvases come to life, said they were “dreamy paintings combining his intense vitality as well as the quiet about him.”23 Sam could be animated and talkative among friends, but when he worked, he withdrew into a deep, focused calm, often asking Muriel to leave him alone in their room. His later friend the museum director Pontus Hultén described Sam’s quiet as “a natural authority that seemed to be almost like a transparent substance around him and it kept people at a distance.” Likewise, the art patron Betty Freeman noticed that both the paintings and Sam were “wrapped in a shroud of remoteness . . . disembodied spirits of color, light and space.”24 To Sam, the White paintings were pure and childlike in their innocence. They were almost, but not quite, empty fields with forms so attenuated that the whole canvas had a preconscious quality. He called them “a natural invention born out of necessity.” The necessity to conserve funds and thus restrict himself to mostly white but also the necessity to start afresh, to regenerate, and, like the country where he now abided, to resurrect out of destruction, creating a tabula rasa in a new land.

7

Ambition and Lies

Sam had come to Paris not just to study and absorb but also to make a name for himself. No sooner had he arrived than he began submitting to annual exhibitions. In November, only one month into his sojourn, a painting was accepted in the Salon de l’art libre of the Musée d’art moderne. My work will be on view with about 500 to 1,000 other works from all over Europe and the rest of the Western World, Sam wrote home. By spring he was included in the prestigious Salon de mai. Picasso will exhibit his latest in this as well as Matisse . . . so I am lucky! But not money lucky as this is strictly a prestige show and the works are not for sale.1 Lucky and talented, Sam was also exceedingly determined and possessed by ambition. Salon shows were an institution in Paris. Large in scale and hugely popular, they were often invitational or juried. If Sam wanted to see his work alongside the leading artists of the day, there was no better entrée than participating in these prestigious art events. When he wasn’t conversing in a café, Sam painted. When he wasn’t painting, he churned with aspiration, extemporizing in letters to his parents and, in the initial months of his visit, to Vera. Could one of them take a painting of his to the Art Association in San Francisco by the end of March? Could his stepmother, Virginia, contact Mrs. Stein? Sarah Stein 78





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was the wife of Michael Stein and the sister-in-law of the writer and art patron Gertrude Stein. Sam reasoned that since Sarah Stein had collected Matisse in 1907 when Matisse was scorned by the rest of the world, she might be interested in his work. Perhaps you know someone who can introduce you?2 It wasn’t just his own work for which Sam sought recognition. He passionately believed that the most exciting painting in Europe was being done by the young Americans working abroad, and he sensed an opportunity. In 1950, the Parisian avant-garde was just becoming aware of the art of the Abstract Expressionists in New York, let alone of that of the expats in tiny hotel rooms on the Left Bank. Writing friends back home, he expressed his opinion that the painters on the West Coast are the best in the U.S. and therefore in the world at present (young painters I mean). He was a natural promoter and enthusiast. He entreated Fred Martin, his old studio mate at Berkeley, to send slides of his recent painting, so he could show them to critics in Paris and perhaps get him a show in Europe. He was such an advocate of the artist Shirley Jaffe that she eventually asked him to stop bringing people over to her studio. His patronage overwhelmed her. “I can handle myself, Sam,” Jaffe told him.3 By nature, Sam was dynamic. Though his body didn’t move swiftly, his spirit sparkled with vitality. This was only amplified by the deep-rooted conviction that, after the death he’d caused and the illness he’d survived, his life had to matter. As an overachiever in high school and even as a bedridden patient, he’d needed to keep busy. Now, the necessity of finding a way to support himself through his art was never far from his mind. In the beginning, he hung paintings wherever he could—in salon shows, in Georges Duthuit’s office, and at the Galerie Huit, the American artists’ cooperative headed by Haywood Rivers.4 Sam grabbed any opportunity to put his paintings in front of the eyes of someone who might further his development and career. Ambition was tied to money. The clock was ticking on his GI Bill stipends. The $75 per month would soon run out. Paint and supplies cost $70.00 a month, food $40, rent 40. Another 30 for transportation, relaxation, trucking costs for paintings, etc. etc. which all seems to point to about $125.00 to 150 per month not counting rent.5 Without money, Sam wouldn’t be able to continue to paint. Without painting, Sam believed he wouldn’t live.

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While Sam’s benefits covered basic rent and food, Muriel contributed by finding part-time work as a tutor. For the most part, Americans weren’t allowed to work in France except for American firms or the US government. In the spring of 1951, Muriel was offered a six-month position as the assistant director for recreational activities for the US Air Force Special Services in Salzburg, Austria. She grabbed the job. Though her decision to leave Sam and France for a spell was certainly due to their goal of financing their mutual artistic dream, they were also facing the problem of intense cohabitation. Squeezed together in their one-hundred-square-foot room at the Hôtel de Seine, they’d spent a passionate but cramped seven months without adequate heat and with all manner of colds and flu passing between them. The limitations inherent in their environment and their lifestyle undoubtedly contributed to the purity of Sam’s White paintings. However, now he wanted to spread out—in both his work and his life. He required periods of isolation to paint. He pressured Muriel to leave during the day so he could have the room to himself. Muriel understood that his primary commitment was to his art and his primary relationship that with the canvas, but she admitted that he had a “focused intensity that could be hard to live with.”6 Though he wanted the passion their intimacy provided, he also wanted to disappear into his paintings. To accommodate him, she retreated to cafés where she drew and wrote poetry and to bookstores where she read. Sometimes she knocked on the door of Shirley Jaffe’s studio or the Riopelles’ apartment. The Riopelles had two daughters whom she adored and a bathroom where she could wash her hair. In addition to bringing in crucial funds, the job in Austria would give Sam and Muriel time apart. It was April when Muriel left for her new position in Salzburg. Sam began his day with a cup of Nescafé in his hotel room (he’d asked his parents to send him a few jars), then a stroll over to the Café de Flore or Les Deux Magots for a croissant while he read a week-old San Francisco Chronicle. The balmy weather meant it was warm enough to sit outside and to amble along the Seine, browsing the bookstalls. However, warmer temperatures brought more tourists and an increased demand for hotels. The price of his tiny room shot up to $45 per month. Suddenly his concierge was banging on his door, shaking her finger at his painting propped on the sink, and exclaiming “Pas de peinture!” as if she hadn’t seen his





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canvases before. When he wasn’t surreptitiously pulling one out from under his bed and unrolling it bit by bit to work on, he was using a borrowed painting wall at his friend Seymour (Sy) Boardman’s studio off the boulevard du Montparnasse. By early evening, Sam would be back at the café sitting with friends. One night that August, an American girl drinking a citron pressé at the next table joined their conversation. Hazelle Miloradovitch told them she was a violinist. She’d been studying music in Switzerland and had stopped in Paris for a month before entering graduate school at Stanford. “California!” Sam exclaimed. His brother had gone to graduate school at Stanford, and his parents lived in Palo Alto. Never at a loss for an idea, Sam suggested that Miloradovitch practice her violin at Boardman’s studio. Everyone agreed that this was a splendid proposal. The next day, Sam picked Miloradovitch up at the Hôtel d’Isly and led her along the twisting streets to Boardman’s place. When she asked about a large painting of deep reds that dominated the room, Sam told her it was his. He’d begun it in Berkeley and was finishing it in Paris. Then he said, “The color is inspired by sex.” He indicated the pinkish hue she’d admired. “A beautiful cunt-red.” In all probability, the painting she noticed was Opposites (1950) or Red and Pink (1950), both with loose, undulating, tissue-like shapes sponged delicately across the canvas. Sam’s comment did not shock Miloradovitch. Undaunted, she picked up her bow and began to play a Bach sonata. Sam and Boardman were working on sumi-e ink studies, a method practiced by Zen monks in China and Japan since the thirteenth century. They were using black ink and white paper. Sam explained that the white of the paper symbolized the emptiness of the universe upon which forms— represented by the ink—ceaselessly appeared and disappeared. With Miloradovitch’s baroque fugue setting the pace, the two men ground their ink sticks in slow circular motions until they’d achieved a creamy consistency. Brushes loaded, they stood and breathed in front of their empty sheets of paper. The “work” for this type of painting was done before a drop of ink touched the paper. The idea was for them to focus until all thoughts had vanished and they were filled with the forms they wished to embody. This was immersion, a way of connecting to the invisible current of chi within so that when they finally released their brushes,

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they conveyed absolute essence in as few strokes as possible. Sam later described this type of sketching to the art critic Jan Butterfield as a process in which he gave up his experience, “like throwing it all to the wind.”7 Although only twenty-one, Miloradovitch was a sturdy, independent young woman. This was her third trip alone to Europe in pursuit of her musical studies. Every day, with her violin in tow, she traced the path to the studio with the cunt-red painting on the wall. There, Sam and Boardman improvised in painting while she experimented with improvisation in music. Bebop and jazz jams were all the rage in Paris. Why not improvise a little in life? Miloradovitch’s hotel on the rue Jacob was a block from Sam’s Hôtel de Seine. Her ground floor room had a large window opening onto the street, and soon Sam was slipping in and out of her open window at night—unobserved by the concierge. Jazz was the soundtrack to these adventures. In the cavernous Club Saint-Germain, Django Reinhardt played gypsy guitar. In the vaulted cellars of Le Tabou, the haunting muse of the Existentialists, Juliette Gréco, eyes outlined in kohl, voice hushed, bewitched Jean Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, and Miles Davis. After midnight, the group that included Sam and Miloradovitch and Sy Boardman and his wife, Elaine, clambered down a rickety ladder into a club aptly named Jacob’s Ladder. Located in the cellar of an apartment building, Jacob’s Ladder was semi-illicit due to the residents sleeping upstairs. The atmosphere was a fuzzy cocoon of smoke and whispers. Instead of talking, patrons furiously sucked unfiltered Gauloises, and the entertainment was limited to gentle guitar strumming. At the end of a set, people snapped their fingers in soft appreciation. Finally, in the dusty dawn light, Sam and Miloradovitch slipped back out into the streets. Sam had countless relationships with women. Some were flirtations that never progressed to sex, others were peripheral affairs, and still others upended his life. Typically, a tangential relationship drifted apart as quickly as it had come together. Miloradovitch left at the end of August with a few of Sam’s sumi-e ink drawings as a remembrance of their time together. It’s unknown if Muriel also had affairs during her time away. But she was well aware of the sexual sampling that Sam and others in their bohemian circle participated in.8 On numerous occasions, Muriel remembered encountering Alberto Giacometti pressed up against the outside of one of





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the crumbling hotels in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a woman at his knees. And if Muriel was conflicted over Sam’s appetite for other women, she shared his reverence for artistic pursuits. She was prepared to live in poverty and supplement their income. “It was fun,” she said of their time together in the tiny room at the Hôtel de Seine. She wrote luminous descriptions of hardship, of wandering Paris’s medieval streets when the frozen Seine, still the main channel for the transportation of goods, made obtaining bags of coal all but impossible except from the black market. Attracted to Zen Buddhism, she practiced nonattachment and viewed her lover’s infidelity not as a betrayal but as an expression of his bracing zest for life. Despite Sam’s cavorting while Muriel was away, he’d diligently pursued their mutual goal: to secure more space and a livelihood through painting. By the time she returned from Austria in October, Sam and Haywood Rivers had rented a rambling house in Sèvres, a western suburb of Paris where the River Seine curves northeast. Rivers, his wife, Betty, and their infant daughter, Cézanne, occupied the second floor. Sam and Muriel had a bedroom, a bath, and a large studio on the ground floor. The house was big and had an orchard and a garden. But, built to be inhabited primarily in summer, it was dilapidated. They soon discovered that it was very damp and had no heat. When it rained, mold grew in their shoes overnight. When they ran out of coal that winter, they cut branches off the fruit trees and burned the green wood in the fireplace to keep warm, then tried to disguise the wound marks on the trees with oil paint.9 Regardless of the hardships the house presented, they loved its spaciousness. On Sunday afternoons, their friends took the nine-kilometer train ride out to Sèvres for meals. Sam concocted excellent curried rice, and there was always lots of good, crusty bread and cheap wine. “We sat around and talked as if we had the world by the balls,” Al Held said of those long afternoons. When Jean Paul Riopelle drank too much, he would lie down on the ground or floor, curl up, and fall asleep. In Sèvres, Sam’s palette expanded into saturated blues, greens, and, finally, black. After so much white light, he was exploring its opposite, the intensity of dark hues. He wrote Shirley Jaffe, who was visiting New York at the time, that Black and blue are all that one can see now. The space between is now to be filled out. As in his White paintings, these overall compositions extend beyond the edges of the canvas, implying a continuation

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of space outside the frame. Built up with many applications of thinned oil paint, colors progress from light to dark. A black webbing (Sam called it undifferentiated matter) flows over the repositories of reds, blues, greens, and yellows. The final canvases resemble curtains shot through with patches of colored light. Although they are dark paintings, they have a heated, almost molten intensity. “Black,” Sam said later, “was always the way of going backwards . . . back to the light.”10 Since his arrival in Paris, he’d spent hours viewing the great Gothic stained-glass windows in SainteChapelle, the royal chapel opposite Notre Dame, where shafts of light set afire fifteen panels of painted glass, and his paintings during this period strive for the same moody, dazzling, illuminated quality. He’d been reading William Blake, and, while Muriel was away, had traveled to London, where he viewed Blake’s paintings and prints. I most urgently feel a great shaking darkness to be brought to the light in my work, Sam wrote Mary Hutchinson when he returned. Thanks to an introduction by Georges Duthuit, he’d met and befriended Hutchinson in London. A writer, socialite, and art patron, she had once been a member of the Bloomsbury group. She’d had affairs with everyone from Vita Sackville-West to Clive Bell to Sam’s champion, Duthuit. Currently, she was involved with Samuel Beckett. She purchased one of Sam’s White paintings, and they began a correspondence. Sounding remarkably like he was creating a Blakean vision, Sam expressed to Hutchinson his desire to elicit what he called a cosmic constant feeling . . . a final shaking free from the particular—something without beginning or end but which sets up currents that are ever revitalizing our life.11 As a man fond of speculative thinking and writing, Sam now started penning aphorisms. On slips of paper and in his dream journal, he scribbled observations and aphoristic thoughts, proverbs to live by. William Blake had been a master aphorist. In his famous Proverbs of Hell, Blake collected aphoristic, enigmatic sayings that he claimed to have heard in a vision. “The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” Blake wrote, and “Eternity is in love with the productions of time.”12 The aphoristic writing Sam began in Paris was an extension of his youthful poetry and a vehicle for insight into his life and artistic process. Some of Sam’s aphorisms were witty or lustful: She bites as she kisses. Others were philosophical or shed insight into his inner world: Artists are thieves of their experience, he confessed. In





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algebraic syntax he wrote, I am a natural liar for I am an artist + naturally. In another, he explained that telling a lie is telling a truth about yourself. Like a Russian nesting doll, Sam’s writing hides riddles inside of riddles. He was an artist, which made him a natural liar, but a lie was also a way of telling a truth. Indeed, Sam’s lies often disclosed what he wanted to be true, what he hoped for, and what he most deeply desired. As a literary form, aphorisms distill, probe, and refract. Because of their concise, dynamic structure, they are often quite visual. When Sam wrote these literary fragments, he looked at them from every angle, almost like an allover painting. He turned his phrases over and spun them around. He revised, rewrote, and reversed directions. He liked wordplay, Not Knowing the not known and What’s the Matter. Words were mutable and fluid, while the image was primordial, ineffable, absolute. Years later, he explained his thinking to the French philosopher Yves Michaud: “The Bible says in the beginning was the word but for me it’s the image not the word . . . . It stands by itself. It’s unique.”13 And what was the image that came before the word? In Paris, far from home, Sam was free to conjure himself anew. He began to construct a persona, a mask that, like a riddle, hid a truth. Unlike the expat GIs who surrounded him, he had not experienced battle. As a B-26 pilot, Norman Bluhm had flown dozens of missions over Europe and North Africa before he was wounded. The war had left air force pilot Sy Boardman partially paralyzed in his left hand. Paul Jenkins had seen action in the navy. On the other hand, illness had kept Sam out of the war. He’d suffered greatly but not heroically. Even in the mid-twentieth century, to be tubercular was to be viewed as weak and potentially contagious. And Sam wanted to be seen as heroic and active, a life force. Yet something monumental had happened to him. Once airborne, then trapped by gravity, he had been recreated by some force. He needed to give form to this force, to find an image that befitted the breadth and depth of his ambition. That image was an airplane crash. An article in the San Francisco Examiner in 1946 had falsely attributed Sam’s tuberculosis to “an Army training crash.” This article might be the genesis of Sam’s airplane crash story. However, it wasn’t until after Sam was in France, far away from home and anyone who could refute him, that the crash story took flight. Once, he’d captured Vera’s attention with

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fictitious stories; now he grinned like a Cheshire cat and told Georges Duthuit’s teenage son, Claude—who was in love with all things American— that he’d been an elite pilot, forced to crash-land his plane in the Arizona desert. Elaborating and heightening the drama of events, Sam said he’d risked his life by deliberately, heroically saving his P-38 Lightning. That was how he’d ended up in the hospital. The boy’s eyes lit up. Sam’s story spread like wildfire. After that, Sam’s tuberculous infection was attributed not to feebleness but to bravery. His ordeal had led him to paint, which, in turn, had saved his life.14 In fact, by assigning art the role of resurrectionist in his reinvention story, Sam was acknowledging the element of the miraculous in his creative process. He wasn’t just talented, dynamic, and persistent. For his heroic suffering, he’d been rewarded with a gift. “I’ve been given a room to see. It’s my gift.”15 All his mythmaking inevitably became intertwined with his art. I long for the wide open space of the west, Sam wrote home, while incorporating his yearning for those spreading vistas into his paintings. The size of his canvases and the scale of his images varied. The illusion was of large forms viewed from a great distance, as one might perceive landmasses from far above the earth in an airplane. Or of motes amplified until they appear to extend into the spectator’s space, as one might view cells magnified under a microscope. Both perspectives—the immortal and the mortal— materialized in his paintings. Many years later, in 1988, when Yves Michaud asked whom he painted for, Sam replied, “Probably God . . . the artist is more or less like an eye of God—he’s not a god at all—he’s just an eye which is a very minor little part but it’s like a candle.”16 What better creation myth for the boy with such great ambition that he’d dreamed that his destiny was to spread color around the world, for the artist who wanted to paint through the eye of God, for the pilot who, like Icarus, reached for the heavens but fell to earth? Icarus, who, before fire and gravity engulfed him, had soared.

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Sam’s first solo show opened at the Galerie Nina Dausset on February 8, 1952, a few weeks ahead of Jackson Pollock’s French premiere at the Studio Paul Facchetti. The majority of Sam’s fifteen paintings were from his ethereal White series created at the Hôtel de Seine, and the critical response bordered on the euphoric. Writing in the weekly newsmagazine L’Express, Jacques Peuchmaurd hyperbolically claimed that Sam had penetrated the “realm of the unknown.” He described the porous perspective in Sam’s paintings as “a sort of thick fog, whitish or red. Jules Verne in his inter-planetary travels must have penetrated similar spaces.” The more subdued reviewer in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune wrote, “I have seen nothing that quite resembles his paintings in Paris or elsewhere.”1 In the vicinity of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, this development put Sam in a fortuitous situation with the French. As an expat living in Paris, he appealed to them. He embraced their prewar history—his dreamlike, indeterminate space evoked the poetics of Surrealism, and his lightinfused palette reminded viewers of those of Matisse, Monet, and Bonnard. At the same time, he extended his space beyond the frame, implementing the allover manner prevalent in America. “He kind of took abstract expressionism abroad as it were,” his friend Jay DeFeo said when she visited 87

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Paris and witnessed the excitement. Landing just ahead of the Abstract Expressionist invasion of Europe, DeFeo observed that Sam “hit Paris at a time when it really needed something new and he was right there to provide it for them.”2 However, his auspicious debut, before that of Jackson Pollock, forever complicated his relationship with his home country.3 In 1946, Nina Dausset, a former Russian ballet dancer, had started the small gallery on the rue de Dragon with her husband, the French immunologist Jean Dausset. Though she focused primarily on Surrealism, she’d branched out to include newer, younger artists. Riopelle’s first solo exhibition had been held at her gallery three years earlier, in 1949. Through Riopelle, Sam was introduced to Dausset and her selection process. Each month, paintings and sculptures by little-known artists were shown to a group of collectors. If enthusiasm was high, the artist might be offered a show. For Sam, it was. One of the expressions of interest came from Michel Tapié. Distantly related to the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Tapié was a polymath. He practiced woodcarving and stained glass making; played the piano, clarinet, and saxophone; wrote poetry and painted. Still, he was best known as a globe-trotting art advisor and promoter of the Art Informel movement. In 1951, seeking to gather a diverse group of artists under one rubric, Tapié advocated a style he called Informel (formless). Tapié concluded that the varying examples of postwar art (the best in his view) had similar characteristics: abstraction, improvisation, and gestural approaches. This new trend in style—what Tapié called “a kind of living matter in a permanent state of magical ferment”—spread over a diverse and dislocated geography. In this respect, Art Informel was broader than its American counterpart, Abstract Expressionism, which at that point was myopically focused on the art developed almost entirely in New York.4 Paramount to Tapié’s thinking was the primary position of the artist. “It’s no longer movements we consider interesting but—how much more rare—authentic individuals.” What these individuals had in common was their mutual engagement with creating forms “heavy with the possibility of becoming.” Riopelle’s explosive, fragmentary mosaics and Sam’s ethereal visions of celestial and infernal realms were primary examples of Tapié’s endlessly evolving spaces. It was Tapié who, along with the artist and collector Alfonso Ossario, organized the Pollock exhibition at





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Facchetti on March 7, 1952. It was also Tapié who, a month later, gathered a constellation of artists from both sides of the Atlantic, including Sam, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Dubuffet, Jackson Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, into one sweeping, international art show.5 Moreover, Tapié envisioned an art form that, in reaching beyond the picture frame, also expanded across the boundaries of statehood. In this regard, Informel was a cultural rebuttal to the Cold War and the nationalist movements sweeping across America, Europe, and Asia. Indeed, in his text for the group show, Tapié proclaimed: “Jackson Pollock avec nous! (Jackson Pollock with Us!)”6 World War II had emptied the capitals of Europe of their intelligentsia while flooding America’s shores with refugee artists, scientists, writers, composers, and professors. Many resettled in New York, where they helped fashion an environment for distinctly American art. A high art capable of matching the military, economic, and political power that the United States now wielded. The dropping of the atomic bombs in Japan had launched the United States into a position of global dominance. In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its atomic bomb, and the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China allied itself with the USSR. A year later, in 1950, President Truman ordered American troops to assist South Korea in its fight against Communist, Soviet-backed North Korea. The world was dividing itself into factions dominated by two superpowers: those who favored communism and those who supported the democracy advocated by the United States. Many feared a third world war. Some, like Tapié, held out a utopian hope that abstract art was a universal language broad enough to speak across a divided world. Unlike figurative art, which was culturally specific, abstract art was, he believed, accessible to virtually anyone who could relate to the relationship between colors and forms. While artists have always celebrated place and the sacredness of landscapes as inspirations for their visions, many became unwilling messengers of the extremist, nationalistic positions of their countries in the 1950s. As far back as 1944, Jackson Pollock had recognized the inclination to attach too much significance to national identity. “I accept the fact that the important painting of the last hundred years was done in France. . . . The idea of an isolated American painting, so popular in this country during the 1930s, seems absurd to me, just as the idea of creating

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a purely American mathematics or physics would seem absurd. . . . An American is an American, and his painting would naturally be qualified by that fact, whether he wills it or not. But the basic problems of contemporary painting are independent of one country.”7 Eventually, the Art Informel movement proved to be too broad, too unwieldy, and too imprecise to counteract this separatist crusade. The word itself (“formless”) was fuzzy and unclear. (Its other name, Un Art Autre—meaning art of another kind—was equally vague.) American-Type Painting, the term coined in 1955 by the critic Clement Greenberg for the art being produced in the United States, specifically New York, was a precise, headline-grabbing moniker. Ironically, just when America was censoring and imprisoning many of its own creators as alleged communists, the terms American-Type Painting and Abstract Expressionism became synonymous, practically interchangeable, with freedom and democracy. Making his way in Paris, attending salons and discussions, and reading the newspapers his father sent from the States, Sam became increasingly conscious of the stakes in the cultural discourse. “There was animosity toward Americans,” he told Yves Michaud. He clarified that the acrimony was waged by the critics and not by French and American painters themselves. Writing in ArtNews, his friend the art critic Pierre Schneider worried that French artists would embrace action painting “as easily as French children adopted Davy Crocket [sic] hats.” At various moments, Sam was corralled into art movements. His guide, Georges Duthuit, championed both him and Riopelle as “protagonists of a renewal of European tradition with the influx of a more ‘instinctual’ North American culture, which could result in repositioning Paris as an artist metropolis.” (Duthuit advocated American art as long as it followed the “trail blazed by Matisse.”) Tapié briefly lumped Sam and other American artists from the West Coast—Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, and Claire Falkenstein—into a group he called l’École du Pacifique (School of the Pacific). “That was bullshit,” Sam said of Tapié’s École du Pacifique. “A fake idea to try to drum up some interest and money from collectors.” Finally, Tapié included Sam under his Informel umbrella, which was so vast that, along with Sam and Riopelle, it included the French painter and sculptor Jean Dubuffet, whose work is tactile and primitive. Indeed, Dubuffet balked at what he called the “nebulous soup” of Informel and coined his own term, Art brut, for works he





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described as “created in solitude from the pure, authentic creative impulse.” By 1954, Sam had concluded that labels and movements made “abstractions out of particulars in order to separate out common traits.” He believed that discussions of schools of art were arbitrary. Rather, “the most important thing was the individual.”8 Though the pieces from his solo show at Galerie Nina Dausset didn’t sell at the Facchetti group exhibition curated by Tapié, Yvonne Hagen, the art critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune, purchased Sam’s Green (1953). She later described spotting the painting and being pulled into the canvas like Alice pulled into the looking glass. It so captivated her that she sold a Renoir pencil sketch to afford it. She hung Green above her bed, because, she explained, it reminded her of a forest. Through Duthuit, the estranged wife of Henri Matisse, Amélie Matisse, also bought one of Sam’s canvases, a huge, dark black work. These sales, along with the earlier purchase by Mary Hutchinson, hovered around $200 each. To Sam, they were manna, worth more than two months of GI benefits. It looks now like I could make my way here in Paris if I were willing to stay— as with 2 galleries behind me I could probably sell enough to squeeze by financially as well as become one of the “boys” so to speak. The “boys” were the tribe of American Abstract Expressionists.9 While Sam was anxious to get to New York and make a name for himself there, he also realized that he needed to secure his position in Europe. He recognized that the critical response he was receiving and the relationships he was building were vital to his success. When he sensed a lack of enthusiasm from visiting New York dealer Betty Parsons, he responded with indignation. Sam wrote Shirley Jaffe that he thought Parsons a fool. All she could say was ‘ah yes, very beautiful but you must have been looking at Rothko and my dear Clyfford Still paints much bigger paintings.’ A dismissal or a withering comparison made him doubt his work briefly and feel frustrated on all sides by the crazy people who hold sway. Yet in the span of the same letter, Sam moved swiftly from despair to elation. I can from time to time find I have painted something that blooms and seems to indicate that here or anywhere is profound joy. It was the work itself, and not the world of publicity and marketing, that mattered.10 Betty Parsons did not immediately promise Sam a New York show. However, she took several paintings on consignment. Then, James

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Johnson Sweeney, the director of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, arrived during the summer of 1952 to visit his studio. Sweeney, shocked by Sam’s big, black, monochromatic canvases, called them “unforgettable” and told Sam he’d consider putting a few paintings in a group show the following year. The prestigious Pierre Loeb Gallery in Paris, where Picasso, Giacometti, and Miró showed, took two paintings on consignment, though M. Loeb felt that Sam was too young and risky a proposition to warrant a whole exhibition. And the Russian prince Igor Troubetzkoy, an exhusband of Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton, bought five paintings to add to his collection of Matisses and Picassos.11 To a man as innately expansive as Sam, a career that spanned the Atlantic Ocean did not seem impossible. As he told his father, he felt messianic! The fact that my paintings are being noticed and sent out into the world— well that is where they belong. However, as his canvases were becoming larger and larger, he complained that they need more space to breathe. He had been reading Sir James Jeans’s theory of steady-state cosmology. Jeans posited a universe with no beginning and no end in which new matter was continuously created. Such a universe was both infinite and constant. Sam told his father that Jeans’s ideas had already begun to influence his paintings. He was striving to depict a whole incomplete world—in which space and light move to create the complements to the individual and his world of space and light. Such painting would immerse the viewer in an expanded field, and, Sam declared, the whole thing to make one aware of things behind and beyond paintings and to make one feel more alive and more conscious of himself.12 Even with cosmological ideas, bold ambitions, hints of success, and a bit of financial breathing room, there was still the reality of the Paris housing crisis to negotiate. Sam’s overriding concern was securing an ample space in which to paint. After a two-week vacation in Ibiza in 1952, Sam and Muriel had returned to discover their dilapidated paradise in Sèvres rented out from under them and a GI and his family sleeping in their beds. Sam found a small space above a sawmill, full of light but plagued by dust drifting through the air, making it nearly impossible to paint. Eventually, he rented a studio in the Montparnasse section of Paris. However, the studio had no running water. He was forced to climb up and down the stairs, continually hauling buckets.





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While he bounced around, Muriel was offered a more secure job at the renowned print studio Atelier 17. Although it was located on the other side of Paris, she seized the opportunity. Sam wrote home that her long hours necessitated her finding a room closer to her work. More likely, it was not the commute so much as Sam’s constant sleeping around that triggered her move. In October 1952, his divorce from Vera was granted, and Muriel anticipated a more settled situation. By this time, she was cognizant that pulling away from Sam provoked his desire for her; separation elicited a sense of loss and longing. Possibly she was wondering if Sam’s world of space and light and acclaim included her. Whatever her reason for retreat, she remained Sam’s ardent supporter, believing his work to be “earthquakingly beautiful.” Living apart, they continued to see one another on weekends, and Muriel wrote him letters full of passionate observations. On a visit to the country, she described “Purple trees, bright, bright yellow trees, red trees, huge rolling motions of green hills, a complete bowl of great sky always.” She referred to him as a “beautiful voyager.” She asked, “You with your wonderful, efficacious (is that right? To mean like fire from the fingertips spreading, spreading?), terrible, creative kind of vitality, how is yourself, your you, and how are all things you move in the midst of? Are you Being Well Taken Care Of? I’ll bet Well.”13 Sam was not being well taken care of. Without Muriel beside him, his health deteriorated. She was his ballast. A soothing contrast to his dynamic nature. Her absence sent him into depression to the point of nervous collapse. Thinking he was suffering from a recurrence of tuberculosis, he saw a doctor, who diagnosed exhaustion and recommended sunshine and rest. I have been very upset at our separation, he confessed in a letter home. And it explains some of the nervous symptoms I developed this winter of illness. He was determined to win back Muriel’s heart and persuade her to share our complete lives together. In January 1953, they traveled to London for the opening of Opposing Forces, a group exhibition organized by Peter Watson and Michel Tapié at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The show included works by Sam, Riopelle, and Pollock. The trip, Sam wrote his parents, was well timed and helped rest us both. Muriel faked illness from her job. Instead of traveling cheaply by boat, they spent all their money on airfare and stayed in a luxurious you might say room at The Marble Arch near Hyde Park.14

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At the opening, everyone was shocked to discover that next to Sam’s and Riopelle’s paintings hung a large Jackson Pollock, the canvas still partially rolled up. The ICA had little experience displaying big American art. When they received the Pollock (Number 31, 1950), they discovered it was too large for the wall. Wanting to include it, they compromised the work. Much to the public’s delight, it was displayed in this limited, rolled presentation. No matter if it fit or not, it was a Pollock. He was “avec nous!” A few months after their return from England, in the spring of 1953, Sam and Muriel finally secured an apartment together at 53–55, rue Tiphaine in the 15th Arrondissement. To celebrate their reunion, he reserved a private room at the fabled restaurant Lapérouse. Lapérouse had been the illicit meeting place of kings, businessmen, courtesans, and coquettes, who, since the reign of Louis XIV, had met there to feast on lobster, champagne, and each other. Located in a grand Parisian townhouse on the Left Bank, it was rumored to possess a hidden staircase and an underground passageway leading directly to the French parliament. In 1953, when Muriel and Sam dined there, the waiters still coughed discreetly before entering the private dining chambers. Sam nestled Muriel down onto a red velvet couch, enveloping her in his arms and the plush upholstery. Above their heads, the gilded ceiling glinted in the candlelight. Mirrors and frescoes covered the walls. Each mirror bore scratch marks made by courtesans, who, when presented with a diamond, tried to scar the glass, checking to see if it was the real thing or if it was paste. When he proposed, Sam gave Muriel not a diamond but an haute couture wedding dress, which he pulled from a giant box and unfurled. He promised they would be artists together; they would find a studio and home big enough for both of them to paint in. It would have light and running water and a stove. They would summer in the sunshine of Aix-enProvence, travel to Italy, finish things off gracefully in Europe, and return home to the United States. Perhaps they would have a family; Muriel loved children. His relationship with Muriel secured, color irrupted on Sam’s canvases. That summer, as he’d pledged, they traveled to Aix-en-Provence to visit the Duthuits and Madame Matisse. There, Sam painted in the garden, a bee, dipping myself in color. Working on Large Yellow (1952–53), a bril-





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liant, buttery painting reminiscent of Bonnard’s Large Yellow Nude (1931), Sam described feeling as if he were staring into the sun. After a few weeks, I could barely see. I was blinded by it.15 He called these next canvases, measuring six feet wide and ten feet high, my monsters. While he’d arrived at the white and black paintings by building up colors, his monsters were monochromatic to the point of saturation. They flooded the vision with almost violent intensity, drenching the viewer in pigment. “Color,” Sam liked to say, “was the receptacle of a feeling.”16 Created near the Matisse summer home, these color-soaked monsters pay homage to the continuous spatial fields envisioned by both Monet and Matisse. Sam had promised Muriel a summer of quiet and reconnection to celebrate their engagement, but, as she knew by now, his spirit was expansive and all-inclusive. He invited their mutual friend Rachel Jacobs to join them at the Duthuits’. According to Yves Michaud, Sam credited his conversations with Jacobs as “being extremely influential” to his thinking and his work.17 At this crucial junction in his development, it was his discussions with Jacobs that finally synthesized and solidified the philosophical underpinnings of his artistic vision. Jacobs was a brilliant American expat, a writer, and a student of philosophy at the Sorbonne and a great admirer of Sam’s work. While Muriel sat with the Duthuits in Aix-en-Provence, Sam and Jacobs paced back and forth on the patio. Jacobs’s current philosophical passion was the ideas and writings of Henri Bergson, and she poured them into Sam’s ready ear. An early twentieth-century French philosopher, Bergson theorized about time and free will and what he termed “creative evolution.” His thinking helped shape that of many of the great minds of his day, including those of Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. (Bergson was married to Proust’s second cousin, Louise Neuberger.) Partially in response to Einstein’s theory of relativity, Bergson proposed that human time is subjective and interior, therefore different from clock time, separate from space, and in need of its own form of comprehension. Time, for Bergson, cannot be reduced to measurement. Time is not a line or a chain or even a succession. Instead, each moment flows into the next and is consequently mobile, incomplete, and unmeasurable. Not only are the past, present, and future constantly intermingling, but so too are actions, perceptions,

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and memories. “Duration is the continuous progress of the past,” Bergson writes, articulating his theory of la durée (duration), “which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances.”18 “For Bergson,” William Agee writes, “intuitive experience was the only source for the knowledge of reality, and art was the direct revelation of such experience. . . . In time, duration means invention, the creation of new forms, the elaboration of the new.” Agee astutely points out that Sam’s reliance on the concept of duration sets his approach apart from “the perceived Abstract Expressionist emphasis on the alienated individual, standing alone in a hostile world and acting out momentary impulses in the arena of the canvas.”19 In contrast, each of Sam’s canvases was part of a totality of germinating cellular forms and intensifying colors. Each encompassed what preceded it while also building and spreading into future paintings. In this regard, Bergson’s imaginative, intuitive time corresponded to the aspiration Sam had described to his father when he wrote that he wanted to create a whole incomplete world—that is, a world (matter or painting) that oscillated between wholeness and incompleteness because it was constantly evolving. Two years later, in an essay accompanying his second solo exhibition, Jacobs would describe the monsters he’d been painting in Aix-en-Provence as “continuums of space.”20 Afterward, Sam would state, obliquely, I paint time. He meant not space-time, not fixed and measurable time or moments, but something closer to the idea of duration—a continuous succession of waves. Space needs duration. Duration needs space. Sam jotted the aphorism in his journal, using Bergson’s term. To capture on canvas the current of time was also to imagine Tapié’s expansive vision: a boundary-free space, a world without geographic or cultural borders. After a few weeks in Aix-en-Provence, Sam and Muriel headed off alone to Italy for a prenuptial honeymoon. On the motorcycle he’d purchased with Riopelle, Sam, shirtless, wore just a back brace for stability. Muriel sat behind him, her dark hair tied back in a scarf. They were once again two adventurers setting off to explore the unknown.21 They stopped at Pisa, then continued on to Florence, where they spent ten days at a friend’s fifteenth-century villa. To every place they visited, Sam assigned colors. Ravenna, with its Byzantine, mosaic-encrusted church, was pure sapphire in color, rather bright sapphire blue with reddish earth





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and green fields. Venice, shimmering in its lagoon, was thunderous, ringing with gold and darkness and again light, dreamy, grey pearly. They stayed in Venice for a week, drinking vermouth with Peggy Guggenheim and her guest Tennessee Williams in her stone-columned temple. On the way home to Paris, they chugged on their little Peugeot along narrow roads and up steep Alpine peaks. One day it rained so hard they tied plastic garbage bags around their bodies for protection. But when they got to the top of the pass, the storm cleared. Birdsong filled the sweet air. Sam cut the engine as he had once done in an air force prop plane, letting the wind and momentum transport them. Down they coasted together into a green valley, laughing and embracing the vital forces beyond their control.

9

A Homecoming of Joy and Anguish

Tiphaine was an actual atelier, a professional space opening onto a courtyard full of bustling shops. The room had a high ceiling, a wall of large windows, a private toilet, and a minuscule kitchen. A small, coal-burning heating stove sat in the corner. After years of struggling to paint in tiny rooms, Sam had a real studio, only a block away from his shared apartment with Muriel. At 14, rue Tiphaine, he’d finally found space that could accommodate his vision of creating large canvases. He pushed his wrought-iron bed up against the wall and began the mural that would eventually be titled In Lovely Blueness (1955–57). Begun in 1955, it would take him two years to complete. He sized the linen first, applying rabbit-hide glue to tighten the ten-by-twenty-three-foot stretch of canvas. Then he began layering on white gesso tinted with red so that the surface would retain a pinkish warmth. Preparing a canvas could take days or weeks to get just right. During that time, he wrestled with his desire to immerse himself in color, to bathe in it as he had in his hospital bed, and his fear of approaching the white void. Gessoing was his first step into this arena. It laid the groundwork not just for the painting but for Sam himself. By now, Sam knew the grammar of white, its serenity but also the fear that it engendered. How to hint at infinity without letting the painting 98





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descend into an impossible void: that was the predicament he faced. White was the color that looked like nothing but was everything. It contained all colors of the spectrum, all positives and all negatives, within it. Sam referred to the surface of his early White series as “beautiful white dirt.” This time, he was working toward an entirely different dimension of white. He didn’t want it to whisper of liminal space: he wanted it to shatter color, to suggest the approach and the conquest of what he called “white’s ringing silence.”1 Blue came next. A bold, keyed-up sapphire speckled with dabs of golden yellow like he’d seen two years before in Ravenna. Standing beside Muriel, he had lifted his eyes and gazed upon the vaulted ceiling of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia. It had stayed with him, that feeling of hurtling upward while the arc of the sky was brought down to earth. Flying had felt like that too—lifting off into the black night with only the headlights of his biplane and the stars for light. Until Ravenna, Sam hadn’t comprehended the possibility of capturing that feeling on canvas. He stepped back, holding his brush cocked at an angle in his right hand, and watched as the liquid blue spread across the canvas. His body was as still and concentrated as it had been when he was a boy fishing beside his father on the shores of Green Lake, scanning the water for the first ripple of a trout’s bite. Muriel called this stance of Sam’s a form of meditative thinking. Patient and exacting, halted midmotion in a dance with the elements. Where along the surface of this painting was the tension, the pop and crack of life? When the moment finally came for him to act, Muriel said she could see the energy coursing straight out of him and onto the painting. Sometimes Muriel worked beside Sam on her black-and-white brushed ink drawings. But in March 1955, while Sam painted feverishly in Paris, preparing his upcoming show, Muriel, his new bride and second wife, was stuck in California, sketching and writing poems in a shed in her sister’s yard. He missed her round face, her dark, doe-eyed gaze following him around the room as he worked. He missed lying in bed beside her, both of them with wool socks pulled on for warmth, reading Rilke aloud. With this painting—its vast and enveloping blueness—he felt he was on the cusp of creating a pictorial space so immense that it might evoke both fear and pleasure, what Rilke had called “a beauty that marked the beginning of

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terror.”2 Muriel, his poet, would appreciate this idea, his venture into sublime territory. But Muriel was trapped on the other side of the world, having stayed behind to take care of family affairs after their recent US visit. Inside the stone walls of his studio, Sam put his brush down and, in a sloping scrawl, dashed off an aerogram to his father. He was worried about Muriel’s infrequent and unhappy letters. He needed to drum up funds for her transatlantic crossing. Consequently, as Sam wrote, Muriel must wait until I can raise some dollars here—might take a month before I can get the money for a boat ticket for her. The weather was still freezing in Paris. At least Muriel was warm in Southern California. How he longed for central heating! France and my way of living seems here (after America) real poverty. •

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Three months earlier, in November 1954, Sam, followed two months later by Muriel, had traveled by ocean liner to visit America after almost five years abroad. To his father, Sam expressed mixed feelings of joy and anguish on homecoming. Though excited, he was also riddled with trepidation. Sam wrote of his desire to provide more stability for Muriel. Gentle Muriel, with her poetic turns of phrase, could fall into deep wells of sadness, and Sam, the nexus of so much sorrow early in his life, felt responsible. I have certainly led her a hard life till now—that is changing and I will protect her with care and love . . . my love for her is full, tender and ripe. His version of protection would prove not to include curbing his wanderlust, either for other places or for other women. Romance for Sam meant doorways that could just as often lead to a new land as to a new person. Muriel knew this. Sam had been married to Vera when they’d met, and Sam and Muriel had agreed that, as artists, they wanted to avoid the claustrophobia of a traditional union. They wanted a marriage that would embrace their unconventional lives.3 On January 29, 1955, three days after Muriel joined him in California, they wed at the Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes with only their friends Bud and Ruth Harris present as witnesses. The site, a Swedenborgian church designed by Lloyd Wright (son of Frank), conformed to their utopian view of marriage. Constructed of glass with live redwood trees as support posts, it was a canopy of light-filled air on a cliff





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overlooking the Pacific. After the ceremony, they drove up the coast and stayed for two weeks with Sam’s father and stepmother in Northern California. Just as they were due to fly to New York to complete Sam’s negotiations for a show there the following year, Muriel’s father took ill. She stayed behind to care for him and remained after his rapid death from pneumonia to help settle affairs. Sam traveled to New York without her. Fueled by postwar prosperity, New York had boomed in the years since Sam’s brief visit in 1950. The city was home to the largest port, served as the financial capital of the world, and had won the race to headquarter the United Nations thanks to the influence of money and power and the donation of eighteen acres along the East River by John D. Rockefeller Jr. As the economy grew, businesses and the building industries expanded. Now New York was the largest city in a country that soaked up half the world’s oil and steel and three-fourths of its cars and appliances. By the mid-1950s, New York was on the cusp of overtaking Paris as the world’s cultural capital. This was the moment when, in Serge Guilbaut’s famous phrase, “New York stole the idea of modern art.” Guilbaut goes on to state that the “French capital was not strong enough, either economically or politically, to protest.”4 Perhaps New York didn’t steal the idea so much as proclaim, in the words of Irving Sandler, “the triumph of American painting.”5 Impoverished bohemian artists like Pollock, de Kooning, and Rothko had finally become successful. And though they disavowed the notion that they were part of a movement, particularly a movement that sought to link their artwork to the rampant nationalist politics of the Cold War era, they were also excited to rival their Parisian counterparts.6 Any new movement is solidified to some degree by rejecting old styles. In 1953, two years before Sam’s visit to New York, Clement Greenberg, the most influential American art critic at the time, wrote in Art Digest, “Do I mean the new American abstract painting is superior on the whole to French? I do.”7 To be new was to create an unpolished art whose raw energy rebelled against tradition. It was a time when audacious acts were praised and a time when the public was increasingly entranced with the personalities who performed them. One evening, at Franz Kline’s studio—a small space that was, according to a story de Kooning told, packed with people drinking— “Pollock looked at this guy and said, ‘You need a little more air,’ and he

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punched a window out with his fist. At the moment it was so delicious—so belligerent.” De Kooning applauded Pollock’s action: “Like children we broke all the windows. To do things like that. Terrific.” Even though Pollock was an explosive drunk, a man extremely uncomfortable with his growing celebrity, de Kooning recognized that his drip paintings “broke the ice for the rest of us.” Subversive acts such as Pollock’s were celebrated as declarations of independence. Just as Sam arrived in New York, word circulated that Rothko had refused to participate in the show New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Rothko’s rebuff of a museum that had previously excluded his work was viewed by many as a bold statement. It was bold, especially for an artist who had just begun to sell his work. Yet he was also a temperamental man who was often reluctant to participate in group exhibitions. He worried that the presence of other paintings could detract from his own. Rothko believed his paintings were more than material objects: they were spiritual emanations. To be fully appreciated, they demanded to be hung alone. Even though Pollock’s and Rothko’s acts were individual and distinct, the larger New York art world saw such behavior as a virtuous demonstration of their fierce convictions about the avant-garde.8 In the winter of 1955, Sam found himself unexpectedly landing in the middle of this battle between Paris and New York for primacy in the art world. He’d bypassed New York and gained recognition abroad first. Though until recently he’d been poor in Paris, New York hadn’t witnessed his poverty or his artistic development. At age thirty-two, he was no longer a neophyte. No one could decide if Sam was now a French or an American painter. If he was American, was his style East or West Coast? His scale was large, on par with Pollock’s, but his surfaces had a European delicacy, not exactly polished in the Greenbergian sense but certainly not raw either. In describing Sam’s style, his old painting buddy from Paris, Al Held, said, “He had a fantastic rare hand . . . Matisse tried to have it by using turpentine, Sam had that hand. A fantastic light touch that one hadn’t seen before.”9 Unfortunately, to Americans, Sam’s “hand” was reminiscent of that of Matisse, a French artist. In Paris, Sam had found a community, sitting at the tables of Les Deux Magots along the boulevard Saint-Germain and debating philosophy. In New York, the place to be was the dusty, dank Cedar Tavern in Greenwich





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Village, where there was booze, jostling, and brawls in dark wooden booths. Sam, continuously battling his fragile health, was not a big drinker, certainly not a brawler. Though he loved the excitement of Manhattan— the bustling, continuous swirl of energy—he found its crush of buildings oppressive. The mood of the city was too Dostoevskian. Sam was not the only American artist out of sync with the prevailing New York style. By the mid-1950s, many of the expats who’d gone to Paris on the GI Bill returned to the United States, bringing the lessons of European painting. Their view of America—its bigness and excess—was influenced by the scarcity they’d witnessed abroad. Of his return to New York in 1954, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, Ellsworth Kelly said that he felt “already through with gesture. I wanted something more subdued, less conscious.” Al Held, now living in downtown Manhattan, also expressed his dissatisfaction with the poured abstractions and overall painting of Pollock, telling the art critic Irving Sandler that Pollock’s canvases were “too undefined.” As a result, Held began to produce more concise, quasi-geometric forms in paintings that would come to be labeled Hard-Edge Abstraction.10 In all events, it was a difficult trip for Sam. Things here are a mess, he wrote Muriel. First, the paintings Al Held had stored for him in his studio were destroyed when a wax-and-paint concoction Held brewed on his stove burst into flames. Sam was forced to ship fifteen new works to New York. That cost money. Then the art dealer Charles Egan had not offered favorable terms on his contract. Like most artists, Sam had a love-hate relationship with the business side of art. He loved the interest and support but hated the bickering over prices, the negotiations about commissions, and especially the drawn-out theater of getting paid. Dealers and collectors often delayed sending funds; Sam griped that by the time he was paid, he could afford only to pay the debts he’d accrued while waiting. The dealer and collectors like to keep it this way as then they have a lever to use on the artist to get the paintings cheaper. Sam did not want anyone to have a lever on him, not a wife, not a dealer. Grasping the circuitous financial ways of the art world, he sensed that Egan, a charming hustler, was not a good businessman. De Kooning, whom Sam met during this trip and who’d suffered from Egan’s slippery dealings, may have warned him away. Additionally, Sam was selling in Europe, and Martha Jackson was

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wooing him to show in her soon-to-open New York space. “I’ve found a brand new gallery big enough to hold anything you can paint,” she wrote him. Jackson’s note gave Sam the confidence to walk away from Egan’s bad deal. But Jackson’s offer was still precarious.11 Martha Jackson was a relatively recent arrival to the New York art scene. Aspiring to be a painter, she’d moved from Buffalo in 1949 and parlayed an inheritance from her mother into a gallery in a brownstone that she purchased on East Sixty-Sixth Street. Having started as an artist, she approached the gallery/artist relationship in a manner intended to be mutually beneficial. Jackson combined the sale-on-consignment practice of her American competitors, in which artists received payment only after sales were made, with the French practice of supporting artists by paying them a yearly stipend. In exchange, she had the right to purchase work at 50 percent of its retail value. One of the first postwar American dealers to travel to Europe and seek out new artists, she’d been introduced to Sam’s work by Michel Tapié. Like Sam and Tapié, Jackson wanted to bridge the Atlantic. Still, Sam had reservations about showing with Jackson. She was unproven, and, at the point he met with her in New York, between spaces. Preparing to return to Europe at the end of February, Sam felt disheartened. He was filled with doubt about his prospects in New York but also unsettled about continuing in Paris, a city he felt he was beginning to outgrow. Weighing on him too was the problem of finding enough money to bring Muriel home to Paris. His painting career now hinged on the outcome of what would be his second solo exhibition in Paris. This exhibition was due to open in April at Galerie Rive droite, the prestigious modernist gallery in the aristocratic neighborhood off the Champs-Élysées. The industrious Tapié would curate it. Sam was under intense pressure. He needed to exceed his first show, to generate enough money to help Muriel, and to win over New York. He knew that influential art world figures, tastemakers, were now watching the evolution of his work. Both James Johnson Sweeney, from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Alfred Barr, from the Museum of Modern Art, had expressed interest in purchasing paintings for their collections. This was neither a sure thing nor an immediate event. Sam was well aware that such an acquisition could take years.





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However, on his return journey, his mood lifted. Instead of taking the boat, he made his first transatlantic flight. There, below him, stretched the vastness of the sea: a magnificent expanse of spreading blue glimpsed through drifting clouds and tethered by landmass. The breadth and size of the Atlantic dazzled the former air corps pilot. As far back as 1952, Sam had been struggling to capture on canvas this ever-expanding aerial vision, the same destabilized viewpoint that he’d encountered behind the controls of a plane. He had written his father, trying to express the kind of painting he longed to create, a canvas he described as demanding contemplation while also allowing freedom. A kind of universe or world, that seems to have formed by its own laws—not touched by human hands, yet there for the human eye—not the gods eye—for in a way it is the eye of the gods. A kind of window to look out of—not into.12 •



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In Lovely Blueness, the long, horizontal painting that Sam began after his return to Paris, was partially inspired by this airplane trip. “My pictures are nothing other than the aggregate of everything I’ve done thus far in my life,” he told the critic Yoshiaki Tōno in 1984. Done in oil, the painting is a matrix of spreading blue lozenges bounded by yellow and red. It evokes standing at the brink of a boundless space filled with color. For Sam, color activated space, and without it, space is separated from us by a chasm unbearable to us. Sam would create a second version of the painting, slightly smaller and titled In Lovely Blueness No. 2 (1955–56).13 William Agee points out that one of Sam’s inspirations for In Lovely Blueness was surely Monet’s Nymphéas (1914–27), the season cycle of Water Lilies he’d viewed with Al Held in 1953 at L’Orangerie in Paris. These were eight panels where, in the final epic work of his life, the master of Impressionism depicted sky (heaven) and garden (earth) merging into abstractions on the reflective surface of the water. “Big field paintings,” Held remembered, “immersions in seas of color that enveloped us.”14 Like Nymphéas, In Lovely Blueness envelops the viewer in an eternal space. By applying yellow and red in the perimeters of the painting, Sam created an architectural quality reminiscent of the vaulted ceilings of cathedrals or

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basilicas. In this way, he used color to both enclose and elate the spectator, to bridge the divide between the human and the divine. Sam was almost certainly inspired by another painting, one he’d viewed during his recent New York trip: Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night (1889), which hung on the first floor of MoMA. Sam frequently visited the museum because one of his favorite paintings, Kazimir Malevich’s White on White, hung upstairs. Additionally, aware that Alfred Barr was pressuring the board to purchase one of his paintings, Sam probably relished wandering through the halls of this great museum envisioning his work hanging with those of Malevich, Van Gogh, Picasso. Of The Starry Night, with its turbulent sky and distant church spire, Van Gogh wrote, “I paint infinity, a plain background of the richest, intensest blue that I can contrive.”15 While Sam’s and Van Gogh’s blues differ in their tonalities—Van Gogh’s blues darkening as he neared the end of his life, Sam’s brightening as he reached the apex of his early career—they share a charged emotional texture. A great wind, a gust of heaven, barrels through both these paintings. With In Lovely Blueness, for the first time and perhaps to differentiate himself from the New York School painters, Sam actively embraced a poetic title. Up until that point and much like Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, and Barnett Newman, he’d titled most his works using minimal descriptions: Grey or Large Yellow or Composition in Blue and Black. This was in keeping with the trend of American abstract artists. They opposed titles that hinted at representation or figuration. The prevailing feeling was that if viewers needed a clue as to what the painting meant, they obviously didn’t get it. Now Sam appeared ready to declare himself neither fish nor fowl, or maybe a combination. Embraced by Europe as the American who brought Abstract Expressionism abroad, he acknowledged his debt to European traditions. And so In Lovely Blueness reveres both the new and the old. A decidedly abstract work that celebrates the boundless quality of American art in the mid-1950s, Sam’s painting has a title that refers to the second line of a poem by the great German Romantic Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): Like the stamen inside a flower The steeple stands in lovely blue And the day unfolds around its needle . . . 16





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The poem is a sustained meditation on finding a possibility, in the modern age, for a poetic dialogue between the temporal and the eternal. Throughout the poem, Hölderlin asks if man can be measured against the divine: “Is there a measure on earth?” At their most abstract, both the poem and Sam’s painting address confronting the space and distance— taking its measure—between man and god, earth and heaven. Sam wanted to breach, through artistic means and with color, this unbearable chasm. In Lovely Blueness and the paintings that followed are striking in their ability to tackle the immensity of space, not as a window, but as subject and object itself: to grasp the sky and bring it down to earth, or close to earth, and in a great enough scope so that the viewer can inhabit the exultant feeling of immeasurable blueness. The art historian Pierre Schneider, who wrote so magnificently on Matisse, understood that Sam was “One of the first American artists to recognize in the outsized imprint, however approximate, of space and little by little make it the subject matter of his work.”17 The sky is the territory of heaven, the realm of infinity, eternity, the cosmos, the eye of the gods. To venture to portray it was a spiritual endeavor. According to Schneider, art in the mid-1950s was at a turning point: “Clamoring for an artist to be violently enough attracted by the void to push painting into it: but this artist, however great his desire and will, could not have crossed the threshold had it not been for the predisposition, that lessened resistance bordering on inducement, in painting itself.” Sam was both attracted to the void (“I think I die anew every time I paint a picture”) and induced by the turning point in the evolution of painting. So was Rothko, who called painting “an adventure into an unknown world.” But where Rothko’s tablets of somber color strived to wall in his viewers, to surround and entomb them, Sam’s paintings, grounded in the natural world and punctuated by white, sought glorious release.18 During this period, as he was preparing for his show and awaiting Muriel’s return from California, Sam’s old friend, the painter Shirley Jaffe, introduced him to the newest expat in Paris, Joan Mitchell. At thirty, Mitchell had a slim, athletic build; a sardonic half-smile; and a raunchy, cussing mouth. She was beginning to find her style: sensuous compositions of clustered energy, lakes of scratchy color (“colored chaos,” she called them) in smudgy, pale fields. According to Mitchell’s account of her meeting with Sam, he immediately swept her through the maze of Paris streets on his

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puttering Peugeot motorbike, then back to his studio on rue Tiphaine, and into his cast iron bed. It was a dalliance that did not last long. Mitchell bluntly told mutual friends that she found Sam deficient as a lover. For his part, Sam did not discuss the affair. Muriel was on her way back to Paris, and it must have been obvious to Sam that Mitchell was too forceful and competitive for his disposition. He favored more pliable women.19 Instead of lovers, Sam and Mitchell became close friends, “fellow conspirators” in the words of their mutual friend Paul Jenkins. When they met up, they’d immediately start gossiping about who in their circle was “making it” with whom, as if sex were an act of construction. In her brusque, inimitable fashion, Mitchell admitted to developing a taste for Sam’s paintings, though it took her a while, “like acquiring a taste for olives or beer.”20 Yet their canvases were in dialogue: they were both lightstruck artists, reaching toward luminous color while referencing nature. Ultimately, Sam and Mitchell became the two major artists with strong roots in American avant-garde painting to successfully cross into the French art market. Soon enough, Mitchell paired up with Sam’s friend and the co-owner of the Peugeot, the Canadian painter Jean Paul Riopelle, with whom she had a tumultuous affair that lasted twenty-four years until Riopelle ran off with her protégée. Sam’s womanizing was no secret. However, the timing, so soon after his wedding, begs the question of whether Sam’s fling with Mitchell was another way of expressing that, like the canvases he was now creating, he was not going to be compartmentalized. Perhaps he was also unleashing some pentup preshow jitters. His uncertain future and the pressure he felt to produce had intensified his work. Shirley Jaffe remembered visiting Sam’s studio just before his show opened at Galerie Rive Droite and seeing “paintings full of dreams and energy.” And Sam wrote his father, saying Have done some of the best work ever since coming back—have been possessed!21 Of Sam’s possession by the energy to paint, Muriel was almost worshipful. In her letters to him from the United States, she referred to him as her “beautiful wanderer” and “vital horizon.” This accommodating aspect of her nature, separating from Sam when he needed to explore, returning when he beckoned, allowed his fiery nature to run its course. On April 22, 1955, his show opened at Galerie Rive Droite. The Rive droite, as it came to be called, was known as an institution that heralded





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the arrival of art superstars. Painters like Francis Bacon and Jasper Johns showed there, as did the kinetic artist Jean Tinguely and later the performance artist Yves Klein. Almost immediately, four of Sam’s paintings sold. After nearly six months of separation, Sam was able to pay for Muriel’s crossing with an advance from the gallery. She arrived by ocean liner at the end of May, wearing a pair of knickers. Her dark hair was cropped and slicked back. Except for her red lipstick, she looked like a pirate ready to liberate Sam from whatever dalliance he’d indulged in while she was away. Sam immediately took her to see his show. In two large rooms, fourteen paintings were on display: curtains of saturated colors that stunned Muriel. She said later that, though she’d known Sam was a very good painter, she now began to think he might be a great one. “He jumped off into nowhere, with no maps.”22 Big Orange (1954–55), a towering ten-foot painting of undulating Creamsicle orange and white, edged in black at the bottom, was purchased by Franz Meyer Sr., a lawyer, a collector of Cubist art, and the president of the Zurich Art Society. Meyer came from a wealthy Swiss family with tobacco plantations in the Dutch East Indies. His parents had collected Cézannes, Mondrians, and Van Goghs (including the famous Five Sunflowers in a Vase and Cypress Trees), which hung on walls of his neoGothic villa in the Alps. Meyer added Picassos, Braques, and now the new American masters to this collection. His son, also named Franz Meyer, was an art historian who lived in Paris and was married to Ida Chagall (the daughter of Marc). Both Meyers would become lifetime friends of Sam’s. As his patron, Franz Meyer Sr. not only facilitated introductions to museums throughout Europe but also promised Sam sponsorship. Meyer Sr. told him that as long as he was alive, Sam did not need a dealer. He would purchase his output. Having heard about the Rive Droite show, Dorothy Miller, a curator from the Museum of Modern Art and the champion and den mother of modernist artists, visited Sam at his studio on the rue Tiphaine. Miller was in the habit of making the art rounds. She was in Paris for the opening of 50 Years of American Art, a show promoting the new American art and design. Her validation resulted in the purchase of Black in Red (1953), one of Sam’s “satanic,” nearly black canvases, for MoMA. It was the first Sam Francis painting to enter a public collection. Now familiar with Sam’s

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work, Miller selected seven large canvases for MoMA’s 12 Americans the following spring. The American shows were major exhibitions of new talent organized by Miller every few years from the 1940s through the 1960s. The previous show had introduced Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still to the general art-viewing public. During Sam’s year, Franz Kline, Philip Guston, and Larry Rivers were included. At last, Sam would be represented by an American institution, his work embraced alongside that of his countrymen. Also visiting Paris to view the exhibition was Arnold Rüdlinger. Rüdlinger was the young, new director of the Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland’s oldest cultural center devoted to contemporary art. A passionate and theatrical man, he was deeply intrigued by what was happening in American art. When Rüdlinger saw Deep Orange and Black (1953–55), he jubilantly told Sam, “If you are crazy enough to paint a picture so large nobody could hang it, then I am crazy enough to buy it.”23 It was not just large, it was explosive, detonating like dynamite, a tornado of biomorphic black shards twisting over a molten red-orange field. Deep Orange and Black was the first contemporary American painting purchased by a major European museum. At a million francs for the painting (roughly $3,000), Rüdlinger’s acquisition, along with MoMA’s, put Sam on the map. Reviewing the exhibition for ArtNews, Pierre Schneider called it “the most stimulating show in Paris this spring.” In December, a spread in Life magazine described Sam Francis as one of the “most talked-about painters in the world.” The following month, January 1956, Time ran a photo of Sam standing in front of Deep Orange and Black and called him “a husky ex-GI., who in the past five years has caused even palette-jaded Parisians to perk up.” The article went on to quote Sam on what he might do with his millionfranc windfall. “I’d like to buy one of those flying platforms they’ve just designed,” the newly flush artist suggested. “Gosh, with one of those you could hover any place you wanted and you could make 40-ft brush strokes.”24 Emboldened by success and the promise of patronage, Sam and Muriel began to try conceiving a child. They wanted to find a new atelier, a studio, and a home, someplace we can both work and have a separate room to eat and sleep as well as hot water. If they couldn’t find a space to meet their needs in Paris, they pondered returning to California. Sam wanted to purchase land and build a rustic studio. By this time, Muriel had had her first





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Figure 5. Sam Francis and Muriel Goodwin in rue Tiphaine studio, Paris, 1955.

solo exhibition. Started by a Dominican father in 1953, La Galerie du Haut Pavé was aimed to help young and unknown artists. It was a small space, yet Muriel’s black-and-white ink abstractions hung in a large window and could be seen from the busy street. Sam bragged that Muriel sold five ink drawings. Very good for a first one man show here.25 Flush with his Paris triumph, Sam was preparing to exhibit in New York: Martha Jackson would give him the inaugural show at her spacious new gallery on East Sixty-Ninth Street. He planned to leave for New York at the end of January, but on February 14, 1956, when his first New York show opened, neither Sam nor Muriel was in attendance. Sam later claimed that they were bedridden with the flu. It’s hard to imagine that flu would have kept him away from his New York debut, especially since he’d given himself a two-week travel window. In all probability, what kept him away was a bad case of anxiety. Like many artists, Sam was uncomfortable at his own openings, where he, as much as his paintings, was on display. And rumors of jealousy of his European achievements had trickled over from New York. He wrote Zoe Dusanne, who was mounting a March show of his watercolors in her Seattle gallery:

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“The reaction to my ‘success’ (so called) in Europe from the good old USA has been both vile and violent (after the Time Article).”26 His fever, he said, remained high all week and was not helped by the reviews. In a round-up, Arts Magazine called his paintings “undernourished . . . there is a good deal of paint and little action.” Writing in the New York Times, Howard Devree decried the work’s decorative quality: “The apparent success of this work in Paris leaves this reviewer somewhat puzzled and rather uncertain that it adds much more than a fashionably tailored cut to some of the American product.” Carlyle Burrows, in the New York Herald Tribune, expressed his belief that “Francis, for us, however, doesn’t link up with any of the salient abstract mannerisms creditable with originating here, such as Pollock or de Kooning.”27 On exhibition were several paintings that Sam had shown only nine months earlier at the Galerie Rive Droite. Ironically, they were the same ones that had excited ArtNews, Life, and Time when they were shown in Paris. For Sam, the critical dismissal of his first exhibition in his homeland was a profound blow eased only briefly when Pollock viewed his paintings and gave them his okay. Well, I like his work too, Sam wrote Dusanne. Yet he remained dismayed by the hostility. Along with Rachel Jacobs, Sam crafted a response that he sent to a few friends. In it, he called the critics drunken pirates looting a banana boat. He blasted their statements as utterly meaningless and drivel by one-legged parrots.28 But to his father, Sam revealed deeper, more personal emotions. He confessed to feeling revolted by the whole thing and wonder about coming back to my own country . . . to want to be loved by all is unholy and a sign of weakness. He was facing a reckoning that would soon spur his ambition, compelling him to seek in his art, and in all aspects of his life, an entirely different direction.29

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You must know by now that I am at another outward-turning crossing in my life, Sam wrote his father a week before Christmas in 1956, explaining why he and Muriel would not be joining them for the holiday in Sicily. All goes reluctantly and with much difficulty. After six years together, nearly two as a married couple, Sam and Muriel were separating. They did not know if their split would be permanent or temporary. We have always accepted the difficult way that we must take through our unconventional lives, Sam rationalized. Muriel would travel to Copenhagen for a Danish Christmas, then on to San Francisco. Sam would continue to work in Paris until January, when he too planned to leave for America. He intended to stop in New York, then head down to Mexico or South America. From there, he would travel to Japan. He had a commission to paint a mural. I must be faithful to what pulls me towards the end.1 Having grown close to Sam’s parents when they’d come to France for a visit that summer, Muriel had been corresponding with them too. She described the situation differently. She clarified that she’d asked Sam to move out four months earlier. “The air was very destructive for both of us,” she wrote. The immediate problem: Sam had fallen in love with a young, redheaded painter studying in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship. Her name 115

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was Carol Haerer. Haerer was not just another dalliance. Sam introduced her to his friends, including Shirley Jaffe and Joan Mitchell. Even Muriel met her. That September, Haerer had accompanied Sam on a romantic motorcycle trip to Italy. They slept in an abandoned spaghetti factory and traveled many of the same routes he’d taken a few years earlier to celebrate his engagement to Muriel. This trip was Muriel’s breaking point. She retreated into the arms of a Danish fellow. Though Haerer’s scholarship had ended and she’d returned home to South Dakota, the affair lingered. Sam intended to see her when he visited America. “I feel resentment towards Sam because of her, and I feel resentment towards Carol herself— all on my own behalf—but it will pass.” What wouldn’t change was Sam’s appetite. Years later, Muriel observed, “He wanted to take big bites out of life. He could see he was brushing up against the bigtime. He wanted to master that, and I didn’t.” However unrealistic, Sam’s motive for marrying Muriel had been sincere. He wanted to provide for her and give her an easier time of it. They both hoped that marriage, even an unconventional one, would settle him down. As his financial situation stabilized, they’d tried to conceive a child. But Muriel did not get pregnant. Since Vera had been unable to conceive when they were together, Sam suspected that his tuberculosis treatment had left him sterile.2 His old restlessness returned. Perhaps it had never really left, only temporarily abated. Though he basked in Muriel’s adoration, it also stifled him. As he carved out a place in the European art world, he hungered to experience the thrill that discovery brought him. Both Sam and Muriel realized that Haerer was symbolic of the larger problem cleaving their marriage. While Sam’s constant craving for new experiences stimulated him and energized his work, it corroded any efforts to maintain a stable bond with Muriel. Recognizing that his relationship with his artwork was the motivating force in his life, Muriel graciously wrote, “I have faith in, and am proud of Sam and the position he has been able to arrive at in relation to his work, and himself in the world. And it is this, above all else, that has, and will motivate him.” Portending the future, she concluded, “he has and will have, moral and financial support from everywhere . . . he will go to the limit of every possibility.” It was precisely this realization that Sam desired to go to the limits of all opportunities from which Muriel chose to retreat.





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Over the last year, Sam’s career had advanced considerably. Despite the reviews from his debut show at Martha Jackson Gallery in New York deriding him as a French hedonist, his sales in the States were brisk. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum bought Red and Black (1954), and the art philanthropist Seymour H. Knox II purchased Blue Black (1952) for the modernist Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. In May, Sam was the only expat in 12 Americans, organized by Dorothy Miller at the Museum of Modern Art. He now had a Swiss art dealer, Eberhard Kornfeld, and he was showing with Zoe Dusanne in Seattle. In London, he was represented by Gimpel Fils, the gallery that showed de Kooning, Alexander Calder, and Marcel Duchamp. As Muriel noted in her letter to his parents, Sam had support from everywhere. With so many avenues opening up, he fully intended to investigate all prospects. His marriage unraveling and Haerer on another continent, Sam retreated to his new studio in Arcueil to consider his outward-turning crossing. Funds from his sales, particularly the million-franc sale of Deep Orange and Black to Arnold Rüdlinger, had enabled him to rent a barnlike space three times the size of Tiphaine, with large windows and a skylight. It was from Arcueil that he wrote his parents, alerting them of his plans: I must be in New York the end of January. And here have to finish the three mural panels I have been laboring on for these past months . . . I have never worked as well.3 He had begun the Basel Mural, three enormous panels, each approximately thirteen feet high by twenty feet long. Whatever turmoil was going on in Sam’s personal life, it did not interfere with his work. Instead, his restless spirit magnified his ability to imbue these canvases with what he told his parents was a terrible opening . . . all about joy and anguish.4 The commission for the mural had come from his supporter Arnold Rüdlinger. For several years, Sam had expressed his desire to create murals that worked harmoniously within architectural spaces. As In Lovely Blueness evidences, Sam wanted to work on a large scale, but he also wanted to wrestle with the demands of an engineered structure. The opportunity arrived when Rüdlinger suggested he paint a triptych for the walls surrounding the nineteenth-century staircase of the Kunsthalle Basel. Sam immediately set to work on an enormous dream, an artwork that would enclose the viewer in a vaulting light-soaked space.

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The triptych, reflecting Sam’s state during this period of disentanglement and new horizons, is about flight. Magnificent panels hang from ceiling to floor with oil paints diluted to the consistency of watercolors, washes of saturated oranges, shimmering golds, and deep blues, laced with patches of white. With their milky, porous surfaces, the three panels rose above Sam like the storm-tattered sails of a giant vessel. I spend all my waking and dream tossed hours on this, Sam wrote Dusanne. I must be a strong wind for them.5 The art historian Peter Selz compared the large areas of white exploding the pictorial space in the Basel Mural to those in the baroque artist Giambattista Tiepolo’s monumental ceilings above the grand staircase of the Residence of the Prince-Bishops in Würzburg, Germany. Both artists use pearlescent white to span and contain architectural framework. Having visited Italy at least three times in as many years, Sam would have been familiar with Tiepolo’s Venetian frescoes in which the artist employed swirls of puffy clouds to bridge the ceilings’ vast space. Additionally, the writer and critic Tyler Green noted the similarity in the compositional formats of the panel of Basel I and Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel: in each, two diagonally placed bodies of color are attached by an attenuated line. While Michelangelo represents the figure of God touching the hand of Adam, Sam’s forms are abstract. Sam was envisioning a space that was theatrical as well as sacred, one that evoked passion while vaulting the viewer into the celestial realm.6 While the Basel Mural is the pinnacle of Sam’s early career, it also signifies a turning point in his progression as an artist: the convergence of his need to break free from Muriel coinciding with his need to break free from the cloistered atmosphere and influences of his European sojourn. In response, the canvases themselves have a shredded appearance. Until that point, Sam’s white had remained veiled or hovered around the edges of billowing forms. But in the Basel Mural, the veil lifts and pulls apart. “I follow the paint,” he liked to say. And if the paint was breaking free, then so was Sam. He would later recall that during the period he was painting the Basel Mural, he was “becoming dissatisfied with Paris. I started going to Japan, I went to America. I was dissatisfied with my painting, with my life, with everything.”7 •

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The prospect of a trip to Japan had glimmered on Sam’s horizon for a few years. He’d been attracted to Eastern philosophy since his days in the hospital, reading Zen Buddhist texts and learning to write Chinese characters. In a 1951 letter home to his father from Paris, he mentioned that a visiting curator from a museum in Tokyo thought that his paintings had a relationship to the Far East.8 His expat friends included several Japanese artists, among them a young abstract painter named Toshimitsu Imai. Sam introduced Imai to Michel Tapié, and Imai became the first Japanese artist to join the Informel movement. Through Imai’s urging and facilitation, Sam, Tapié, and the French painter Georges Mathieu were introduced to the contemporary Japanese art scene. Nearly two years earlier, in 1955, before Sam’s marriage to Muriel fell apart, Sōfu Teshigahara, the grandmaster of ikebana (flower arrangement), had traveled from Japan to Paris to perform in the Bois de Boulogne. Dubbed “the Picasso of Flowers” by Time magazine, Teshigahara demonstrated his creation of living sculptures to a crowd that included Sam. As onlookers applauded, Teshigahara deftly constructed elegant arrangements from a variety of natural materials: three tons of thousand-year-old wisteria boughs, giant pieces of driftwood, and bunches of dried sunflower heads. After the performance, Sam and Teshigahara quickly discovered they were kindred spirits. Both believed that their art lay in their ability to give feeling to the material: in Sam’s case, paint; for Teshigahara, elements from the natural world. A few days later, Teshigahara visited Sam’s studio and invited him to go to Japan and paint a mural for Sōgetsu Hall, his school of flower arranging in Tokyo. If Sam could finance his trip, a studio space would be provided. Sales from paintings had begun to generate income for Sam. However, as soon as the money was in his pocket, he splurged. He hosted all his friends at a restaurant, bought bottles of wine and fancy new brushes, and leased a bigger studio space. Money was not something he hoarded. Instead, he adhered to the philosophy that funds should pass through him, thereby opening the need for more funds. Now, desperate to subsidize his trip to Japan and New York and a visit with Carol Haerer, as well as an extended period of travel and time to paint, Sam reached out to his patron Franz Meyer Sr., who’d already bought a number of his major oils. Informing Meyer of his progress on the Basel Mural, Sam expressed his

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desire to pause and travel. I would beg you to consider the purchase now rather than at a later time. It is now that I shall need help in making it possible for me to voyage and gain the experience of these large spaces. . . . So the work goes on and I feel at last I am the possible medium for more enduring works. At any rate I will take the risks. Ripeness is all.9 Meyer answered Sam’s plea. He advanced the funds for an adventure that would take Sam around the world. On January 20, 1957, one month after Muriel left Paris to spend Christmas in Copenhagen with her Danish beau, Sam put his brushes down. He suspended work on the Basel Mural. He was due in Japan in September, but in the meantime, he had another opportunity to explore in New York with Arnold Rüdlinger and Eberhard Kornfeld. If it weren’t for Rüdlinger’s and Kornfeld’s backing, Sam might never have become Sam Francis. While Rüdlinger was the curatorial visionary who brought international attention to Sam, Kornfeld was the dealer who sustained that attention with his financial acumen. A Swiss gallerist and auctioneer, Kornfeld was thirty-four, the same age as the artist. His bushy eyebrows and a raucous laugh belied his precise and exacting Swiss nature. As a young man, he’d studied architecture, but his life changed direction when, in 1945, he started to work for August Klipstein’s auction gallery in Bern. Passionate about his job, Kornfeld shrewdly asked his brother to fill in during his time in the army and thus hold his spot at the firm. In 1951, Klipstein died suddenly, and Kornfeld stepped up and took over the business. Specializing in seventeenth-century Dutch prints and nineteenthcentury French drawings, the gallery had branched out to promote modernists such as Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and now Sam Francis. When Kornfeld met Sam and saw his work on a visit to Paris with Rüdlinger in 1954, he felt an instant bond. There stood Sam, legs apart to brace himself in front of his giant, gorgeous canvases. A powerful alliance was born among these three men: Kornfeld, the art dealer; Rüdlinger, the innovative museum director; and Sam, the artist. As the director of the Kunsthalle in Basel, Rüdlinger strived to bring the Swiss art world out of isolation by exhibiting art of international consequence. He wanted his museum to be the first in Europe to organize a show consisting of only American artists. Aware of Rüdlinger’s tastes, Sam enthusiastically talked up the new art happening stateside to both Kornfeld and Rüdlinger, the kingmakers of the European art world. They



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proposed a show featuring six artists: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, and Sam Francis. Unfortunately, Rüdlinger’s board in Basel wouldn’t agree to finance a fishing expedition to the States to see the artists’ work in their studios. (Slides and photographs were unreliable, and there were still few of their paintings in Europe.) At this point, Sam stepped in to help. Even this early in his career, Sam possessed a genius for fostering creative relationships. He had an innate understanding of how the art world operated, and he was adept at seizing opportunities that presented themselves. He suggested that Kornfeld buy his painting Deep Blue and Black (1955). Instead of keeping the money, Sam would donate the 100 Swiss francs (about $233) to Rüdlinger. This was enough for Rüdlinger’s round-trip airfare. The exchange agreed upon and money now raised, the trio left together to take the risk of bringing a major show of American art, one that included Sam Francis, to Europe.10 •



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By the late 1950s, the art world’s power balance had shifted westward from Paris to New York. The polar attitudes between the two cities thawed, and competition gave way to working relationships. In February, Leo Castelli opened his gallery at Madison Avenue and Seventy-Seventh Street with an exhibition that mixed de Kooning and Pollock with their European counterparts Giacometti and Dubuffet. Martha Jackson was already showing Sam and other young Americans who’d gotten their starts in Paris. Further south, on Fifty-Seventh Street, Sidney Janis hung French Cubists beside Pollock, and the Stable Gallery was due to exhibit Joan Mitchell’s Paris paintings in the spring. The time was ripe for Rüdlinger’s enterprising idea. Indeed, unknown to Rüdlinger, Kornfeld, and Sam, the Museum of Modern Art was discussing its own American assault on European culture. Jackson Pollock’s tragic death six months earlier had caused his prices to shoot up, along with those of other New York School painters. Pollock, the wild wunderkind, America’s answer to the perspective- shifting Picasso, had crashed his Oldsmobile convertible on Fireplace Road in Springs, Long Island. He’d been on a booze-induced spree, heading to a party at the Hamptons estate of Alfonso Ossorio, the wealthy

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Filipino painter and collector who’d first helped Tapié exhibit Pollock’s work in Paris. Too drunk to attend Ossorio’s party, Pollock swung his car around and barreled into a tree. Along with his own life, he took the life of a young woman named Edith Metzger. Only Pollock’s girlfriend, Ruth Kligman, thrown free from the car, survived. His death, preluded as it was by a disastrous joyride with two young women, further cemented his fame and the reputation of American artists as reckless men pursuing freedom and expression at any cost. Back in 1949, when Sam was still an art student, he’d seen Pollock’s paintings in San Francisco, and he’d been astonished by their monolithic grandeur, their thick drips of paint embedded in matter, and their raw materiality. In his fashion, Sam would eventually wrestle with Pollock’s technique of allover painting and reposition his canvases on the floor, working on them from above. Even though this had been Sam’s first technique in the hospital when he was encased in his plaster body cast, necessity, not concern with nondirectional composition, had dictated his approach. Pollock’s genius was to place a canvas on the ground to get at all sides equally. He wanted to “literally be in the painting.” However, Sam had not been impressed by Pollock, the man, when he’d met him the year before he died. “A volcano,” Sam called him. “All he wanted to talk about was women, fucking and drinking. And his own terrible anguish.”11 Everyone was coming to terms with Pollock, especially de Kooning, the heir apparent to the art world’s crown. “He’s the new guru,” Sam stated, introducing Kornfeld and Rüdlinger to Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Barnett Newman. All three artists readily agreed to the proposed European show. However, roadblocks appeared when the moody and insecure Mark Rothko and the recalcitrant loner Clyfford Still refused to lend their work for a group exhibition. “I feel the work of painters should not be mixed,” Still had already declared in 1952. To appease the men, a series of solo shows was suggested. But since the desire was to survey the great reach of tendencies happening stateside, this plan collapsed. That’s when Dorothy Miller suggested a cooperative transatlantic tour that would open at Rüdlinger’s Kunsthalle in Basel and close at MoMA in New York. Eventually, two shows—The New American Painting and a Jackson Pollock retrospective—traveled together throughout Europe for close to a year. Irving Penn took a group photo of “the boys” for Vogue, and the New





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Figure 6. Artists in the 1958–59 exhibition The New American Painting, as photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, October 15, 1959. Front row, from left: Jack Tworkov, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis. Middle row, from left: Theodoros Stamos, James Brooks, Franz Kline. Back row, from left: Philip Guston, William Baziotes.

York Times declared, “Abstract Art Is Going to Europe to Represent American Culture” as eighty-one canvases by sixteen Americans were crated and shipped for their eight-country excursion.12 This would be the first time European audiences viewed a large selection of exclusively avant-garde American art. Though Sam was still the only expat in the group, he was finally presented as one of “the boys.” Joan Mitchell, back in New York and living in an old brownstone on St. Mark’s Place, threw Sam a party while he was in town in early 1957. Into

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her high-ceilinged studio trooped many of Sam’s old friends who’d returned from their GI Bill–sponsored educations abroad. Brooklyn-born painter Al Held now lived on Twenty-First Street with his girlfriend, a dark-haired young dancer from San Francisco named Yvonne Rainer. The sculptor George Sugarman was back, and so was Sam’s old studio mate Norman Bluhm. The art promoter Michel Tapié was in town too, headed to Japan to introduce the East to his Informel movement. It was a convergence of old Europeans and young Americans. Records by Charles Mingus and Lady Day (Mitchell’s favorite) played in the background. Everyone drank, not just cheap fifteen-cent bottles of beer but scotch on the rocks in highball glasses. The tall Rüdlinger cut a dashing figure, sweeping through the room in a long, dark winter coat. “Sam in New York is quite famous—a social weight he seems to be handling very gracefully,” Muriel noted in a letter to his parents in February. She’d arrived in Manhattan by cargo ship, sailing from Copenhagen through gales, a hurricane, and five snowstorms to rendezvous with Sam before she began her new life in San Francisco. While Sam was intent on making a place for himself in the New York art world, Muriel wanted nothing to do with the city. To Muriel, New York “smelled Competitive, Aggressive, and Neurotic—so energetic and young and exciting after Paris. It’s an impossible place to live, to work . . . to survive, and more, in a personal way . . . I can’t live in the middle of this flow, not daily, but only somewhere at the edges.”13 As for Sam, his past was fading, his future still not set. He knew he wanted to master the dynamism, what Muriel called the flow. For now, his business in New York completed, he was free to travel inland toward his romance and his next adventure. After a week in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, with the Haerer family, Sam bought a used Mercury, packed it with watercolor paper and rolls of canvases, and, together with Haerer, headed south, down through Texas to Mexico. The choice of Mexico as their destination was likely Haerer’s. In a month, she was due to meet up with a friend from Paris at Lake Pátzcuaro. In the meantime, Sam and Haerer settled into an empty six-room apartment in an old European enclave near Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park.14 It was a leisurely lifestyle, warm and splashed with vibrant colors. Mexico was cheap, and endowed with a mural tradition and thus an ideal





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destination for an artist interested in works of art in large spaces. Throughout the capital, huge, striking frescoes and other artworks by muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros covered public buildings. Minutes from where Sam and Haerer were living on Avenida Michoacán, Siqueiros was painting a 4,500-square-foot antechamber at Chapultepec Castle, and just outside the capital rose the monumental pre-Columbian ruins of Teotihuacán. Yet despite the historic atmosphere, Sam never described visiting any of the museums or sites in the few letters he sent home that spring. And except for the brighter greens and oranges in his palette, there is little indication that Mexico’s vibrant mural tradition influenced his paintings. Instead, it was the experience of dislocation that significantly impacted his work. While in Mexico, he created several watercolors and two large canvases, Mexico (1957) and Around the Blues (1957–62). Both paintings have the same dramatic scale and format: a large, irregular white rectangle surrounded by dense blues shot through with red, yellow, purple, and hints of tropical green and tangerine orange. Sam’s diaphanous clusters have congealed into concentrated landmasses adrift in seas of white space. It was during this period of travel that strong cartographic imagery entered Sam’s artistic vocabulary. William Agee recognized the topographic references in Mexico and Around the Blues and referred to them as “visual journals, a diary of his travels around the world . . . like those of a modern day-Odysseus.” Maps had been part of Sam’s visual language since he was a boy diagramming the routes of his hikes in letters to Vera. In the air corps, he had learned aeronautical map reading. Now, as he zigged and zagged the world by plane, car, train, and boat, his white fields began to circle and penetrate his colored forms, and his colored shapes became increasingly dislodged, creating a pictorial space that the critic and curator Lawrence Alloway termed “space without place.”15 By now, there was a pattern in Sam’s relationships with women, especially during his outward-turning moments. He’d find a younger woman, usually an aspiring artist who was good, just not too competitive with him, and run off with her. He’d left the hospital with Vera, he’d left Vera and America with Muriel, he’d split with Muriel and gone off to Mexico with Haerer. The pattern would continue throughout much of his life. The women provided Sam with companionship, love, sex, and care. They were

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smart, yet not too intellectually challenging. Though he had many friendships with strong, cerebral women, his long-term girlfriends and wives had more pliable natures that did not clash with his ambitions. He favored creative bohemians. In a time when cultural diktats did not encourage women to seek their own adventures, Sam offered the opportunity to see the world. He was confident and daring, and though unabashedly lustful, he was also extremely generous and encouraging. If a woman had a dream, Sam was the first to urge her to pursue it. “The more familiar you become with the utterly unknown through dreams,” he said, “the better you can bring it out.” Discovering the unknown—whether a place or a woman— was Sam’s grand quest, and he wasn’t timid about it. “Getting lost,” he said, “is how I find myself.”16 Fairly quickly, Sam’s interests both in Mexico and in Haerer ran their course. The climate was too humid and hot, and Sam was too much the lothario to offer the steadfastness Haerer sought. Additionally, Haerer worried that Sam’s growing fame would overshadow her budding art career. After leaving Mexico, Sam traveled up to California to see his parents and Muriel, then back to New York. It wasn’t until September that he arrived in Japan. As he flew in over Tokyo Bay and gazed out the window, night was falling and his first impression of the city was of “No verticals, no perspective. All things sit in undifferentiated space. I felt a déjà vu.”17 The familiarity Sam alluded to was not to any place he’d ever traveled, clearly not to the soaring, jagged skyline of Manhattan or the rococo grandeur of the European landscape. Instead, that view of Tokyo reminded him of the space his own abstract paintings inhabited: flat, moving more and more toward horizontal configurations where colors sat in undifferentiated space. Japan was the space Sam had been painting. Of course, in 1957, Tokyo was mostly flat. Due to the high risk of earthquakes, typhoons, and tsunamis and even to memories of atomic destruction, buildings were restricted to no more than nine stories. Having played the roles of supply station for the Korean War and bulwark against communism, Tokyo was rapidly emerging from the shadow of World War II, when carpet bombing had nearly razed the city. Now, sprawling in all directions, it was the world’s second-largest city with eight and a half million inhabitants. Yet in many ways, Tokyo was a modest place, in keeping with a Japanese mindset that shunned showy, individual statements of





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opulence. Almost no one had a car, and people tended to own only a few pieces of furniture. Sam appreciated the simplicity of the Japanese, that spare and refined elegance. He marveled at the forced intimacy of so many people living together in small spaces with thin, translucent walls. Shoji partitions were another way of minimizing the destruction caused by frequent earthquakes. A screen made of a thin wooden frame and paper would not hurt someone when it fell. Sam loved the ritual of slipping off his shoes when he entered a house. He wrote home about walking on lightness itself in a Japanese house . . . intimacy is established immediately you touch your bare feet to the yielding sweet floor.18 Sam lodged with his friend Imai, who had returned to Tokyo along with Michel Tapié to organize the Informel storm that was sweeping Japan. Coinciding with the arrivals of Tapié and Imai and that of the French painter Georges Mathieu (who had also been invited to paint a mural at the Sōgetsu school), Sam’s landing in Japan thrust him again into a fortuitous position: the forefront of the burgeoning, postwar Japanese art world and its wave of enthusiasm for gestural abstraction.19 As the art historian Bert Winther-Tamaki points out, Sam’s growing success, combined with his predisposition for Eastern philosophy and the expanding areas of white space on his canvas, provided him with a unique platform. In a period when Japan was reaching out to the Western world, Sam was seen as a “proponent of the ‘Oriental void’ in abstract painting.” Two of Sam’s paintings had preceded him to Japan in the exhibition Art of the World Today, presented in Tokyo in 1956. In his essay for this exhibition, the art critic Shūzō Takiguchi described Sam as an artist who “grounded his work in the linkage of the individual to the universe in Oriental philosophy by bringing to life the white of the flat surface.” Even before Sam set foot in Japan, Japanese audiences were primed to view him as a beacon. His painting, Winther-Tamaki writes, “operated like a vessel that generously accommodated a wide variety of creative interpretations.” To the Japanese, evolving from an isolationist nation into a new Western ally, the open white space on his canvas “admitted participation.”20 At first, Sam and Imai stayed with the Japanese composer Urato Watanabe. Soon, an irate Watanabe became worried that these two bachelors returning from the bars in the wee hours presented a bad influence

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to his daughters. Sam and Imai then moved into the upstairs quarters of a Buddhist temple in Roppongi. Infamous for its nightclubs and brothels, Roppongi was a district where they were free to indulge in what Sam called “man’s paradise.” For the next few months, Sam and Imai lived, ate, played, painted, and exhibited together. Imai acted as a conduit not just to the erotic pleasures available in Japan but to a slew of essential contacts. Through Imai, Sam met the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno and his wife, Takako Idemitsu. A tapestry of reciprocal exchanges and interactions was woven from these first friendships. Sam met the art dealer Kusuo Shimizu, who would represent him at his Minami Gallery in Tokyo in the coming years. Through Tōno and Imai, Sam learned of Jiro Yoshihara, the founder of the Gutai group. Gutai was a collective of artists who believed that art should be primal and urgent in the wake of nuclear near-incineration. The artists of Gutai upended convention by pushing their work beyond the picture frame into the material world using spontaneous gesture, dance, mime, and performance. Excited by the raw, experimental nature of Gutai, both Sam and Tapié alerted Martha Jackson, and in 1958, a selection of Gutai artworks premiered in her New York gallery. Soon Sam was dressing in a linen kimono. He liked the unencumbered, T-shaped looseness of the garment. Though certainly more elegant, it was not so different from a hospital gown. Teshigahara provided him with a Sōgetsu classroom in the Mita district to use as his studio while working on the mural. While Georges Mathieu enjoyed performing his painting in a one-day flurry in front of an audience, Sam took a month and preferred privacy. A curtain was hung up to hide him from view, and Teshigahara instructed his students to “be silent and walk quietly.”21 Still, a few of the curious peeked behind the cloth to observe Sam, sitting for hours in front of his canvas, an earthenware teapot and snacks of kanpyō (pickled gourd) and sushi rolls beside him. As he had done in Paris when he was working on his sumi-e ink studies, he focused silently and motionlessly until the essence of the image built up inside him. Then, to the delight of anyone who might have waited, he unleashed a single mark. Configured to fit the low-ceilinged auditorium, Tokyo Mural (1957), at six feet six inches by twenty-six feet three inches, is a very long painting. Though it is a one-panel painting, its scale, like that of Basel Mural, is





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Figure 7. Sam Francis working on the Tokyo Mural in temporary Tokyo studio, fall 1957.

magnificent. And like the mural for the museum in Switzerland, it is a virtuoso feat that manages to harmonize with a unique and challenging architectural setting: the compressed space of the Sōgetsu auditorium. Galloping nearly the full length of Tokyo Mural, swirls of royal blue dominate the canvas. A few other colors—chrysanthemum red, plum, dandelion yellow—swim inside this roiling sea of blue, but only a small

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square window of white arrests the blue’s progress. The color blue, Sam said, represented himself. This is one reason why it dominates his oeuvre. Blue was the color, he said, that he used to incorporate himself into the works. “Blue spreads out, it’s a color that is strongly expansive.”22 If Japan allowed Sam to expand his horizons, it also allowed him to break the hold of Paris. Like a German Romantic, he’d set off on a ramble, meandering the world’s surface to discover his next adventure. He was happiest in this state, slightly disoriented, his senses alive like those of a newborn. The paradox was that wherever Sam went, he wove a web of connections that would eventually require him to break free. At the time he was leaving Japan, he gave a short description for a Japanese newspaper, defining the characteristics of an artist. Like most of Sam’s statements, it’s a riddle with the truth hidden at its core. “The artist,” he said, “is seeing, hearing, hoping, and dreaming the extraordinary, struck by his own thoughts as if they came to him from above or below as lightning flashes peculiarly his own; . . . As a complex, artful, deceitful and inscrutable being who has perhaps made it possible for men to feel enjoyment at the sight of the soul. Whose every opinion is a lurking place, every color a mask; as one who has the incurable melancholia of the completed, but who even though often running away from himself will always come to himself again and again . . . Where, in fact, is he?”23

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Feverish Intensity

A jazz band played in the corner. With a large Noh theater mask covering his head, Sam dipped and dived among his friends. His face was completely obscured behind the carved tiger’s head with its grimacing snarl and bulging eyes. The mask even had whiskers and a mane of yellow hair that draped down Sam’s shoulders like a mantle. He had just returned to Paris from his travels, and in celebration, he was throwing himself a party.1 It had taken him a year to make his way around the world. After the fanfare of exhibits in Tokyo and Osaka, he stopped off in Bangkok, Hong Kong, India, and Rome. Traveling had not hindered Sam’s career. Quite the opposite. His evolving style—islands of color swimming in seas of white spaces—perfectly corresponded to his peripatetic lifestyle. In Mexico, New York, and Japan, he’d roll up a canvas as soon as it dried and ship it off to a gallery in Europe, New York, or Seattle. There it would be unrolled, displayed, and sold. “We are now in the class of dealers yelling and screaming for paintings. It seems your watercolors sold out!” Martha Jackson wrote from New York. In the last year, even though Sam was physically absent, he’d exhibited recent works at Gimpel Fils in London and Galerie Kornfeld in Bern and 131

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had been included in group exhibitions at several museums, the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art among them.2 Now, in February 1958, old and new friends came to his cavernous Arcueil studio to welcome him home. Mingling with the expat artist were contacts Sam had made on his travels. In attendance were the dramatic Arnold Rüdlinger, a young writer named Joe Barnes, Michel Tapié (back from Japan), Shirley Jaffe, Claire Falkenstein, Rachel Jacobs, and Kimber Smith and his wife, Gabrielle Staub, who was now a correspondent for Life magazine. The stormy Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle arrived. Mitchell was living in France again with Riopelle, even though he was still married and blunting his Catholic guilt with a daily intake of forty Ricards. Mitchell, a massively talented female artist in the male-dominated art world, was likewise dogged by alcoholism and internal rages. But the night of Sam’s homecoming party, neither Mitchell nor Riopelle threw a punch in public. Gallon jugs of inexpensive French wine crowded every available surface. Sam, acting as chef, had cooked a concoction of chicken and bananas that he’d sampled in Thailand. Not remembering the precise ingredients, he improvised. His cooking, like his painting, was intuitive. The result, though not tasty, was nonetheless bizarre enough to win over his guests. After the carousing and the excitement of his return subsided, Sam set to work completing the Basel Mural. The three panels would premiere at the same time as The New American Painting show opened in mid-April. This was the exhibition that Rüdlinger had proposed a year earlier and that Dorothy Miller had selected. A delighted Sam bragged to Dusanne that the exhibition included 5 Stills, 5 Rothkos, 5 Klines, 5 Francis in one room . . . enlightenment for the Europeans!3 A personal statement by each artist appeared in the catalogue for The New American Painting, and each statement is uniquely revealing. De Kooning, the tortured binge drinker, begins, “Art never seems to make me peaceful or pure.” Rothko, a man who would eventually self-eradicate, writes of the progression of the painter’s work to the point of “the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer.” The uncompromising Still expresses his belief that “Demands for communication are both presumptuous and irrelevant.” And then there is the dreamy Sam Francis, who wanted his paintings to lift the





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veil between heaven and earth: “What we want is to make something that fills utterly the sight and can’t be used to make life only bearable; if the painting till now was a way of making bearable the sight of the unbearable, the visible sumptuous, then let’s now strip away . . . all that.” At the end of his statement, he again references the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the distance between man and god. “You can’t interpret the dream of the canvas for this dream is at the end of the hunt on the heavenly mountain—where nothing remains but the phoenix caught in the midst of lovely blueness.”4 Recognizing the mural as a benchmark in Sam’s evolution, the art critic and historian Robert Pincus-Witten writes, “One could regard all of Francis’ painting at this time as a subset of this single commission, the way we think of Picasso’s work of 1907–10 as a subset of Demoiselles d’Avignon—that is, a mode dominated by an overriding single work.” During the period Sam was finishing the Basel Mural, he worked with feverish intensity. His studio was littered with nearly thirty paintings in progress, canvases that either preluded or were born out of his struggle with the triptych. These included Towards Disappearances and three studies for Moby Dick, Blue Out of White, The Whiteness of the Whale, and Ahab. All were begun in Paris and finished in New York. In many, blocks of primary color are stacked one atop the other like vertebrae, a reference to his damaged spinal cord. Many of their titles connect to Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. This was not an uncommon touchstone for Abstract Expressionist painters. Jackson Pollock and Robert Motherwell both paid homage to the American classic. In his famous 1952 essay “The American Action Painters,” Harold Rosenberg claims that “The American vanguard painter took to the white expanse of the canvas as Melville’s Ishmael took to the sea.”5 In Sam’s hands, the works explore the theme of the artist’s own obsessive quest and pursuit across ethereal space. Ahab’s search across the ocean for a mythic white whale is illustrated by Sam’s journey over the vast expanse of his canvas to uncover and discover his image. “My brush is my harpoon,” Sam claimed.6 Years later, Sam recalled the experience of trying to find the image: “The temperature falls, I lose energy. It is a kind of suction. There is something right below the level of my mind which I am trying to get at, which is itself trying to inform me, and I can’t quite get there, so I have to let myself go down to it.”7 Again, he referred to his image as a monster beckoning to him from the depths.

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It was in such a state of absorption and passionate pursuit that one of his leviathan panels toppled off the wall, nearly causing him to suffocate and tearing the muscle in his lower abdomen. Yet another injury to his torso. Later, after help arrived, probably in the form of Rachel Jacobs, whom he was involved with at the time, he noticed a pain in his groin. He thought he must have strained a muscle or a ligament in bearing the weight of the painting. Assuming that it would heal once he rested, he ignored the discomfort. Instead of resting, he took off for Basel. Installed in the majestic staircase of the Kunsthalle, the murals were on view for the April 19 premiere of The New American Painting. With the caption “New American Painting Captures Europe,” Horizon magazine ran a photo of Sam standing atop his ladder, brush dripping paint, in the throes of creating the Basel Mural. Yvonne Hagen noted in the Herald Tribune that “the pulsating canvases of the younger Sam Francis stand in surprised harmony with the works of the two dynamic masters (Rothko and Still).”8 Despite the praise and inclusion, Sam was singled out by some critics for the Europeanness of his style. Françoise Choay denounced his inclusion with “Pollock and the other Americans,” writing that Sam’s art had “a kind of charm, of prettiness, of decorativeness almost, and one feels the word tachisme (the European equivalent to abstract expressionism) was made for him.”9 It seemed that no matter how his work was positioned, Sam’s controlled elegance—the lyrical hand the painter Al Held so admired—was viewed as originating in Europe. His style was seen as the antithesis of the rigor and rawness demonstrated by the New York School painters. Still prey to an emotional need to be taken seriously by New York, Sam again expressed a desire to leave Paris. He confided to his patron Franz Meyer Sr., I have the wanderlust in me that makes me want to move about much. Sam had other important reasons to leave Europe. He’d secured a prestigious commission to paint a mural for the Chase Manhattan Bank’s new headquarters on Park Avenue in New York. He had an exhibition opening at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, and a fourth solo show at Martha Jackson Gallery. He knew he needed a more permanent presence in New York. Meyer understood Sam’s struggle for recognition but urged him to at least keep a base in Paris. Meyer sensed that Sam’s sensibilities would flourish better in Europe than in America. Heeding



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Meyer’s advice, Sam retained his studio in Paris. In Switzerland, Kornfeld generously offered the use of the carriage house next to the Galerie Kornfeld for him to paint in whenever he returned. Like a sea captain, Sam was establishing ports of call around the world.10 Years later, when asked what he was searching for in his travels, Sam said it was the same thing he sought in painting. He was seeking to discover the point of equilibrium between soaring and gravity. Both painting and travel transported him. Both spread and expanded his horizons while keeping him suspended. “I feel trapped by gravity,” Sam told Betty Freeman. “I would like to fly, to soar, to float like a cloud but I am tied down to place. No matter where I am it’s always the same.”11 •



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That summer, before Sam left for New York, Muriel visited Paris. Sam’s affair with Haerer definitively behind him and his eagerness to explore Japan sated, she hoped they could find their way back to one another. But time and currents had swept them too far apart. They were no longer baby sponges soaking up the Parisian atmosphere. Sam, she wrote, “paints his head off. He is in fine shape.” On the other hand, Muriel was able to make only a few marks on paper. Sleep overwhelmed her. By now, most of the old gang had disbanded. “So many preparing trips to the States, as though to jump into a mysterious bath to see what will happen, what transformation . . . or shock will take place.”12 It wasn’t until September that Sam was able to tie up loose ends, rent the Arcueil studio, and fly to New York. He planned to stay in Manhattan for a few months, then travel to San Francisco over Christmas to visit his parents and Muriel. She had a show opening at the Dilexi Gallery in North Beach, and Sam wanted to work on the West Coast through the winter. However, once he was in New York, his plans altered. This time, instead of staying on the staid Upper East Side with Martha Jackson, he set up shop at the Chelsea Hotel, the grand Beaux-Arts brownstone on West Twenty-Third Street. Like the Hôtel de Seine in Paris, the Chelsea was the beating (sometimes crashing) heart of the bohemian art scene. At various times, Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Joan Mitchell had all been residents. James Dean and Marilyn

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Monroe used it as a haven from the paparazzi, and a very drunk Jackson Pollock once vomited on the dining room carpet. It was cheap, spacious, and tolerant of the antics of its creative clientele. Sam rented a penthouse apartment where sunlight flooded through the huge dormer windows. Having established another home-work base, he jumped into an affair with a Japanese artist named Teruko Yokoi. They first encountered one another at an opening at the Museum of Modern Art.13 Sam later said he fell in love with Teruko the moment he laid eyes on her. She was slender and striking, with high cheekbones and silky black hair that nearly reached her waist. Teruko remembered a man staring at her from across the room. By the way he gazed at her, she assumed he was single. “He did not act like a married man,” she said. “He hypnotized me with his beautiful blue eyes. He used those eyes on everybody.” They didn’t speak until a few days later. According to Teruko, Sam tracked her down through the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, where she was studying painting. He wanted to talk to her about her country. Teruko Yokoi had grown up on Tsushima, an emerald island in the Japanese archipelago where white sand beaches banked crystal clear waters swimming with translucent fish. She worshipped her father, a schoolmaster and practitioner of calligraphy and haiku. On Sundays, he took her on walks in the forest to “catch verses from the air.” After her mother noticed her sensitivity to color and nature, a private art tutor was hired to instruct her. Since then, Teruko had lived for painting. After a brief marriage ending in divorce, she won a fellowship to study at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In that postwar period, it was a remarkable achievement for a young Japanese female artist from a peripheral island. From there, she moved to New York in 1956 to learn from Hofmann. Unlike Muriel, who vacillated between painting and poetry, Teruko informed Sam in her limited English, “I am one hundred percent a painter.” He responded enthusiastically to her open, flat geometries: squares, diamonds, and zigzags with sweeps of reds and blues. At the age of thirty-four, she was only a year younger than he, yet her quixotic mixture of brazenness and innocence made her appear naive. In the grip of love for Asian culture, Sam was smitten. Teruko was not just an up-andcoming painter; she was Japanese.





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If Teruko’s Eastern exoticism spellbound Sam, she was mesmerized by his blue-eyed Americanness and by the soft resonance of his voice. She was also attracted to famous artists and tended to defer to them for guidance. Before Sam, she’d been infatuated with Mark Rothko, another married American painter. As it turned out, they had troubling misconceptions, which were not helped by the language barrier. Blinded by stereotypes when they met, they soon realized the errors of their first impressions. Teruko was not a docile doll. She was so emotional and so prone to dark fears that when she was a child, her parents had worried she’d take her own life. Sam was not the steadfast companion she longed for. But by the time they realized how ill-suited they were as a couple, Teruko was pregnant. The news came as a complete shock to Sam. He’d tried to conceive a child, first with Vera and then with Muriel. Attributing the problem to his tuberculosis and treatment, he’d not worried about impregnating Teruko because he thought it was impossible. Even though he never intended marriage and family, he was delighted to learn that he was going to be a father. Yet there remained a problem. Sam had a wife, Muriel, who more or less accepted his roaming disposition. In the middle of this familial drama, Sam traveled to Washington, DC, for his show at the Phillips Collection, then back to New York for Martha Jackson’s exhibition of eighteen large canvases. At the opening, Sam greeted guests in front of his vibrant, gorged image of Moby Dick (1957– 58). He appeared weak and tired. He was sweating heavily and felt ill. He attributed his discomfort to the flu or to his unease about the fanfare for the show. But when the nagging pain in his abdomen and his constant cough didn’t subside after a few days, he realized he’d been in pain since his accident with the Basel Mural. By the time his show closed right before Thanksgiving, he was having trouble catching his breath, and the soreness in his stomach was making walking difficult. Traveling to Baltimore, he consulted with Dr. Edgar Berman, a surgeon and collector of his paintings. Like most of the people attracted to Sam, Berman was both a complex character and enticed by power. He would later serve as a medical consultant to both John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. During the women’s liberation movement, he’d gain notoriety for declaring that women couldn’t be leaders because of their “raging hormonal

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imbalance.”14 On December 4, Sam went under Berman’s knife for a hernia operation. Sam’s recovery took longer than expected. His body was run down from his unrelenting schedule. While he was recuperating, Teruko nursed him, and Berman became quite protective of her. He convinced Sam to act honorably with Teruko. A woman, Berman told Sam, needed a man’s protection. Sam must divorce Muriel and marry the soon-to-be mother of his child. If Teruko remained unmarried and her visa expired, she might be forced to return to Japan. While being a single mother was difficult in the United States, in Japan lone mothers (even war widows) faced economic and social stigma. Swayed by Berman’s reasoning and happy to have sired a child, if not entirely sure about fatherhood, Sam wrote to his parents that he wanted to go west as soon as his doctor allowed him to travel. Life is full of surprises, Sam hinted. I’m anxious to see you and talk.15 He took longer to reveal the situation to Muriel. In one of his more insensitive acts, he didn’t immediately tell Muriel about Teruko when he met her to explain. Instead, he showered Muriel with adoration, affection, and sex. He was under the delusion that if she couldn’t have him, he could at least give her a baby. It might also be that, with a pregnant wife, he could more easily wriggle free from Teruko. Surprised by Sam’s demonstrativeness, Muriel questioned him, and he admitted that he’d been trying to impregnate her. Back east, he had a girlfriend who was already pregnant. Muriel was livid at the deception. More painful still was the reality that Sam would have a family without her. The problem with conception was hers. Yet she offered scant resistance to his request for a divorce. It was not in her nature to oppose Sam’s decisions. When she signed the papers, she was so distressed she hardly knew what she was doing because she asked nothing in writing from the man she’d helped support from the time he was poor until fame took him away from her. It was a decision she would regret. On March 23, Sam flew to Alabama, where out-of-state visitors could obtain quickie divorces within twenty-four hours. Three days later, back in Baltimore with the Bermans as witnesses, he wed Teruko Yokoi, making her his third wife. Two days after the wedding, Sam flew back to Paris alone while Teruko, in her second trimester, stayed with friends in DC.

Figure 8. Sam Francis and Teruko Yokoi, wedding day, Baltimore, Maryland, 1959.

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An Internationalist in New York

An hour after sunrise, on Sunday, July 19, Sam’s daughter, Kayo Andrea Francis, was born at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital. “Pronounced like sky-o,” her ecstatic father told friends. In Japanese, the name means a celebration of the next generation. Having endured the death of his mother and his best friend, Sam wrote that Kayo’s arrival caused him to “feel more relaxed about this universe of souls.”1 A man who had once believed fatherhood impossible, Sam was enthralled and determined to provide for Teruko and his baby. He described mother and child as “more beautiful than art dares.” As picturesque as they seemed to him, Sam was first and foremost an artist in pursuit of a dream—one that had taken him away from Teruko’s side right after their marriage five months earlier. Tellingly, Sam and Teruko’s wedded life had begun—just like Sam and Muriel’s four years earlier—with a prolonged period of separation. In both instances, Sam deemed it necessary to travel for work. In 1956, limited financial resources and the death of her father had prevented Muriel from accompanying him back to Paris. This time, Sam’s exhibition schedule lasted two months and took him around the world, from London to Paris, Switzerland, Rome, Hong Kong, and Japan. He returned to America via 140





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the West Coast. Now, in 1959, money was not the primary obstacle keeping Sam and Teruko apart. Instead, it was the dictates of Sam’s lifestyle and nomadic personality. Certainly, Teruko had been nearly six months pregnant when they wed, and her condition prevented a prolonged excursion. It is also probable that as soon as Sam committed himself to a marriage, he put an ocean of both emotional and physical distance between himself and his partner. While he traveled, Teruko had waited, her anxiety mounting as her belly expanded. She was unfamiliar with Sam and his habits. A dynamic man filled with big visions, he was also an inveterate planner who relentlessly pursued new opportunities. Yet as frequently as he made plans, he was apt to change his mind. This was not entirely his fault. Shows could be canceled or postponed, shipments delayed, venues added. As an artist exhibiting in multiple places around the world simultaneously, Sam was breaking ground. When Sam finally returned to New York in May 1959, he resettled, with his new family, into his penthouse apartment on the top floor of the Chelsea Hotel. Though Sam loved the Chelsea’s shabby grandeur, the way it sat on West Twenty-Third Street like an artistic fortress, it was not an ideal choice for a mother and baby. It was loud and boisterous. At any time of day or night, artists, poets, and filmmakers might be found hanging over the spiral banister in the central stairwell passing around bottles of wine. Prostitutes and pimps took phone calls on the pay phone in the lobby, and naked women occasionally rode up and down the elevator. Unlike Sam, who enjoyed chaos, Teruko liked order. She was outraged by the constant stream of artists trickling into their apartment and by the danger they posed to her child. One day, Al Held rambled into the kitchen, grabbed a piece of chicken from the refrigerator, then tried to feed it to the baby. And while Sam appreciated her paintings—in all likelihood, he was inspired by her floating minimal shapes and broad planes of color—he was not initially supportive of her career. He didn’t take her ambitions as seriously as he took his own. Marriages between two artists are never easy. This was particularly true in the mid-twentieth century, when women were striving to make headway in the male-dominated, male-centric art world. Some women were

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self-effacing in the presence of their partners’ lauded talents. Lee Krasner subordinated her career to Jackson Pollock’s until after his death. Bill and Elaine de Kooning had what appeared to be a union of equals, but they didn’t live together and didn’t have a child. In fact, de Kooning sired his daughter, Lisa, in 1956 with a different woman, Joan Ward. And while everyone remembers Willem de Kooning’s paintings of women, Elaine de Kooning is mostly recalled for her wit (she infamously called the 1950s “a decade-long bender”)2 and forbearance with a difficult marriage. The same year Sam married Teruko, Helen Frankenthaler wed Robert Motherwell. Unlike Frankenthaler’s, Teruko’s artistic career was in its infancy. And she was not financially independent, as Frankenthaler was. When Motherwell and Frankenthaler wed, they were both established artists. They would never add a child to their dynamic mix. They divorced in 1971. Frankenthaler said later about her decision not to have a child that “children could have suffered.”3 In marrying a woman who came from a small Japanese island and who, for special occasions, liked to dress in the formal costume of the kimono and tightly bound obi, Sam expected that he would have a traditional Japanese wife. His notions of love were riddled with romantic distortions. He thought of women as flowers, sprigs of “night blooming Jasmine.” In Japan, he’d chased a geisha from Tokyo three hundred miles south to Kyoto. However, a geisha is not a wife. She is a hostess, a performer, an enchantress, and an ambassador of her culture. She is someone a man visits and then leaves. Sam wanted a wife who would not protest too loudly when he disappeared. He hoped Teruko would be content to remain behind while he traveled. He wanted a woman who understood, as he believed he did, that love was inclusive, not exclusive. Muriel had been that type of woman for a while, allowing for his love to include other women. But there’d been no baby for Muriel to worry over, no infant in need of constant care to exhaust her. At the beginning of Sam’s marriage to Teruko, the language barrier between them restricted communication and contributed to their illusions. Moreover, Sam avoided confrontation. Soon enough, however, Teruko made it clear that when Sam spilled his fruit juice on her new bookcase, she wasn’t interested in tidying up his mess. Baby Kayo charmed her, but she, like Sam, never intended to be





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anything other than a full-time painter. She was not passive or subservient. She reminded him that she was also devoted to her canvas.4 They hired a nanny. Teruko set up her studio in the living room— though Sam’s watercolors still covered the coffee table. When Arnold Rüdlinger came to New York and saw a few of Teruko’s paintings leaning against the wall, he said, “Sam, you didn’t tell me you had such a good artist for a wife.” “Didn’t I?” Sam coughed into his hand. Sam’s return to New York had coincided with Rüdlinger’s visit and the victorious home lap of The New American Painting after its successful yearlong, eight-country tour. The exhibition, which included Sam’s work along with that of sixteen other renowned American artists (only one of whom, Grace Hartigan, was a woman), had encountered mixed reviews and unexpected hurdles. In Paris, Le Figaro labeled the work child’s play. In London, The Times seemed primarily impressed by the mammoth size of the paintings on display. Perhaps the English public recognized a value the critics did not, for the exhibition garnered the highest attendance in the history of the Tate. At Madrid’s Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo, the upper portion of the front door had to be sawed off to accommodate canvases by Jackson Pollock and Grace Hartigan. The Spanish, still under Franco’s thumb, were less obliging about Robert Motherwell’s politically charged Elegy for the Spanish Republic XXXV. They said they’d exhibit the painting only if he retitled it, a request he flatly refused. Across Europe, the upshot was that American art was big. It was risky, young, new, and produced by nonconformists, and it promised liberation. When the show returned to New York, in the spring of 1959, the art world heralded its success. Hilton Kramer reported that Abstract Expressionism “is now our certified contemporary style so far as museums, the critics, and the big investors in modern painting are concerned.” Art that had shocked the Europeans five years earlier was now respected. An ironic accomplishment, given that one of the central ambitions of its practitioners was to free themselves from a European heritage and the market that supported it. At the opening night event on May 25, guests supped at the uptown homes of renowned collectors, then rode in limousines to preview the MoMA show. The festivities, Kramer concluded, “had

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the air of a college on Saturday night after the big game: I’ve never seen so many happy faces in a museum.”5 Sam was both elated and skeptical about all the attention. Writing Kornfeld in Switzerland, he asked, What do you plan to do for us painter types now? In the next line, he worried, There seems to be too much interest in our work. We seem to be darlings—hell. He knew the fickleness of taste. Critics alternately lauded or bashed de Kooning depending on whether he was in an abstract or a figurative phase. Within a year, John Canaday, the art critic at the New York Times, was predicting a twilight settling over Abstract Expressionist painting. But as the 1950s came to an end, criticism was not the only measure of a style’s success: art was viewed more and more as a commodity. Before, dealers had handled art sales discreetly; now auction houses created events. The sale of art had become its own form of theatrical spectacle. Guests attended auctions in dinner jackets and evening gowns and drank champagne. Fortune magazine compared investments in the art market to investments in the stock market, calling old masters “gilt-edged securities.” Impressionist art, which had spiked from a few hundred dollars to several hundred thousand, was “blue-chip,” while contemporary art was recommended for its “speculative growth.”6 In the catalogue for a show aptly titled Business Buys American Art, the Whitney Museum described the latest trend: large-scale commissions and purchases by corporate America. Falling in step with abstract American painting’s conquest of the world stage, companies like Hallmark and IBM were amassing collections as investments and tax write-offs. They were exhibiting these works of art in lobbies, boardrooms, and dining rooms. A year earlier, in 1958, Rothko had accepted a $35,000 commission to create about seven canvases for the Four Seasons restaurant in the new Seagram Building. Eventually, he backed out of his contract, after calling the diners “rich bastards” and telling his studio assistant, “Anybody who will eat that kind of food for those kinds of prices will never look at a painting of mine.” While Rothko was deeply uncomfortable with power structures and his behavior was subversive, other artists, like Alexander Calder, Franz Kline, and Sam, welcomed the patronage, income, and exposure.7 Right before he’d left for his first trip to Japan in 1957, Sam had, on the strength of a series of drawings, secured just such a commission for a mural for the Chase Manhattan Bank’s new offices. His contract stated that the





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payment for the work would not exceed $17,000. Not as large as Rothko’s sum—Sam was not as famous, nor was he painting more than a half dozen canvases but rather one large mural. And large it was. At eight feet high and a vast thirty-eight feet long, the Chase Mural is three times the length of one of the panels of the Basel Mural and twelve feet longer than Sam’s Tokyo Mural. Early on, Sam referred to it as Drapeau américain (American Flag), and, indeed, its primary colors—red, blue, and yellow—unfurl like flags or banners across the extended white tableau. As with the Tokyo Mural, Sam was working on a canvas for a low-ceilinged room. As a result, his forms needed to be compressed to encourage the viewer’s eye to move horizontally along the length of the space. The British art historian David Anfam has noted Sam’s debt in the Chase Mural to the late cutouts of Henri Matisse, especially Matisse’s nine-panel installation The Swimming Pool, created at the end of his life for the walls of his dining room at the Hôtel Régina. Since Matisse’s installation was taken down when he died in 1954, it’s unlikely that Sam had viewed this site-specific work of blue, hard-edged, cut-paper figures. However, in the early 1950s, when Sam first arrived in Paris, he’d watched Matisse’s daughter, Marguerite Matisse Duthuit, as she sat on the floor of Georges Duthuit’s office, diligently cutting out the colored-paper shapes for her father’s final artwork.8 The Chase Manhattan Bank Mural, as it came to be called, has the blocky, solid shapes that Sam had begun using in 1958 in Round the World. While Round the World fills the center of the canvas like a Pangaean landmass, the Chase Mural is a long parade of repetitive structures. Both works display an overall shift in Sam’s style. He has abandoned the diaphanous, ethereal surfaces of his Paris years in favor of larger white areas and concentrated masses of flat color. He’d begun incorporating acrylic emulsion into his oil-based compositions. The addition of plastic medium, as Sam referred to the synthetic paint recently introduced to the American market, resulted in brighter, more dominant colors with sharper edges. It dried faster than oil alone and allowed him to work quickly. The other major factor impacting Sam and his work was the hectic tempo of the city of New York. Despite the grand scale of the architecture, the compressed density of the buildings oppressed Sam. In an interview with the Sunday PostDispatch, Sam called the city “primitive—like getting back to a cave. It is

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barren.” The description probably didn’t endear him to his fellow Manhattanites.9 Privately, in a letter to Meyer, he admitted that New York upsets me and I have had to find calm and purpose in myself and in the space of the city and its pressures. At that moment, the primary stress on Sam was where to paint now that Teruko and Kayo had taken over the apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. The living room was adequate for the time being but only for small works. Soon Kayo would start crawling.10 Up until then, when Sam needed to work on a large scale, he’d subleased studio space in downtown Manhattan from artists who were away, first from Jon Schueler, and then, during the spring and summer of 1959 while he was painting the Chase Mural, from Larry Rivers while Rivers painted and played jazz in the Hamptons. With the mural finished, Rivers returning to the city, and the demand on Sam’s domestic space increasing, he needed his own place to work and retreat. This was a massive problem in New York, where space was expensive. A windfall of $35,000, not from selling art but from competing on the TV game show The $64,000 Question, had allowed Rivers to rent a 7,500-square-foot duplex, costing $235 per month. Most artists weren’t so lucky, nor did they have deep pockets. But Sam was flush thanks to his final payment for the Chase Mural. He set off in search of a studio. Instead of going door to door or relying on word of mouth, as he had in Paris, Sam hired a real estate agent. This was unheard-of among New York artists, who mostly lived in dark, cramped spaces. Al Held was shocked. “Sam went to buildings nobody would dream of looking at because the space was too good.”11 He quickly settled on 340 Broadway, which spanned the block from West Twenty-First to West Twenty-Second Streets. It wasn’t a typical dingy twenty-five-by-a-hundred-foot artist’s loft. It was grand and clean. It had sixteen-foot ceilings and frosted glass skylights, which evened out the light. With two extra rooms that Sam didn’t require, it was the most magnificent artist’s space anyone had ever seen in New York, so large that Sam persuaded Martha Jackson to cosign the lease and use one of the extra sections for storage. The other he rented to painter and filmmaker Al Leslie, who was finishing his edits on the Beat classic Pull My Daisy with the documentary photographer Robert Frank. Even with the new studio space, Sam was still jumpy and out of his element in New York. The constant jockeying for power and position





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exhausted and distracted him. He was not a regular at the Cedar Tavern, where older, first-generation New York School artists Franz Kline, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning drank and argued. Sam thought Kline funny, but the fawning around de Kooning annoyed him. “Everyone thought he was the gnat’s eyelash,” Sam said. Though he was friends with many of them, Sam did not join younger, second-generation painters like Al Held, Al Leslie, Grace Hartigan, and Norman Bluhm when they went out for cheap beer and Chinese food.12 Sam was undoubtedly shaped by many of the same events as this second generation of abstract painters. Like them, he was formed more by the trauma of World War II than by the poverty of the Depression, more by the GI Bill than by the Federal Arts Project. Yet Sam’s development ran concurrently with that of the first generation. His contemporary Al Held had been in Paris at the same time as Sam, but Held had not gained the renown there that Sam had.13 Inadvertently, Sam had made what the art curator Paul Schimmel termed “an end-run around first generation painters, bringing the New York School to Paris, but filtered through the lens of California.” Schimmel theorized that the resentment directed toward Sam was because “he was not tied to the Cedar Tavern.”14The result was a layered, complex, and fraught relationship with the New York art world. Sam knew this. “I was a fugitive,” he said.15 Sam’s venture to Japan and his continued travels only reinforced the view that he did not belong anywhere but particularly not in New York. In the late 1950s, “New York was still a very insular place,” Al Leslie observed, “and Sam was an internationalist.”16 Now his growing wealth cast another shadow over him. How had Sam succeeded so swiftly? Was he too marketdriven? Was he a sellout? And then there was Sam’s fractious relationship with Norman Bluhm. Bluhm had arrived in Paris on the GI Bill in 1949, a year before Sam did. In Paris, they’d been friends and had briefly shared studio space on the boulevard Arago. Then Bluhm returned to the States slightly before Sam, bringing with him their shared preference for allover fields of transparent washes. He’d scored a show at Castelli Gallery in 1957. When Bluhm’s show was reviewed by the poet James Schuyler in ArtNews, Schuyler brought up the question of the similarities between the two artists’ work. To Sam, the differences were obvious. His painting Big Red (1953) predated Bluhm’s

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Bleeding Rain (1956) by three years. Yet to the untrained eye, they look to have been created by the same artist. Even though their work had since evolved in different directions, the comparison forced them into the position of having to defend themselves as to who preceded whom first stylistically. The friendship was compromised.17 That fall, in an effort to connect with the New York scene, Sam, along with Al Leslie, participated in Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. Kaprow was beginning to work with items like food, paint, and furniture to produce events that connected the artist to the viewer. Two years earlier, in the middle of Art Informel’s attack on Japanese culture, Sam and the artist Toshimitsu Imai had done their own small “happening,” splattering paint on a sign at Kyobashi bridge in Tokyo in front of a small audience. Later, the sign was displayed in the gallery window of the Sam Francis/Toshimitsu Imai Exhibition. In Japan, the guerrilla-style events of the Gutai group responded to the scarcity and the lack of infrastructure after the war. After the bombings, they literally had no gallery spaces to show their work, so they took their art into the streets. But at New York’s Reuben Gallery, Kaprow gave all the artists involved a set of written instructions. Audience members were told not to clap and were required to change seats on command. When Kaprow rang a bell, Leslie and Sam were supposed to paint lines on a sheet of canvas. What had felt vital, fun, and even necessary in Japan felt tedious and overschematic in New York. Kaprow’s choreographed “Simon says” proceedings did not appeal to either Leslie or Sam. They both burst into fits of laughter and created free-form pictures. It was a happening, after all, a spontaneous performance, or so they thought. Kaprow wasn’t pleased. From then on, he banned Leslie and Sam from participating in his programs. The fact that Sam and Teruko were outsiders in the New York art world could have brought them closer. Instead, Sam’s wanderlust returned. They decided to leave New York for Paris, imagining that a change of scenery would alleviate their troubles. For Sam, the vexation centered on the New York art world’s failure to recognize his talent as the European art world had. Teruko hoped that in Paris there would be less strain and struggle, and that Sam would put down roots. In the first week of January 1960, after only nine months in New York, Sam left for London, then Paris, where he intended to find a home for Teruko and Kayo.





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Sam’s new studio partner, Al Leslie, thought Sam returned for another reason. “Sam was the Pollock of Paris,” Leslie said. In Paris, Sam was legendary, first generation.18 Whatever the combination of reasons for his departure, Sam was confident he would continue to develop New York as his American home base. After all, he had just signed a five-year lease on the Broadway studio. But, except for a few visits lasting a month or two, Sam never again resided in New York.

13

I Am a Seismograph

On a spring evening in 1960, shortly after Sam, Teruko, and Kayo moved into a spacious apartment at 18, rue du Douanier-Rousseau, Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle came over for dinner. The four artists sat around a wooden table as outside the light turned to a tarnished silver. In the corner of the room, a cast-iron radiator clanked. Sam lit candles. Riopelle slumped forward in his caned chair and gingerly poured a tall glass from the bottle of brilliant yellow Pernod with his left hand. Teruko pointed to Riopelle’s bandaged right hand. “What happened?” The usually boisterous Riopelle merely grunted and curled his hand inward like a wounded paw. “He was so angry he hit me in his sleep!” Mitchell said. “In the middle of the night, he whacked my head.” She leaned across the table and pointed at a bump under the short curl of bangs across her forehead. “Look how hard it is,” she bragged. “My head broke his hand.” After their guests departed, Teruko turned to Sam. “I like Joan Mitchell,” she said. “She has muscles. But I am not upside-down like your friends.” Sam chuckled at Teruko’s characterization of his spirited compatriots. Joan Mitchell and Jean Paul Riopelle were the crash-bang-boom couple of the art world, bruising and breaking bones wherever they went. A few 150





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weeks earlier, Rachel Jacobs had limped away with a broken toe from an argument with Mitchell about their respective dogs. Between Mitchell and Riopelle, the battle centered on his unrestrained sexual promiscuity and her jealousy. Riopelle was not good at hiding his behavior, and in their more intense alcohol-fueled episodes, one of them invariably exploded at the other. Teruko knew Sam was “a flirt.” If he was unfaithful, she was letting him know: she was not the kind of woman who could tolerate having it paraded in front of her.1 Unlike Riopelle and Mitchell, Sam and Teruko did not throw plates or punches. They might yell, but Sam preferred to walk away from arguments. Recently though, he’d found himself accusing Teruko. One evening, the conversation grew heated, and Sam yelled, “You broke up my marriage to Muriel.” “When we met, I didn’t even know you were a married man,” Teruko protested. She claimed she’d been an innocent girl. “I’m simple,” she stated flatly. In truth, Teruko had not been an innocent girl when they met, yet she wanted the world to be straightforward, predictable, and controlled. Only twenty-one when the atomic bombs fell on Japan, she had lived through the resulting chaos. In February 1960, just before she and Kayo arrived in Paris, France had exploded its own atomic bomb in the Algerian Sahara. Code-named Gerboise Bleue (Blue Jerboa, a desert rat), it was France’s first nuclear test, and it put France in the same atomic club as the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain. Moscow and Japan protested the tests. In Morocco, two thousand people marched outside the French embassy despite a ban on public demonstrations. For the last seven years, in an effort to win independence, a guerrilla war had raged in French Algeria. The recent atomic testing incited further bloodletting. Soon the violence spilled over into the streets of Paris. Sam understood that the disorder and uncertainty in the headlines were a terrifying reminder to Teruko of the devastation she’d already survived. This, added to Sam’s unpredictability, increased Teruko’s anxiety. Instead of helping the marriage, their move to Paris made it worse. As they settled into their apartment, Sam began building a hi-fi system, bringing home a vacuum tube, screws, a coil of copper wire. But this activity, too, upset Teruko. Kayo was walking, and she was afraid the baby

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Figure 9. Sam Francis and Kayo Francis Malik, Paris, 1960.

would get hold of one of the tiny gadgets or wires he left lying around and would put it in her mouth. Sam arranged a baby corral in the living room so Kayo would be safe while Teruko painted and he tinkered, but Teruko was still concerned. They spent more and more time apart. It was an easy drive or train ride to Bern, Switzerland, where Kornfeld gave Sam the carriage house next door to the auction gallery as a studio space. Sometimes Sam was gone only a day, sometimes a week or two. “We live in separate worlds,” Teruko complained when he returned. She was punctual to the minute and expected the same from him. When Kornfeld came to visit, Sam confessed, “I feel like a tiger in a cage.” •

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It was the dawn of the 1960s, the cacophonous decade of protests, the counterculture, political upheaval, and the generation gap. In America, nearly half the population was under eighteen. This young society, the most affluent in US history, struggled to wrest leadership from the previous generation and to make its mark on history. The charismatic and handsome John F. Kennedy won the Democratic primary. The first student civil rights sit-in took place in a Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina, and the oral contraceptive pill became available to women. (It would not be legalized in France until 1967.) In Japan, teenagers clashed with police in riot gear while protesting a security treaty between Japan and the United States that they feared would lead to another war. Thousands were injured, and one woman died. In Germany, following food shortages, 160,000 refugees crossed from East to West Berlin. In response, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev demanded the construction of the 103-mile-long Berlin Wall. And in France, violence resulting from Algeria’s struggle for independence bloodied the charming boulevards of Paris. Over the last two years, not far from where Sam, Teruko, and Kayo lived, an auxiliary police force was detaining, torturing, and murdering Algerians, even throwing them into the Seine. Dead bodies had begun to wash up on the banks of the river.2 As geopolitical differences continued to assert themselves, power changed hands, and new alliances formed. The confluence of a young, affluent, economically mobile population, on the one hand, and a society rife with the anxieties and pressures of the Cold War, on the other, challenged the formal structures in all art forms. To many artists, mere abstraction no longer appeared revolutionary. The position of the detached viewer was jettisoned in favor of that of the active participant. Immediate experience became the vogue. In Osaka, the Japanese Gutai group produced the International Sky Festival (1960), suspending thirty banners of artwork on ropes tethered to helium balloons. On the streets of Paris, the filmmaker Jean Rouch stepped in front of his camera and commented in Chronique d’un été (1961) on his own creation. Within months, cinema verité (filmmaking that aims at candid realism) became hip. At the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely nearly set fire to the building when his sculptural assemblage Homage to New York (1960) self-destructed in the garden. Tinguely, with the help of

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Robert Rauschenberg, had created Homage after rummaging through the garbage of all five boroughs to collect junk for his “suicide” sculpture. At the event, Al Leslie presented him with a butchered baby lamb. Thinking it was a dead dog, not realizing it was a contribution for dinner, Tinguely buried the lamb in the snow as part of his sculpture.3 Sam and Teruko visited Jean Tinguely shortly after he returned from his New York event. He was living on l’impasse Ronsin, an alley near Montparnasse, which had been taken over by an artists’ colony. In 1916, Constantin Brancusi was the first artist resident. He was followed by the painters Odilon Redon and Max Ernst. Over forty years, artists converted a labyrinth of abandoned sheds into a snaking artery of live-work studios. The joke: the artists there shared many beds but only one toilet, and not even the john had a roof. Now, at l’impasse Ronsin, Yves Klein, Tinguely, and Tinguely’s new girlfriend, Niki de Saint Phalle, belonged to a group of young Nouveaux réalistes. They defied convention as they explored new ways to perceive and portray reality in both their art and their lives. Both married to other people but in open relationships when they met, Tinguely and de Saint Phalle were dubbed the Bonnie and Clyde of the art world. Formerly a cover girl for Vogue and Life, de Saint Phalle dressed in a white jumpsuit and shot a .22 rifle into bags of paint to create performance paintings. While Tinguely’s art exploded and burned, her art bled. In her essay “Reflections on Violence,” Hannah Arendt tapped into the ethos of this new generation, who “live with a greater awareness of the possibility of doomsday . . . because this was their first decisive experience in the world.”4 This was not true of either Sam or Teruko, who had been born and raised during periods of relative peace. Even if Sam experienced early tragedy, his home life had been stable, as was Teruko’s quiet emerald island upbringing. Though impoverished, Tinguely and de Saint Phalle lived in a kinetic world, a wacky bohemian island of repurposed detritus discarded by the bourgeoisie of Paris. On their visit to a huge garage warehouse—full of all manner of scavenged bric-a-brac that Tinguely used to create his kinetic sculptures: wheels, springs, rusted toys, pots, pans, bells, and wires—Sam was captivated by the way the artists aroused and stimulated one another. Dirt-poor, outrageous, and ungovernable, they were nonetheless in constant dialogue with each other. In contrast, he had become bourgeois. He looked



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over at Teruko, impeccably dressed in a narrow skirt, high heels, and scarf tied securely under her chin. If the world was unpredictable and disorderly, as Sam recognized and Teruko feared, he wanted to embrace the chaos. •



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A month later, Sam and Teruko attended the thirtieth Venice Biennale. Held every two years in the Giardini Pubblici, the Biennale was the premier modern art exhibition, a glamorous showcase for the international avant-garde. During the day, art was unveiled. Throughout the night, everyone attended parties. Artists, critics, curators, collectors, filmmakers, and movie stars rode the vaporetti along Venice’s byzantine waterways. French heartthrob and New Wave film star Jean-Paul Belmondo drifted along the Grand Canal. Art champion Peggy Guggenheim, wearing a pair of jazzy sunglasses, floated by in her private gondola steered by her own young gondolier. Peter Selz, the new curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, remembered noticing a short, rotund man ambling under the plane trees and trying to skirt a flock of pigeons. He was followed by an elegant woman in a kimono. Someone next to him nodded in the couple’s direction. “There goes Sam Francis.” The woman was Teruko. A toad and a princess, Selz thought. “He was not an attractive man, but boy could he paint!”5 Kiki Kogelnik, dressed in a shift of pink fabric fastened together by safety pins, appeared at the biennale with the visionary artist-cum-architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. The half-Jewish Hundertwasser had grown up in Austria during the war. He escaped persecution by joining a Hitler youth group. After his years of marching in formation and jerking his arm out in heil-Hitler salutes, he claimed to be vehemently opposed to any representation of a straight line. His paintings and buildings were all decorative curlicues and spirals of brightly colored shapes. He was an odd choice of paramour for Kogelnik, who occasionally bragged that her father had been a Nazi. “Nearly everybody in Austria was a Nazi,” she acknowledged. Predictability bored Kogelnik. She was provocative, beautiful, and talented. Still, at only twenty-five, she was unformed as an artist.6 Kogelnik and Sam had met years before when he was a young American in Paris drinking beer with Kimber Smith at Les Deux Magots. At the time,

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Figure 10. Sam Francis and Ida Chagall at the Venice Biennale, 1960.

Sam was living with Muriel, and Kogelnik was engaged to the Austrian expressionist painter Arnulf Rainer. Though both Sam and Kogelnik had arrived in Venice with other people, neither was feeling attached to their current companion. Sam, the stifled tiger in his cage, found himself bewitched by Kogelnik. With her body barely covered by her pink outfit and a funny hat balanced on her head, she was outrageous, improvisational, and modern. A camera crew followed her. Like Tinguely and de Saint Phalle, Kogelnik didn’t acknowledge a boundary between life and art. Intentionally or inadvertently, the enchanting if dangerous Kogelnik would be Sam’s conduit out of his marriage to Teruko. In this floating city of lovers, Sam and Kiki rendezvoused by night. Kayo was safe with her nanny in Paris. Teruko was back at the hotel, or so Sam thought. But gripped with a headache, unable to sleep, and fed up with waiting for her husband, Teruko went looking for Sam. She found him under the ornate shadows of the basilica kissing Kogelnik in the moonlight. Though Teruko knew Sam was flirtatious and evasive, and she probably suspected affairs,





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witnessing his transgression was shattering. And in so public a format as the biennale. She couldn’t speak, only weep. Lost in his rapture, Sam was unaware of Teruko’s presence until he saw her dart past—the long stream of black hair was unmistakable. Before he could react, she hurled herself into the canal. A splash, and he was there beside her. The dark and murky water smelled of sewage and was surprisingly deep where the slippery algaecovered steps disappeared below the surface. Teruko clung to Sam as he pulled her out onto the cobblestones. Shivering and wet, he hurried her back to their hotel. The next morning, they returned to Paris. If Teruko was shocked by Sam’s unfaithfulness, he was mortified by her extreme reaction. He had rescued her from the water, but her desperate act and anxious misery unnerved him. Instead of bringing them closer, it pushed him further away.7 Just as when Muriel learned about his affair with Carol Haerer, Sam retreated to his Arcueil studio. Perhaps in response to his mood, almost all the paintings he created that year were blue. The blue paintings he did in 1960 were deeply personal manifestations of turmoil that Sam referred to again as “monster configurations.” Thinly washed, distorted blue forms swallowed up his beautiful, clean white space. This quickly changed. In works like Blue d’Arcueil, Blue Cross, Blue Figure, and Blue in Motion (all 1960), the blue malformations burst and dissolve into globular bubbles that congeal along the perimeters of the paintings. Not only his marital woes played on Sam’s consciousness and thus impacted this body of work. One inspiration was undoubtedly Henri Matisse’s 1952 Blue Nude, a paper cutout pasted on whiteboard. Not far from Sam’s studio, on l’impasse Ronsin, Yves Klein combined his reverence for Matisse’s Blue Nude with the Japanese calligraphic concept of “the living brush.” Klein used naked women as human paintbrushes, “conducting” them to roll around in blue paint and then smearing their bodies against his canvases. Never completely comfortable with the spectacle of performance art, Sam struggled to find another way to open his work to the viewer in a period when art was becoming ever more participatory. The large murals he’d done in Basel, Japan, and New York were certainly one format. Rothko pointed out the benefits of painting large canvases: “However you paint the larger picture, you are in it.” But, for the most

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part, these blue paintings done in 1960 were smaller and deeply private. At the same time, their orbed shapes were familiar and ordinary. When Peter Selz saw them a few years later, he noted that the early blue forms looked like clenched fists. The fist, Selz identified, was a universal symbol, memorably used by Thomas Mann in Death in Venice to represent the denial of desire. It’s interesting that Selz, who never knew of Teruko’s jump into the Venetian canal, tuned in to the elements of both Venice and death to which these monster configurations referred. “Art turns personal fate into the fate of mankind in the life of mankind,” Sam wrote, commenting on art’s ability to merge the unique with the universal.8 Sam had worked with blue before. In his early Paris years, when he’d approached one color at a time, he’d done a series of nearly all-blue canvases. Prussian, sapphire, and ultramarine blue dominate In Lovely Blueness (1955–57). But while In Lovely Blueness depicts an ideal realm where God and man, each in their own spheres, coexist in serene harmony, Sam’s warped, early Blue Balls alludes to the site of Gerboise Bleue, France’s nuclear test and the blue desert rat. A world that was exploding, decomposing, and mutating before the viewer’s eyes. The color blue held multiple meanings for Sam. One of his aphorisms stated that blue was his mother liquid, matrix. Blue signaled his presence in the painting. It was the color he used to incorporate himself into the work. “Blue is the color of speculation. Because it is full of shadow,” he said. “There is darkness in it. The resident quality of blue is darkness.” Most of all, Sam said of blue, “It’s hard to put into words, but blue comes back to life by dissolving itself.” But for anything to be reborn, it first has to end.9 •

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In midsummer, Teruko and Kayo left the heat of Paris for the South of France to stay at the home of Sam’s London dealer, Charles Gimpel. After a brief visit, Sam traveled to Zurich to create a series of lithographs for his show opening that fall at Moderna Museet in Stockholm curated by a young, maverick director named Pontus Hultén. Sam’s Swiss dealer, Eberhard Kornfeld, who’d begun his career as a print specialist, funded the lithographic enterprise by acting as publisher. Far cheaper than paint-





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ings, prints provided Kornfeld, and now Sam, with an additional income stream. In Europe, artists like Picasso and Miró enjoyed close relationships with master printers. However, in America, few artists worked in a medium that allowed them to produce multiple images. This would soon change when Andy Warhol popularized a silk-screen portrait of Marilyn Monroe in 1962. But in 1960, when Sam arrived in Zurich and began the process of pulling an image from a stone, the American print renaissance was still in an embryonic stage of development. Shown into a whitewashed room of the workshop, Sam was immediately awestruck by the beautiful white space. He told the printer Emil Matthieu he didn’t want to ruin the walls and floor. “These can be washed down and repainted,” Matthieu reassured him. Then Matthieu left him alone in the room. Sam stood quietly. Occasionally Matthieu peeked in through a crack in the door, only to see Sam standing silently in front of the stone. Finally, after three hours of contemplation, Sam sprang to life. In a frenzy, he covered not just the stones, walls, and floor but also the ceiling in what Matthieu called a “volcanic eruption” of colored paint. Long hard hours but very satisfying to work together, Sam wrote his father from Switzerland, to make something that is the result of teamwork.10 It wasn’t just the collaboration that stimulated Sam. He loved the physicality and rhythmic movement of sponging the stone with water and rolling on the ink. “I had a romance with the stone,” he explained later. “You breathe on it and it shows.”11 Most of all, he loved working with the stone flat on the table beneath him. This change of position from vertical to horizontal—something he hadn’t done much since his time in the hospital—would, from then on, alter his painting process. That autumn, Teruko and Kayo left Paris for Japan to stay with Teruko’s family. She was preparing for a show at the Minami Gallery in Tokyo. Sam hoped that the show would reawaken her verve and independence. He stayed behind, continuing to work in Switzerland, then traveling to Sweden to install his exhibition, with a side trip to visit Kogelnik in Austria. From Japan, Teruko wrote to Kornfeld and to Sam’s parents, anxious about where Sam was and when he would join her and Kayo. On December 11, having stopped off in Paris and New York, Sam finally

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arrived. It had been three months since Kayo had seen her father. She was now speaking Japanese. To Sam’s delight, she called him “brother daddy.” The next week, five earthquakes rocked Japan. No one was hurt, but Sam was excited, almost feverish, at the sight of high buildings in downtown Tokyo swaying back and forth like saplings in a strong wind. He began to run a slight temperature, which he attributed to stress and the tumultuous atmosphere around him. On his daily two-mile walk to the hut on the outskirts of the city where he painted, he pondered his dilemma with Teruko. His Japanese dealer, Kusuo Shimizu, planned to show both Sam and Teruko at the Minami Gallery in the new year. Teruko’s solo exhibition would take place in February, and Sam’s a month later. Sam knew the recognition for her artwork meant a great deal to Teruko. She did not want to remain in his shadow, her identity marginalized by his. She’d recently written his stepmother of her happiness at the prospect of showing: “I have galleries in New York, Bern, London and Tokyo.” Sam was counting on her involvement with work, the nearness of her family, and the attention of the art world to create a more stable emotional scaffolding for her. Yet he was taking no chances. He did not inform Teruko that after she’d left for Japan with Kayo, he’d seen Kogelnik in Austria and then brought her to Paris. By this time, Sam knew he needed to leave the marriage, but, wrestling with a silent inward complaining torture out of my sense of guilt in front of Kayo, he delayed.12 The feverish pace of travel and painting, combined with the balancing act between his marriage and his affair, began to take their toll. He lost weight. At first, he thought it was due to exercise and a new diet of fruits and vegetables. But on January 1, he became quite ill. Seems I was attacked by a virus, oriental, unknown to me before. So now I’m yellow and thin. Can you see me yellow and thin? he wrote Kornfeld. Have been to American Army Hospital for a real check and rest and so feel better now and may be able to get up in a week or so. He planned to leave Japan as soon as he got stronger. His doctor advised a rest cure with no travel or painting. First, though, he intended to buy Teruko a house and settle her comfortably. Everything, he believed, will be arranged and well.13 But before Sam could make arrangements for Teruko, he relapsed. The illness was neither oriental nor unknown.

14

A Dance with Mr. Death

Sam awoke in a white room: white walls, white ceiling, white sheets. Dr. Barandun was leaning over him, clad in his lab coat. A pipe dangled from his mouth, and he held a large pair of gleaming scissors. “Schnitt, schnitt” (Cut, cut). Dr. Barandun pointed with his shiny shears at Sam’s genitals. The pipe wagged up and down in his mouth. Sam burst out laughing. It was not a dream. The white room was in the Tiefenauspital, a hospital in the medieval city of Bern. Outside the window rose the jagged peaks of the Alps. The man standing over him was the renowned immunologist and cancer specialist—and fledgling art collector—Silvio Barandun. It was March 1961. Two months earlier, when Sam had relapsed in Japan, he’d feared the worst: cancer. He contacted Kornfeld, who immediately arranged for him to fly to Switzerland and undergo medical tests. In Zurich, nothing specific was found, though an infection in his kidneys was suspected. Kornfeld pressured Sam to come directly to Bern, where he could be examined at the Tiefenauspital by his friend Dr. Barandun. However, when no cancer was detected, Sam was so relieved that he decided to go skiing with Kogelnik. Checking out of the hospital, he traveled to the resort town of 161

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Zermatt. A few weeks later, in the snow-covered village beneath the Matterhorn, Sam walked into a pub and collapsed. By the time Sam was admitted to the emergency ward in Bern, he was gravely ill. He suffered from night sweats and fevers. He had blood in his urine and sperm. His prostate was enlarged and sensitive to touch; his right testicle was massive and red. This time, the tuberculosis had infected his urogenital tract, impacting his kidneys, testicles, and prostate. Dr. Barandun put him on a regime of streptomycin infusions and strict bed rest for the first four to six months of a yearlong treatment. Bern had been chosen primarily by Kornfeld because of Barandun’s reputation. In addition, Kornfeld lived nearby. He was Sam’s primary dealer in Europe and his dear friend. He could be trusted to discreetly handle Sam’s business affairs and correspondence while he received treatment. For the first few months, Barandun’s daily injections caused Sam’s right arm to ache and his fingers to grow numb. Kogelnik had accompanied him to Bern, but Barandun insisted she leave. Sam was highly contagious and didn’t need the excitement and distraction of Kogelnik’s presence. He was progressing slowly. Again, he was in for a long haul. He later recalled feeling in a state of psychic shock and poisoned physically by the toxins and also poisoned in the mind too. Exhausted, depressed, and critically ill, he could barely speak on the phone, let alone hold a pen or a brush. He curled in upon himself like a wounded animal, suffering in silence. He was reduced to a pair of blue eyes, floating in their sockets, gazing at the white ceiling. I just want to sleep and wonder when I’ll wake up and be my old self again or new self, is what I really want. Part of me is sleeping waiting for something inside my bones to crack open. Compounding his physical pain was the guilt he felt over his situation with Teruko.1 When Sam had left for treatment in Switzerland, Teruko and Kayo stayed behind in Tokyo. She needed to prepare for her show at the Minami Gallery, and, at that point, Sam had no idea how long he’d be gone. When he learned he’d relapsed with tuberculosis, he couldn’t risk infecting either of them. He intended to return to Japan to settle their situation. In the meantime, he worried that a permanent split would affect both Teruko and Kayo. Teruko complained of a heart ailment to Sam and to his friend the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno. However, she wouldn’t reveal if her heart condition was from anxiety, loss, or a true disease. In March, Teruko sent a





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letter to Switzerland, urgently requesting that Sam sign an extension on Kayo’s visa so they could stay in Tokyo. She seemed to want to develop her career in Japan. She was happy to have returned. She stated that she depended on him only for Kayo’s sake. Relieved that Teruko was considering a life apart from him, Sam wrote to his parents that they were on good enough terms. From his hospital bed, he signed Kayo’s extension, wrote a will, and set up a trust fund for his daughter. Barandun had explained to him the possibility of infertility from tuberculosis in his testes. Kayo might be the only child he would ever father.2 Because Kornfeld kept the nature of Sam’s illness under wraps, few visitors trekked to Switzerland. When Sam was out of isolation, the painter Lilly Keller arrived to play chess with him. Jean Tinguely came with Pontus Hultén, and Ida Chagall hung a painting by her father, Marc Chagall, in Sam’s hospital room to relieve the sterility of the environment. But for the most part, Sam was alone with Barandun or Kornfeld, who would arrive with letters. By spring, after four months of incapacitation, Sam was well enough to sit up in bed for one hour each day. He asked Barandun if he could paint. Paper, watercolors, and inks were supplied. He could work only on a small scale, but he worked intensely. Because he had limited time upright and only fast-drying watercolors, he painted quickly. Unable to stand, he worked sitting up with the paper below him on the horizontal plane of his bed tray rather than in front of him on an easel or a wall. Like working on a lithography stone, this position altered his relationship to the image. Though he was not encased in a plaster cast, as during his 1946 hospital stay, he again hovered over images spread out below him. For that one hour, his quiet room transformed into a studio. He wrote his patron Franz Meyer that he was making some spots on white paper and hoped to liven up the bed linen.3 By the next month, Sam was well enough to rise from his bed, and a table was placed beside the large bank of windows that opened onto a balcony. A garden lay below. As the weather warmed, the windows were opened wide so that Sam could reach out his arm and allow birds to land and feed from his hand. Now, with the curtains open and light flooding the room, Sam resumed drawing the blue orbs that he’d begun in the fall of 1960 in Paris and continued in his fevered state in Japan. Images bubbled and ballooned like

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wounded, enlarged organs on the laid paper that covered his tray and table. Stopping by on his rounds, Dr. Barandun would sit puffing on his pipe, while Sam, surrounded by books and brushes, speculated about the connection between the round blue forms and his current disease. Six months before the onset of his illness, Sam had started this series of warped and swollen balls. Could they be premonitory messages from his subconscious? Barandun was a thoughtful man, but he was a specialist in immunodeficiency and not psychology. He was three years older than Sam, and he quickly came to delight in his visits with the patient who had turned the white nirvana of the hospital into a colorful art studio. Once, while examining Sam, Barandun held up a painted blue ball and suggested they compare it to one of Sam’s real, red ones. The left testicle has made very good progress and is nearly normal now, Sam wrote his father. Humor helped, but from experience, Sam knew that his pain and discomfort would likely linger for a long time. To his friend Tōno, he elaborated: I live in a paradise of hellish blue balls—merely floating, everything floats, everything floats . . . . So I continue to make my machines of strokes, dabs and splashes and indulge in my dialectic of eros.4 Back in Tokyo, Tōno was gathering the paintings Sam had left behind in Japan for the show at the Minami Gallery. He seized on the title from Sam’s letter: Blue Balls. Jackson Pollock had painted Blue Poles with the help of Tony Smith one night in 1952 in a drunken and depressed frenzy. Tōno thought of the title as a play on Pollock and on Sam’s current testicular condition. In a fragment of a poem, Tōno wrote, “Blue balls blue poles blue microbes blue balloons blue kidneys blue nothing.”5 The images Sam had left behind for his show had a hallucinatory, erotic character. Even Barandun marveled at the prognostic quality of some of Sam’s globular forms. If Barandun did not wholly agree with Sam’s prophetic notions, he was tolerant of Sam’s belief in the psyche’s power to heal the body. As an avid follower of Carl Jung, Sam fervently trusted in the close psychosomatic relationship between his artistic work and his health. When Sam had first read Jung as an undergraduate student in a psychology class at UC Berkeley, Jung was still mostly unknown outside Europe. His anti-Semitic comments during the 1930s hadn’t helped his popularity directly after the war. But by the 1960s, he was ascending to the status of countercul-





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ture guru. Jungian dream analysis had been used by Dr. Joseph Henderson in 1939 to help Jackson Pollock. Federico Fellini was currently suffering a post–La Dolce Vita creative block and undergoing Jungian analysis. In 1963, Fellini would release 8 ½, a film about a filmmaker with a creative block who finds deliverance through Jung’s process of “individuation.”6 In his own life, Jung battled depression. In 1913, when he split with Freud, he suffered a collapse that lasted several years. To find his way back from his breakdown, he created a series of visionary illustrations. Between 1915 and 1930, Jung worked on what would become the fabled illuminated manuscript The Red Book, a prophetic confrontation with his unconscious. Jung called The Red Book his “numinous beginning . . . . Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and integration into life.”7 Sam recognized that he had reached an impasse both physically and emotionally. I have a personality that does everything at 200%, he wrote his father. Since 1954, he’d obsessively devoted himself to his painting and never established any habits or rhythm between the positive and negative poles. He needed rest. He needed to heal without the constant fear of death. In the last analysis, Sam wrote, the body must heal itself, the drugs just cut the time.8 According to Sam, his body would heal and reach optimal health through the process of consolidation of my whole being. It was the same psychological integration that Fellini sought: individuation. Jung postulated that we are all made of a multitude of opposites: good and evil, male and female, illness and health, jealousy and benevolence, love and hate, all the yins and yangs of our positive and negative poles. Some character traits are active while others, such as illness, remain buried deep within our psyches, acting upon us in destructive ways. To achieve individuation, the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious must be synthesized with the conscious mind. This, Jung taught, happens when we examine and interact with messages transmitted by visions in our dreams. Since Jung saw artists as visionaries capable of reaching below the surface of the conscious mind and seizing the primordial image, he considered the artist a “higher man.” If individuation was achieved by forming and shaping what we inherit from the universe into the particular, then for Sam, this specificity was accomplished through painting. This was how

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he transmuted his unconscious imagery into matter, his diseased organs into things. “Paintings,” Sam stated, “were the traces left behind by my individuation process.”9 “Space and bodies in it are one and the same, like my body and soul,” Sam explained a few years later to Betty Freeman. “The blue bodies are not shapes but are imbedded things—minute particulars imbedded into light. In the hospital I was in love with things. I was a prisoner in love with the products of my imagination. So they appeared to me as things imbedded in space. The space was also a thing.”10 The blue things of his imagination, while imprisoning him, also anchored him. To Peter Selz, he explained how the images helped him during this difficult period. “I was flying off in all directions at the time and the Blue Balls series was a way to contain myself.”11 In his monograph on Sam Francis, Selz identifies the genesis of the Blue Balls as erotic pen-and-ink drawings Sam did in response to Matisse’s Blue Nude. But while Matisse’s Blue Nude is a singular female form, Sam’s figures are usually entangled couples. The yin and yang and what Jung called the anima and the animus—the masculine and feminine sides of the psyche. Another influence for both the drawings that preceded the Blue Balls and for the Blue Balls themselves was surely the Japanese tradition of shunga. A popular form of erotica executed in woodblock print format from the Edo period (1615–1868), shunga depict males and females copulating, often with the genitalia graphically exaggerated. By the time of Sam’s hospitalization, his entwined figures were reduced to their genitalia and mutating into abstract shapes. As sensual and fluid as the shapes appear, they are also castrated forms, each isolated from the others on a sterile white field. Though Sam stated he knew he wasn’t castrated, he was cut off from the world, ball-sick and blood sick and full of a poison that I hadn’t let come out of me.12 Whether Sam’s Blue Balls represented primordial dream images of sex or castration, manifestations of approaching disease, a yin-yang aspect of his psyche, or, as his friend the architect Arata Isozaki would later observe, Zen rock garden formations—bulbous, hard shapes resting on an empty field—they were stepping-stones away from a previous body of work and toward a new one. “The most we can do,” Jung writes, “is to dream the myth onward and give it a modern dress.”13





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Figure 11. Sam Francis blowing bubbles while at Tiefenauspital, Bern, summer 1961.

One other important aspect of Jung’s history undoubtedly impacted Sam’s thinking. Early in life, Jung had lost his mother, not to death, as Sam had, but to mental illness. For the rest of his life, Jung was unable to trust any one woman. He advocated polygamy—at least for men. For nearly thirty years, Jung lived in an unconventional relationship with his wife, Emma Jung, and Toni Wolff, a woman who was his patient and then his collaborator. Sam certainly did not want to cohabit with both Teruko and Kogelnik. During the most acute stages of his illness, he’d encouraged Kogelnik to leave Switzerland and take his studio in New York. He would never be entirely comfortable unpaired, yet he was also incapable of committing solely to one person, even to one place. There is never just one ball bouncing around in Sam’s space, but a multitude. I have learned to love and admire Teruko but it is difficult for us to live together. I want to live alone, Sam wrote to his parents. Of course I still love and admire Muriel and I have a friend who visits me in Bern from Vienna, an extraordinary woman whom I am very fond of but who is as independent as I am. Instead of choosing, Sam habitually fled or remained indecisive. From his hospital bed, Sam contemplated a new way to live. The doctor advises I should make a permanent studio-home for myself somewhere where I can be fully at ease. I guess I will do so at last, but a little reluctantly as I like to be a leaf in the life-wind.

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Ever since Sam had begun to make money selling his paintings, he’d been generous. Yvonne Rainer remembered borrowing $400 from Sam in 1959 for an illegal abortion when she couldn’t get the money from anyone else. Now, illness, boredom, and his innate restlessness made him feel particularly magnanimous. He wanted to invest in land and art. Kornfeld was advising him on the purchase of etchings and lithographs by Goya, Matisse, and Picasso. Someday I may give my collection to Los Altos or San Francisco or a small museum somewhere near the Bay Area. He asked Dusanne to have two blue silk dresses made for his two stout nurses and shipped to Switzerland. He bought a Citroën for his parents to use when they visited Europe. Please don’t worry about it . . . . I feel a little useless lying in bed so long so the mere fact of helping you out at all gives my ego a lift, makes me feel more potent so it’s good for me—aids my recovery—I’m well aware of how all this works in the psyche.14 As he considered his living options once free of the hospital, he knew he needed to be somewhere warm and near the sea. Besides the Bay Area, he was considering Long Island, Connecticut, or the South of France, where Joan Mitchell had invited him to join Jean Paul Riopelle, Shirley Jaffe, and the rest of the gang holed up in Cap d’Antibes. “We have 9 Italian sailors (oh so beautiful) and a cook. You could just sit in the sun or shade and fish over the side or not fish.” Kimber Smith added a postscript. He’d split from his wife; everyone was drinking and fighting from dawn until they passed out. He warned Sam: “the whole fucking circle is frightening.”15 By the end of July, Sam could leave the hospital for dinner once a week. Sometimes he would visit Kogelnik, who had returned from New York and was ensconced in an apartment that Kornfeld had rented close by. But, instead of finding comfort in the arms of the woman he professed to love, Sam recoiled. He was still weak and depressed. Perhaps he also sensed that, for all her charm, Kogelnik was not maternal. She was fierce and outgoing. And Sam had been conditioned since childhood to take flight in the face of pain and illness. In October, he was pronounced clinically cured. He would continue medication for the next year, but he was finally discharged from the hospital. With his release, he decided: he needed to be by himself, to stand still. Since warmth and rest were imperative and the political situation





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between France and Algeria was too disgusting for me at the moment, he chose to come to California. Leaving Kogelnik behind and accompanied by Kornfeld, Dr. Barandun, Sister Gisela Newmann (his nurse), and the art historian Hans Bollinger, Sam flew to New York and then on to California. An old childhood friend who was now his lawyer, Bill Elliott, found him a Spanish hacienda, a four-hundred-acre property overlooking the ocean in the foothills of Montecito, in Santa Barbara County. The house backed up to an outcropping of yellow sandstone. Below stretched a garden, a pond, and an orchard full of avocado, lemon, and orange trees. There was a stable with four horses. All mares, Sam joked, they would be mares! No stallion here on the place. After a short stay, his entourage left him in the care of Sister Gisela on the crazy beautiful coast of California. Just as Sam departed Switzerland, Teruko and Kayo’s boat had docked in Genoa, Italy. Teruko had decided to return from Japan. She’d shipped rolls of her paintings ahead to Kornfeld. Though Sam had sent her a long letter explaining that he was settling in California, Teruko had never received it and was surprised to find he’d decamped from Switzerland before she arrived. Fearful, exhausted, and self-preserving, Sam fled without preparing her adequately for the fact that, now cured, he no longer intended to live with her and Kayo. It’s unclear what Teruko expected from Sam when she landed. She contacted Kornfeld and told him she needed money because she intended to travel. And funds were duly provided. However, within two weeks, she rented an apartment in the Bavarian Alps, near the home of a friend from her days in New York. She realized, even if Sam didn’t, that Kayo needed stability. She then wrote to Sam that he was an egoist and a bad husband, an accusation he didn’t deny. A week later, she apologized. Sam knew he’d mistreated her, but Teruko was also stubbornly refusing to accept that the marriage was over. Through Kornfeld, he continued to wire money, which she was grateful to receive. But what she really wanted was to not be abandoned with a child. Feeling deserted and unwanted, Teruko sank into depression. Then, somehow, she learned that Kogelnik had visited Sam in Bern. This too unmoored her as her pride was again profoundly wounded. For a Japanese woman, the stigma and shame were too great. For a woman

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with Teruko’s temperament, the heartache was unbearable. She was miserable, desperate, and incapable of caring for herself or for Kayo. Knowing she was in trouble, she finally asked Sam to recommend a doctor. My way of helping her has to be via second party for the moment, Sam explained in a long letter to Kornfeld and Barandun, asking them both to intercede on his behalf. He knew that even though she had asked, Teruko might resist his advice. Barandun could help her medically and find her the treatment she desperately needed. Kornfeld and his old friend Arnold Rüdlinger, who had shown interest in her work, could help her reestablish her identity. She is a very great painter and still doesn’t know yet her powers.16 While Teruko struggled in Switzerland, Sam felt his energy return in Santa Barbara. After two months of sleeping thirteen hours a day, he woke one morning and ran like a child to the window. Outside he saw a sea of fog as thick and white as milk, the sun bursting through like a spot of blood. Recovered, he was desperate to win back Kogelnik’s heart. He wrote her a series of letters explaining his state of mind and reasons for pushing her away in Switzerland. I wanted only your life for my death and that’s an unfair bargain—I wanted only that I could sick melt in your arms, be taken care of, healed by you and so I knew enough now about love in the pit of me somewhere that I could only go away to be by myself. In the garden of his hacienda, he picked up a shovel and began to dig shit and dead leaves and grass out of the pond. Smelled great like all the rotten mess I could think of. He told Kogelnik he was unearthing his guilt, self-hatred, and remorse for abandoning Kayo; his grief over the loss of his mother; and his horror of having killed Roy Powers. I woke up and thought why was I not lying dead under some cold stone down by the river . . . and thinking why did I run so far with this body to see it—if I could only put the load down and take a look at the underface [sic]. I felt guilty for everything that lived and mostly for living when others died so I felt unconsciously that I would be struck dead by god for this sin of living. But he was not dead. He was reawakening in California, in the landscape of his boyhood. The place where he had once been just a freckledfaced kid first dreaming my way into the world of things as they are. He wrote Kogelnik about his joy in finally confronting his past. The only pain left is the pain of awakening to myself. His brother came to visit: We spoke





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warmly together for the 1st time in 7 years. If his illness—what he referred to as my dance with Mr. Death—was from repressed guilt, then the exposure of that guilt to the brilliant Santa Barbara sunshine healed him. Each day, with each push of the shovel, he excavated. I can’t tell you how fantastic it was to feel the change, Sam wrote. What I couldn’t do I wouldn’t do and that is my weakness, but not now.17

15

Resurrection

The first time Kayo Francis saw her father again after his nearly fatal illness was in the fall of 1962. It had been nearly two years since he’d said goodbye to her in Tokyo. Now she was three and a half years old, living with her mother in Switzerland. Sitting in the back of the Citroën, she felt confused. The man driving the car had the same dancing blue eyes as her Papa. He’d told her he was taking her to see Kornfeld and his wife, Elizabeth, whom she’d visited with her mother. Kayo looked out the window and wondered, “How can this be?” In Kayo’s memory and in all her mother’s photographs, her Papa was clean-shaven. This man had a big walrus mustache and had given her a bristly kiss. The only way she could reconcile her memories of Papa with the man in the driver’s seat was to believe that “I have two Papas!”1 She loved this new Papa. He was energetic and exciting. He’d shown up in a car that looked like a space capsule. He bought her a huge carriage and a giant rubber horse. She could climb into the carriage and pretend she was a princess. She could sit on the horse and imagine she was a cowgirl. Kayo spoke Japanese, German, and English. With her father, she practiced her English. But no sooner had her Papa arrived than he disappeared again. “That was Sam,” Kayo remembered. “He’d appear like a flash, and there’d be all this commotion, and then he’d be gone.” 175

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Figure 12. Eberhard Kornfeld and Sam Francis at Galerie Kornfeld preparing for Sam’s solo exhibition, Bern, August 1966.

Showing up out of the blue was Sam’s favorite mode of arrival. However, his impromptu visits didn’t sit well with Teruko. Having spent two months that year hospitalized for her heart and nervous conditions, she craved routine. She’d begun painting again but balked at any discussion of divorce. Kornfeld, interceding on Sam’s behalf, told her that Sam needed to be free not just from her but in all aspects of his life. Even Kornfeld never knew if Sam would attend one of his own openings until, looking across the room, he’d spot him in the crowd. After eight months of walking in the hills surrounding his Santa Barbara hacienda, reading Chinese novels in the garden, and digging out the scum of his literal and metaphorical pond, Sam craved stimulation. He’d reunited with his brother George and had a few visitors. With his vigor returning and his lease due for renewal, he decided to look for a





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place to live near Bill Elliott in the Los Angeles area. Once more, he alternated among various studios: New York, where Kogelnik occupied his studio; Paris; Zurich; and now California. Sam explained later to his friend Mark Whitney how he felt about reentering the world after his second sojourn on the brink of extinction: “I wanted to roar like a lion.”2 As it turned out, Sam’s illness and convalescence hadn’t damaged his career. His output in the years preceding his bout with urogenital tuberculosis had been so prodigious that, while bedridden, he’d had solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, Dusseldorf, Rome, and Vienna. He’d been included in more than sixty-five group shows. At the time, he was one of the most exhibited American artists in Europe and Japan. Meanwhile, reports that he’d disappeared into the white peaks of the Alps with an unspecified disease only to emerge with what Sam called his “old bounce” added to his allure and mystique. “Reincarnated” was the term Pierre Schneider used to describe Sam’s miraculous recovery.3 The art world Sam returned to was in the midst of a transformation of its own. Abstract Expressionism, the prevailing style of the 1940s and 1950s, was in decline in favor of a remarkable potpourri of approaches. Art was no longer elitist. It was participatory, happening in the streets and on the land, and celebrating the supermarket and the graphic elements of advertising. In 1962, in front of a televised audience, Niki de Saint Phalle, glamorously dressed in a fur coat, cowboy hat, and sunglasses, strode around helping Jean Tinguely detonate one of his sculptures in the desert near Las Vegas, a happening ironically called Study for the End of the World, No. 2. If happenings broke down the barrier between the artist and the viewer and brought the experience of creating (as well as destroying) art off the canvas and into the spectator’s realm, new styles like Pop art pulled their content directly from consumer society. Art seemed to fly off the shelves of the supermarket and appear on gallery walls. That same year, Andy Warhol premiered his iconic paintings of Campbell’s soup cans at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles; and, in New York, Leo Castelli showed Roy Lichtenstein’s comic-strip paintings of Popeye and Mickey Mouse. Minimalism, another important style moving to the forefront, favored reductive geometric shapes and uniform colors. Frank Stella produced black-and-white pinstripe paintings and stated that “a painting is a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more.”4 If the Expressionists had favored

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highly charged and gestural surfaces, Pop artists and Minimalists denied emotion, preferring industrial production over the artist’s hand. Frequently competing with, if not flatly criticizing, one another, artists who worked in these styles explored accessible and popular subject matter. During this period between 1962 and 1963, as Sam completed his Blue Balls series, his output slowed to a crawl. The last of the paintings, done in oil and acrylics, had a denser consistency than those he’d produced in the hospital using fluid inks and watercolors. Signaling his return to health and his longing for his new muse, Kogelnik, he wrote her that this work would be hot odes to you and not like the blue balls I so painfully struck. These newer orbs, infused with cadmium yellow, crimson red, dark green, and violet, expanded like optical embryos across sea-white spaces. The critic Roberta Smith would later note “the desire for intensity and release” in this group of canvases. She observed that the paintings “mark a turning point in American painting with unusual complexity . . . . The ‘Blue Balls’ paintings reflect an artist determined to bring the emotional fervor of Abstract Expressionism (especially that of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning) forward into a brave new world of 60’s art, a world in which coolness, style, emotional understatement and formal overstatement were the paramount goals.” In the midst of the cacophonous diversification of styles, Sam had found a way to bridge them.5 Then, abruptly, Sam put down his brush. His colored balls, swimming around the edges, were not only leaving an ever-larger empty space in the center of the canvas but also bursting apart. The clenched fist that Selz had noted in the early Blue Balls gave way to the open hand. Pierre Schneider surmised that perhaps Sam hesitated to move to a completely open format because he’d heard that his supporters in Paris, namely Georges Duthuit and Schneider himself, were concerned that his palette had become too minimal and stark. Whiteness was taking over his painting, Schneider said. And Georges Duthuit agreed: “Soon there won’t be anything else.” They believed the recent paintings had lost the airy softness of his early Paris work.6 In fact, Sam paused to assess the difficulties in representing a void on a two-dimensional surface. For Sam, the white centers of his paintings were never meant to be seen as empty space. White had a deeply felt and sacred presence. It was a thing in and of itself, the still center of his orbiting





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world. A place of discovery and recovery from the turmoil that color represented. But he must have sensed that he wasn’t ready to undertake its complete exploration. He had just returned from near oblivion, brushed up close again to extinction. What Sam courted, he also feared. Instead of pursuing that quiet absolute, he turned his attention to other mediums and more material matters. Lithography became his passion. While Kogelnik continued to live and work in his New York studio— with Sam visiting sporadically—he was invited to be the resident artist at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. Tamarind was a nonprofit printing venture founded by the artist June Wayne in 1960. It sought to restore interest in cooperative printmaking in the United States. In Europe, where Sam had printed just before and after his illness, the métier of printmaking remained robust. In America, the Abstract Expressionist painters considered “the graphic medium the lowest possible way of expressing yourself.”7 Art, for an Expressionist, needed to be direct. Tamarind’s mission was to change this attitude, and Sam, who had sampled the process and believed in its restitution, was an early adopter. Lithography offered a distinctly different methodology than painting. When Sam approached a canvas, he engaged in what he referred to as a direct and “unexpected” process that drew him inside it. Lithography, on the other hand, required him to compose and visualize from the outside and in reverse. First, he drew with crayon or greasy liquid (tusche) on a flat limestone or metal plate. The stone or plate was moistened with water, and the parts not covered with crayon or tusche soaked up the water. Oil printer’s ink was applied with a roller, and this ink adhered to the greasy parts of the stone. Finally, the paper was pressed into the stone, and the ink transferred to the paper. For each additional color, the procedure repeated. This long and involved process was an intellectual challenge, Sam said, as opposed to the more physical work of painting. “It forces me to think things out first.”8 During a period when Sam wasn’t painting and his galleries were clamoring for work, lithography provided a new product and a steady stream of income. The prints, attractively priced at $350, sold quickly. An edition of twenty lithos could expeditiously net him $4,000. Paintings, more expensive and usually requiring more judicious consideration from a

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potential buyer, could take longer to sell. By the early 1960s, the price of a small Sam Francis canvas started at $1,000, with the larger ones going for up to $7,000. His older work fetched more than double that. Sam determined the cost of his paintings by the French point system, based on the dimensions of the artwork (length multiplied by width) and the medium (gouache or watercolor on paper or oil on canvas). He worked on consignment with his galleries. If they were mounting a show and needed thirty paintings, a dealer usually got a 30 percent discount on all sales, though Sam often negotiated them down to 25 percent. When Sam was pressed for money, Kornfeld bought a group of paintings outright at 50 percent, taking the risk that he could sell them. Because it could take time for his dealers to collect payments from clients, Sam received a monthly stipend from both Kornfeld and Martha Jackson. Out of his running tab, he would ask his dealers to pay bills—attorneys’ fees, storage, insurance, studio costs, Teruko’s expenses—then deduct those amounts from his account. He would often send a telegram to Kornfeld or Jackson requesting that money be wired to his bank accounts in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Switzerland.9 In all likelihood, Sam’s multifaceted banking practice resulted from his complicated lifestyle: multiple marriages, divorces, and studio locations in various countries necessitated, at least for Sam, separate accounting systems and separate banks. In Switzerland, his bank account could not be taxed. It was confidential, and disclosure was forbidden by law. He was prospering. In 1964, he would sell Around the Blue, a large oil canvas from 1958, to the Tate in London for $25,000—his highest price yet. That single painting cost the Tate more than the price of the average new home in the United States (less than $20,000). At a time when a new car cost $3,000 and a gallon of gas $0.25, when a professor earned roughly $11,000 a year at a public institution and a congressman $30,000, Sam was a wealthy man doing business around the world.10 His work at Tamarind coincided with two projects that would absorb the next few years of his life: One Cent Life and The Pasadena Box. One Cent Life was proposed by Sam’s friend the poet and painter Walasse Ting. Originally from Shanghai, Ting had traveled to Paris in the early 1950s. He mingled in the same circles as Sam. An exuberant free spirit, he created jazzy verses combining the erotic with the profane, sex with food, the

Plate 1. Sam Francis, For Fred, dated as 1949.

Plate 2. Sam Francis, Upper Air, dated as 1951.

Plate 3. Sam Francis, Deep Orange and Black, dated as 1954–55.

Plate 4. Sam Francis, Big Orange, undated, 1954.

Plate 5. Sam Francis, In Lovely Blueness (No. 1), undated, 1955–57.

Plate 6. Sam Francis, Moby Dick, undated, 1957–58.

Plate 7. Sam Francis, Blue Balls, dated as 1961.

Plate 8. Sam Francis, Sky Painting, performance piece over Tokyo Bay, sponsored by the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, 1966.

Plate 9. A man walks in front of the giant painting Berlin Red (1969–70), by artist Sam Francis, during a press preview of the exhibition Pacific Standard Time in Berlin, March 14, 2012.

Plate 10. Sam Francis, Untitled, dated as 1980.

Plate 11. View of The Last Works in progress in Sam Francis’s West Channel Road studio, Santa Monica, 1994.





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pope with JFK. Quickly Ting and Sam became beloved friends. Ting called him Fatty, King Sam, or Uncle. In one of the many poems Ting composed about him, he described Sam’s physicality: “stand up like gorilla, lie down like seal, sit down like frog.”11 Ting’s imagery was equally playful, a menagerie of flowers, birds, and naked women swathed in neon colors. Sometime in 1962, Ting discussed his idea for One Cent Life with Sam and Kornfeld over dim sum in New York’s Chinatown. It would be a folio of twenty-eight of Ting’s poems with lithographs by artists in styles ranging from Abstract Expressionist to Pop. Sam and Kornfeld signed on as Ting’s angel benefactors. “The idea was born from global experience, close contact with culture, pseudo-culture, primitive existential worries, urban erotic and eastern wisdom,” Kornfeld said of that meeting.12 Printed in Paris by Maurice Beaudet, published in Switzerland by Eberhard Kornfeld, and edited in California by Sam Francis, One Cent Life comprised flashing psychedelic portraits, monochromes, and splattered biomorphic images. This is going to be the most gorgeous, richest, glorious, book in the world!!! Sam proclaimed in a letter to Ting.13 Almost two years in the making, One Cent Life included contributions from old and new friends from Europe, New York, and Asia, among them Joan Mitchell, Jean Paul Riopelle, Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Karel Appel, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg, and Kiki Kogelnik, who contributed a pink Venus. The completed folio suggested that artists as diverse as Andy Warhol and Joan Mitchell might have more in common than the fads of the marketplace implied. Their mutual dedication to their art was more important than a shared stylistic sensibility. The project was also the first in a long line of commercial and philanthropic endeavors that Sam would pursue from his base in California. By the spring of 1963, Sam had rented a home at 345 West Channel Road in Santa Monica. It was rumored to have once belonged to Charlie Chaplin, who had housed his collection of fire trucks there. Cradled between the mountains and the blue Pacific, Santa Monica was an esoteric community in the early 1960s. Hotels and beach clubs lined Ocean Avenue, and an amusement park occupied the end of the pier. Raymond Chandler had immortalized the area in his noir classic The Big Sleep: “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.” Indeed, just a

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stone’s throw from Sam’s property was the beach house where President Kennedy met Marilyn Monroe for assignations right before she died; over the hill lived the crotchety libertine writer Henry Miller as well as Miller’s paramour from his Paris years, the erotic diarist Anaïs Nin. Drawn to the area because of its bohemian allure and cheaper rents— compared to the more affluent community of Brentwood, where Bill Elliott lived down the street from the actor and soon-to-be-governor Ronald Reagan—Sam recognized that he was settling on the other side of the continent from Kogelnik and half a world away from Kayo. His relationship with Teruko had deteriorated to the point where any contact with her, even over the phone, caused his body to ache and his back to spasm. Proximity brought fears of tuberculosis. To Sam, his physical health was inseparable from his difficulties with Teruko. He hoped that by creating a home in California, he might convince her to let Kayo live part of the year with him. His new home, a ranch house on a half-acre of land, also had a profound link to his past. A seven-minute car ride away from his front door stood the majestic Georgian Hotel. The bright blue building with yellow trim was where he’d last seen his mother alive twenty-eight years earlier. Sam was now forty years old. He’d lived and worked on three continents. His third marriage was over. Having been reborn twice, he didn’t want to waste time. He wanted to roar. For a few months, Kogelnik tried living with Sam in Santa Monica. But after her extended time in New York immersed in the Pop art scene happening on the East Coast, she’d found her milieu in Gotham. She’d developed friendships with Oldenburg, Lichtenstein, and Warhol. She’d stopped painting abstractions and embraced the imagery of fashion and advertising. In an interview about their time together, Kogelnik pointed to their generation gap: not just the twelve-year difference in their ages but also the dissimilarity in their approaches to art. “I didn’t paint like him. I was in another group. And then most of the time he was sick in California so I was here in [New York] alone, which I didn’t mind.”14 In moments of resentment, Sam derided the work of her media-appropriating friends as too commercial. “You sell your paintings,” Kogelnik pointed out, “and they are twenty times as expensive.” In moments of persuasion, he wrote, You impress me so much as a great woman you need my





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greatness and I need yours.15 He combined the letters of his name to surround hers like an embrace, forming the moniker Sakikim. Kogelnik returned a note signed Kismaki. She did not want to disappear into Sam’s greatness, into his name, into the vast open space of California that he so adored. Tension built in what was now a cross-continental relationship. In early 1964, when Sam closed on the property on West Channel Road, it was his friend the Chinese calligrapher “Doc” Groupp and his wife Juliann (a.k.a. Spike)—not Kogelnik—who relocated from New York to help Sam build his art compound. Spike became his first secretary, while Doc oversaw construction, occasionally stepping in to assist in the studio. Soon Sam was writing Walasse Ting: When are you coming to California? He did not want to live alone. He wanted to build an art community. Sam’s arrival in Southern California placed him in a unique position. In Paris, he’d been an aspirant seeking to find his method as a painter. Once he arrived in New York, having made his name in Europe, he’d been viewed as an outsider and a latecomer. In Japan, he was heralded and adored but still a foreigner, one of the conquerors in a conquered land. Now, as he planted himself under the palm trees in the sandy soil of Santa Monica, Sam realized that he’d arrived at an auspicious moment. He was the most famous painter the area boasted. Unlike in New York, his international reputation was a boon in Southern California. “Sam brought class to the whole picture,” the artist Ed Ruscha remembered. To a city desperately trying to shed its regionalism, he gave global recognition.16 In contrast to artists in Paris, New York, and San Francisco, artists in the Los Angeles area had worked in almost complete isolation during the 1950s. This was attributable to several factors. The city’s museums had few examples of modern art and, therefore, little scholarship or documentation. Up until the 1950s, there was no tradition of patronage for the arts and no collector base. During the anticommunist era, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors went so far as to ban city art fairs, claiming that modern art was commie propaganda. In one rare instance in 1948, the actor Vincent Price had pushed back by helping to establish the Modern Institute of Art in Beverly Hills, but, after only two years, it closed due to lack of funds. By virtue of its size and sprawling geography, Los Angeles was decentralized, a series of enclaves without an urban core. It lacked a network of galleries. It did not have a Left Bank, Greenwich Village, or

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North Beach. The artist George Herms observed that in Los Angeles, wherever you were, “you were still forty-five minutes from everyone.”17 Off the beaten track and absent a codified art historical past, Los Angeles was nevertheless free from the aesthetic battles taking place in more established and entrenched metropolises. A few artists began to see the region as a ripe and open territory. “We’re a young city. We’re not an old city. We’re not surrounded by art. We don’t have to deal with our past because we don’t have a past,” the artist John Baldessari said. Robert Irwin echoed this sentiment: “All the things that New Yorkers would say to me was wrong with California—the lack of culture, place, sense of the city and all that—is exactly why I was here. It was very possible to entertain the future here.”18 By the time Sam appeared on the scene, a handful of artists including Irwin and Ruscha had concentrated around an unlikely character named Walter Hopps. A California native, Hopps had found his calling when he dropped out of Stanford, and then out of the biochemistry department at UCLA, to become an art impresario. At the age of twenty, Hopps put up his first significant show in Southern California at the carousel on the Santa Monica Pier in May 1955. Renting the space for $80 for a week, he stretched tarps between the poles and hung the canvases of a mix of Los Angeles and San Francisco painters: Clyfford Still, Mark Rothko, Richard Diebenkorn, and Jay DeFeo. Instead of the lighthearted organ music that usually accompanied the merry-go-round, recorded jazz played in the background. He didn’t sell any pieces, but he made a name for himself as an innovative curator. Soon after, he opened the Ferus Gallery on La Cienega Boulevard along with the assemblage artist Edward Kienholz. The actor, painter, and art collector Dennis Hopper called Hopps “the intellectual godfather” of the LA art scene. He was young and smart, an iconoclast who thought like an artist and hung out with the artists but looked like an FBI agent since he wore a suit and tie while the artists dressed like surfers or car mechanics. At Ferus, Hopps championed a group of artists who came to be known as the Cool School, people like Larry Bell, Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman, and Robert Irwin. Hopps was not a particularly good art dealer: the business side didn’t interest him as much as the art. He just followed his curiosity. Since he was a great talker, he started teaching a class called Looking at Modern





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Painting at UCLA Extension. Rather quickly, the class attracted a group of collectors that included the philanthropist Betty Freeman and Frederick and Marcia Weisman. Frederick Weisman, the president of Hunt Foods, would soon establish the Mid-Atlantic Toyota distributorship, amassing a fortune and investing in modern art. Also in the group was the real estate tycoon Ed Janss, the joint owner, along with his brother, of the Janss Investment Company, a third-generation real estate development company. They had recently acquired two ski resorts, Sun Valley in Idaho and Snowmass in Colorado. Sam met Hopps in the early days of the Ferus on one of his visits to Los Angeles. One day Sam wandered into the gallery. After a long time studying the art on the walls, he walked over to where Hopps and Kienholz were sitting, took a $100 bill out of his wallet, and offered it to them. Rent on the gallery was only $75 a month. When Kienholz asked Sam why he wanted to give them money if he wasn’t buying anything, Sam replied, “You guys are doing a good job, and I just want to help a little bit if I can.” From then on, Sam would occasionally show up to help Hopps hang exhibitions at Ferus.19 After only a few years at Ferus, Hopps was hired as the curator of the Pasadena Art Museum, and Kienholz decided to devote himself full-time to making his assemblage environments. Ferus was handed over to the more astute tutelage of Irving Blum. Blum was a showman known for affecting the debonair demeanor of Cary Grant. This was Hollywood, after all. With coiffed hair, impeccably tailored suits, and a fake aristocratic accent, he attracted the clientele the gallery lacked. Immediately, Blum put up a show of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans, uniting East and West Coast Pop artists under the Ferus brand. The year was 1962. Meanwhile, Hopps dismayed the garden club society of old Pasadena with the first Marcel Duchamp retrospective, Sam moved into his property at 345 West Channel Road, and the real estate tycoon Ed Janss purchased his first three major paintings: a Mark Rothko, a Jackson Pollock, and a Sam Francis. As word got around about the ski resort owner who was collecting art, Sports Illustrated interviewed Janss for a magazine spread. When they asked him who he thought were the world’s greatest artists, Janss named the only three painters he owned at that time: Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and Sam Francis. Within days of the article’s publication, Sam

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rang Janss’s doorbell in Thousand Oaks. Feet firmly planted, head thrown back slightly, he stuck out his hand. “My name is Sam Francis, and I want to meet the person who thinks I’m as good as Jackson Pollock.”20 By this time, Sam and Walter Hopps had joined forces on a philanthropic project for the Pasadena museum. The Pasadena Box was a set of thirteen Sam Francis lithographs and a unique gouache on paper in a white Lucite container. The images—swirls, balls, and splatters in primary reds, yellows, and blues on a white background—were of various sizes, one of them unrolling like a traditional Japanese scroll. Like Duchamp’s, Boîte-en-valise (a rectangular case that unfolds into a mini museum of Duchamp’s own work), the box was intended as a portable museum. Sam’s box was crafted in Japan, and, though proceeds went to the Pasadena museum, he paid for the fabrication of the box himself. Having it made in Japan allowed him to use Japanese packaging expertise and spend the yen that he couldn’t otherwise get out of the country. Like One Cent Life, the Pasadena Box embodied the spirit of cooperative vision. As Sam planted himself firmly in the milieu of Los Angeles, he also focused on projects crafted in different countries, drawing together diverse sources of support for his art and his community. The book and the box were rarefied objects as well as commercial products. Sam was in love with things, and these things were meant to be touched. They were meant to bring art into the hands of the viewer. Like the book, the box opened up. Inside was the world of Sam Francis. This is an exploration of itself, Sam wrote in a poem he inserted in one of the drawers of the box. Can you invent your own reality thus? Everything is here.21

16

I Love My Desires

By his own admission, Sam was not just messianic, he was slightly megalomaniacal. Fervent about painting, arrogant enough to value the importance of his work, he wanted to see his art recognized on a world stage. Moreover, he aspired to have a hand in crafting that stage. His sweeping ambition meant that he was inherently unstable. Instead of basking in his achievements, he continually needed to prove himself worthy. At times, he courted catastrophe, proving his own worst adversary. This led to a complicated relationship with success. Desire is not the same as accomplishment. Desire needs a challenge. It is appetite, not satiety. Sam’s desires often brought churning whirlwinds of activity, commotions that blinded him and made him reckless with people. In the spring of 1964, it appeared that Sam would finally realize his dream of spreading his paintings from east to west and around the globe. Arnold Rüdlinger approached Peter Selz with the idea of a Sam Francis exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where Selz was then the curator of painting and sculpture. Enthusiastic about the work, Selz immediately agreed to the exhibition. The solo show would open in 1966 and travel in Europe and Japan—connecting all the locales of Sam’s global reach. The coup of a MoMA exhibition would place Sam in the 187

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ranks of Rothko, Pollock, and Picasso. In California, where he was building his compound on West Channel Road, Sam was the most famous artist. And in Tokyo, an oil tycoon named Sazō Idemitsu was going to open a museum featuring a three-thousand-square-foot floor devoted to his collection of Francis paintings. While one could view eight of Monet’s Les Nymphéas at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, and in 1963 the Museu Picasso had opened in Barcelona, as yet no American artist had a single space devoted to their work. “You will be starting a new trend,” Martha Jackson wrote Sam. “We will have reason to fly about the globe in the new two thousand mile an hour jet!”1 Sam should have been pleased by Jackson’s reaction. Instead, he grumbled. Over the last year, he’d grown increasingly disenchanted with his reception in New York, and he blamed her. In the spring of 1963, the ArtNews critic Lawrence Campbell had dismissed his show at Jackson’s gallery as “unusually pleasing. Sam Francis is a splendid decorator.” Reviewing the same exhibition, the Minimalist sculptor and acerbic critic Donald Judd wrote, “Spontaneity would do much for Francis’ paintings, but primarily they need to be something else.”2 Unfavorable reviews might have caused a less secure painter to cling to his New York dealer, especially one who had supported him in his early, lean years. But Sam took the opportunity of the proposed MoMA show to renegotiate his contract with Jackson. It may be that he felt Jackson wasn’t promoting his work properly or courting the right critics. He pointed out that Kornfeld, whom Jackson called a wholesaler because he sold mostly to other galleries, gave him a better percentage on his commissions. Sam wanted the best deal for himself, and so he set his dealers to quarreling over him like combatant lovers. He knew Jackson didn’t want to lose him just as his career was accelerating. However, Jackson thought Sam’s wrangling for money was hasty and imprudent. Due to the Pop art craze, she foretold “a great danger of abstract art falling sharply in prices unless certain steps are taken to make it available on a reasonable basis.” In a recent sale, a Jackson Pollock had fetched only $15,000, “one-half the estimated value,” according to Jackson. A few days later, Sam mailed his cocky reply to her: “I hope abstract art falls off sharply in prices, and we can all be poor again. We can use my paintings and Pollock’s for bedspreads and tablecloths!” With MoMA’s and Idemitsu’s support, Sam became arrogant.



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For the time being, Jackson and Sam settled their differences, with Sam increasingly choosing to show only his lithographs at the Martha Jackson Gallery. For Sam, placing himself at the center of a struggle was a necessary component of value. Causing someone to jump for his business or his love gave him a sense of control. Wrestling between things—women, countries, art movements, dealers—was how he reached equilibrium. He courted change and drama, even encouraging conflict because it forced him to retreat into his art. Exhausting himself in the exterior world, he would finally turn toward the only safe harbor: painting. Venturing back to the canvas, he found a rhythm and a balance that life did not provide. Like emotional chaos, travel stimulated his creative process. Dating back to his childhood, Sam used flight not just to escape a painful situation but also to spark new visions. Moving from place to place was now ingrained in his creative process. It allowed him to contact different galleries, propose shows, exhibit, sell, and generate income. The art writer Jan Butterfield observed that Sam sought “the constant re-introduction of himself into other cultures which serves to refresh him, to keep him totally aware—both as a man and as an artist.”3 It also increased his desirability. •



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•



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Sazō Idemitsu was Sam’s second great patron. Franz Meyer Sr. had been his first, supporting him early in his career; buying Big Orange; then funding Sam’s first trip around the world. In Meyer’s honor, Sam had painted the jazzy Round the World (1958–60). When Meyer died in 1963, Sam wrote that the lawyer and collector had helped him immensely by giving him “disinterested” support. Idemitsu was offering the same sort of encouragement and guaranteed sponsorship plus his own floor of the Idemitsu Museum of Arts. Furthermore, he offered Sam the opportunity to go to Tokyo to consult on the design for this museum, which would overlook the Imperial Palace. The megalomaniac in Sam could not refuse. As the founder of Idemitsu Kosan, Ltd., Japan’s largest petroleum company, Idemitsu was the Rockefeller of Japan, a charismatic, authoritarian robber baron. Born in Fukuoka Prefecture in 1885, he had grown up hearing his father caution, “Do not depend on others, be independent, and

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you will live without laments.” It was an unusual perspective in a culture known for its homogeny. His father’s advice marked Idemitsu deeply. After working briefly as a tutor, he went into business as a distributor for Nippon Oil. Early on, he showed a knack for finding business opportunities under adverse conditions. In 1914, his nascent company beat out competitors for a contract with Manchurian Railways. Idemitsu had ingeniously developed a more viscous type of machine oil, thus solving the problem of machine oil burning off as a result of low viscosity during northern China’s icy winters. Later, he earned his nickname, Pirate, when he sailed out in a small boat to sell fuel oil to fishermen, instead of waiting for them to come into port.4 Motivated more by ingenuity than greed, Idemitsu developed a corporate philosophy for his company based on paternalism, moral character, respect, and consumer-focused business practices. A respect for work, not money, undergirded his company’s goals. Each employee should be educated, trained, and assigned work that matched their talents. After World War II, when the Allies took control of Japan’s oil industry and approximately one thousand employees of Idemitsu Kosan returned to their defeated country, he gathered his staff and told them, “As long as Japan’s people exist, the country will rise again and surprise the world.”5 He didn’t fire a single employee. Instead, he reconfigured his business, retrained his employees, and put them to work repairing radios, selling soy sauce, and retrieving oil left at the bottom of underground tanks. Sincere in his faith in himself, his employees, and his country, he achieved his most significant victory in 1953, and in the process, uplifted the spirits of his vanquished nation. A nationalist, Idemitsu resisted the monopolization of Japan’s domestic market by the major cartels of Standard Oil, Royal Dutch Shell, Texaco, and British Petroleum (now BP). In March 1953, after these companies cut his access to oil for sale around the world, he chartered a tanker, the Nisshō Maru, to do business in Iran, which had just nationalized its oil fields. To get there and return with oil, he ran the British naval blockade of Iran. When the ship arrived back in Japan with a cargo of oil priced 30 percent below market value, Idemitsu and his sailors received a hero’s welcome. What became known as the Nisshō Maru affair went down in history, establishing a relationship between Japan and Iran despite resistance from Western powers.





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Idemitsu was also a man of highly refined tastes who appreciated beautiful objects. But beauty for him went beyond the material. For an object to be beautiful, it had to express a man’s heart and a nation’s spirit. After the Nisshō Maru crisis, he rebuilt his oil empire and began collecting art. His focus was Japanese art: works by the Zen Buddhist monk Sengai Gibon, medieval ceramics, and calligraphic scrolls from the Edo period. These pieces represented not just his tastes but also his abiding respect for his nation. Then, one afternoon in 1960, he stumbled on Sam Francis’s White Line (1958–59). On a visit to his company’s New York office, Idemitsu stopped by Sam’s Chelsea penthouse, where his daughter Takako and son-in-law Yoshiaki Tōno (an art critic and Sam’s friend) were staying. At the time, Sam, Teruko, and Kayo were in Paris. Tōno described White Line as a painting with color streaming down either side, leaving the center of the canvas a perfect white waterfall. “This is great!” Idemitsu said as soon as he walked in the door. “People can enter this painting.” Idemitsu believed that people could not enter a picture by Picasso, but “this one is different . . . this one is fantastic.” He had no idea who Sam Francis was. He thought he must be Japanese.6 By the time Sam arrived in Tokyo four years later, in October 1964, Idemitsu had established a systematic collection of his work. In addition to the floor at the museum, he generously offered to build a studio for Sam to use any time he wanted to work in Japan. In the meantime, Sam got a temporary space on the top floor of the old Nisshō Kosan Building (a subsidiary of Idemitsu Kosan) in the Ginza district. Sam needed to work because he had a show opening in November at the Minami Gallery. That October, Japan was hosting the Summer Olympics, and Tokyo was in the throes of Olympic fever. The countrywide festivities meant that all of Sam’s meetings were postponed until the Olympics ended. He was stuck on Japanese time, in which no decision was ever rushed or arrived at without ceremony. He wrote Kornfeld, who was waiting for a visit: I expect I shall be here until about Christmas! The 1964 games were the first Olympics hosted by an Asian country, and the occasion served as a catalyst for ridding Tokyo of US bases. The theme for the opening ceremony was Japan’s ascension as a technological leader. A passenger jet transported the Olympic flame around the country, and for the first time, the games were broadcast in color and live across

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the globe by satellite. A recent housing boom had made Tokyo the most populated city in the world. A new subway line snaked through the city, Haneda Airport had been modernized, and the shinkansen (bullet train) now connected Osaka to Tokyo. Time magazine called Tokyo the most dynamic city on the face of the earth. No wonder Sam wanted to plant his flag there. Down the twisted streets of the city’s red-light district, narrow buildings crammed with pleasure trade establishments rose high into the night sky. Sam marveled at the city’s visual density, its juxtaposition of old and new. Modern buildings might contain as many as one hundred bars. Sam could grab a beer in a space the size of a small closet, standing elbowto-elbow with his friend Tōno and his Tokyo dealer, Kusuo Shimizu. The men could ride a dingy elevator up to a dance floor; above that, a supper club; and, higher still, a nightclub, where they would be entertained by hostesses in evening dresses. Los Angeles is sweet and placid next to Tokyo, Sam wrote his lawyer, Bill Elliott. I am like an ageing lion shuffling around trying not to step on the flowers.7 Sam had been asked to paint a mural for the National Gymnasium in the Olympic Village, but time constraints had made the commission impossible. Furthermore, he had not exhibited any new paintings since he’d fallen ill in his hut outside Tokyo in early 1960. For him, Japan had become symbolic of his inability to create new canvases. Since his Blue Balls series, he’d made only lithographs and smaller watercolors. The fact that his California home and studio were still under construction contributed to his difficulty focusing on large canvases. Now, sensing that he was on the brink of a new body of work, he intuited that the key lay four years in the past, in the paintings he’d created just before fever overtook him. “You can see it coming,” Sam told the art critic Barbara Rose when she asked him what led up to his Edge paintings. “I was doing Blue Balls, at the time and they became differentiated and began to go out, leave . . . .”8 In the few paintings he produced at the end of 1964, bright acrylic colors migrate to the perimeters as white yawns in the center of the canvas. It’s not surprising that Sam would embark on works so extreme in Japan, where he’d had such success and now enjoyed Idemitsu’s support. Given his complicated and peripatetic lifestyle and the energy he consumed in design and construction decisions (about his spaces in Japan and his California home and studio), it’s understandable that he paused





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before committing himself to the series. To Kornfeld, he wrote, just after the Minami Gallery show opened, I seemed to have had to work out my agony here in the Orient after falling ill here that winter in 1960. There is much to tell but I don’t feel able to say it all now—I feel I have completed another circle and I am tired, anguished but healthy and determined and there is much I don’t know.9 Sam’s anguish and determination were undoubtedly heightened by MoMA’s abrupt cancellation of his solo show. The curator, Peter Selz, had announced he was leaving New York and MoMA for the West Coast. Frustrated with his New York representation, Sam cast about for another gallery. Indeed, he decided to relinquish the Broadway studio he shared with Al Leslie and Martha Jackson—the space where Kogelnik had been working.10 He was also bent on divorcing Teruko, who was still contesting the separation. He wrote Kornfeld: I am determined to let go of the past. Something more was driving Sam’s attempts to let go of the past as he languished in Japan. Something he knew could explode his arrangements with Idemitsu and put an end to the tycoon’s support. For the last year, Sam had been carrying on a secret love affair with Idemitsu’s twenty-fouryear-old daughter, Mako. Sam surely realized that, as a traditional patriarch, his patron believed that daughters were the possessions of, first, their fathers, and then, after marriage, their Japanese husbands. But desire was Sam’s favorite trait in himself. Mako was yet another match that Sam couldn’t resist lighting. Born in 1940, just before the attack on Pearl Harbor and Japan’s declaration of war, Mako had grown up in a household that veered between frugality and affluence. In 1945, when she was five years old, her father sent his wife and daughters out of Tokyo to escape the bombardment. While Idemitsu stayed behind, struggling to keep the business going, his family was in the country selling their kimonos and pots and pans for food. After the war ended and her father’s business again prospered, Mako grew up in a wealthy household where every detail was carefully arranged and every emotion held in check. The trees in her father’s garden were pruned to perfection; her mother was either silent or scolding. On the rare occasions when her father was home, she would spot him dressed in his favorite indigo kimono taking his meals alone. Her father’s devotion to his business and his nation took precedence over his family. Mako escaped to the movies, where

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she sat and ate candy in the dark and watched Japanese love stories. These movies invariably ended sadly with a weeping woman forced into a marriage of servitude by her father. Mako barely understood the plots, but she resolved never to allow her father to marry her off against her will.11 She wanted to become a novelist and write her own tales. Her older sister, Takako, was living and painting in Paris, but Takako was married, whereas Mako was young and single. At twenty, she begged Idemitsu to let her study in America. At first, he resisted, but after Idemitsu Kosan opened a subsidiary at Rockefeller Plaza in New York, he finally allowed her to study on the East Coast. Mako enrolled first at Connecticut College for Women, then at Columbia University. She went to hear jazz. She met the African American hard-bop jazz pianist Horace Silver and posed in a kimono on the cover of his Tokyo Blues album. One evening in New York in the fall of 1962, the general manager of her father’s corporation invited her to his home for dinner. There, she was reintroduced to Sam Francis. Mako and Sam had met briefly when, in 1960, she’d visited her sister in Paris and he’d been with Teruko. Now, at the dinner in New York, Sam was accompanied by Kogelnik, captivating in a black cocktail dress. Mako wore a pinafore. Eighteen months later, as his relationship with Kogelnik fell apart, Sam invited Mako to dinner. His invitation seemed natural to her. Not only was her father his most significant patron but also her older sister, Taka, was married to his friend Tōno, and they knew many of the same people. That’s how it started. After the meal, Sam sent her a bouquet of wildflowers. A few months later, over Christmas, she visited him in Santa Monica. Though Sam was now forty and Mako only twenty-three, she had grown up with a powerful, absent father and thus seemed to understand Sam. Soon after their tryst began, her visa expired, and she departed for Europe. “I am jealous that you have much energy to leave people,” she wrote Sam from abroad. “I feel tired of seeing new people.” She called him Sam Chan (Lovable Sam). Her fleeting observations were cryptic yet accurate. “St. Tropez is the perfect place for you to live because there is nothing except emptiness.” She wanted to meet him in “a small village near the sea to see your round face.”12 Sam adored her. In his letters, he called her Mon Cheri! and Ma vivification. He said her touch lingering on his skin was mon torrent. He





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tracked her using her postcards, calling the American Express offices in Saint-Tropez, Zurich, and Rome to inquire if a young Japanese woman named Mako Idemitsu had picked up her mail. Just before he went to Japan, he caught up with her in Venice, where they holed up in a hotel overlooking the Grand Canal. Certainly, Sam understood the implications of wooing his patron’s daughter. He kept his affair with Mako a secret throughout 1965, as he traveled back and forth between America and Japan, consulting on his studio and the Idemitsu Museum. We are here incognito, he wrote Kornfeld when he visited Mako in New York. We wish to remain incognito. He worried about upsetting not only Idemitsu. As negotiations with Teruko’s lawyers proceeded and she appeared to be cooperating, Sam didn’t want to give her any reason to renege. For nearly a year, they’d argued over In Lovely Blueness (1955–56), the seminal, monumental painting that he’d finished two years before they met but that Teruko insisted he’d promised to give her. Finally, Sam reluctantly agreed to part with it on the condition that it be held in trust for Kayo. I am happy, he wrote Kornfeld, I’ve started on a great project—a series of paintings I’ve been slowly turning over inside me somewhere for the last few years. I imagine they will take me 10 years to finish. I can’t speak about them more but to say they will be finished one day. They are in her [Mako’s] honor.13 In January 1966, unbeknownst to her father, Mako left school in New York and moved in with Sam in Santa Monica. One afternoon, Sam, Mako, and Sam’s lawyer, Bill Elliott, were sitting in the Japanese garden Sam had planted on West Channel Road. Sam and Elliott had just returned from their late afternoon dip in the Pacific. They opened a bottle of wine and toasted the great pink ball of the setting sun. In the pond at their feet, gold, red, and white koi darted among the water lilies. Elliott looked at Mako and said, “If you love Sam, you’ll marry him.” Mako never knew if Sam put Elliott up to the proposal or if the proposal was Elliott’s idea. She did, in fact, love Sam. She enjoyed his friends. Although California cities perplexed her—never any people on the streets, only cars—she delighted in the relaxed beach lifestyle of Santa Monica. Sam nodded at Mako. “Yes,” he said. “Marry me.” Young, bewitched, in flight from one strong man, Mako agreed to wed another.

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She had her doubts about Sam’s track record, about her father’s reaction, about her own aims in life. But the current of energy around Sam was too strong and swift. With Sam, everything always happened all at once, and, though it was exciting, it was hard for Mako to catch her breath and think. Even though his divorce papers from Teruko hadn’t arrived, wedding invitations on tissue paper were sent out. On February 26, Mako, wrapped in a sari, said “I do” to Sam without informing her family. Only a handful of friends attended the ceremony. Two weeks later, after Sam’s divorce papers finally came through, Sam and Mako went to the county clerk’s office and registered as man and wife. She’d discovered she was pregnant. They left for Japan the following month, intending to ask for Idemitsu’s blessing and have a formal Japanese wedding. They did not tell him that they were already married or that Mako was carrying Sam’s baby. Hearing the news that his daughter wanted to marry Sam, Idemitsu had only two words. “White barbarian!” he yelled, casting Sam from the house. Sam had expected resistance, but Idemitsu’s vehemence shocked him. Within days, Idemitsu had converted Sam’s floor of the Idemitsu Museum into office space and had bolted the large double doors to Sam’s new studio in the Akasaka district. They are all crazy, Sam wrote Kornfeld. I have seen it on the outside—great! I came prepared to work and brought unfinished canvases with me.14 While Sam retreated to the Hilton Hotel, Mako stayed behind to plead with her family, revealing their marriage and her pregnancy. At this point, she became ill, perhaps suffering from morning sickness. Mon Cheri, Sam wrote. We must meet right away now that your father has said his words about you and me. Sam was afraid Mako would be unable to withstand her father’s wrath. The longer you stay there the more danger there is . . . I will now be happy he will give up my paintings . . . We are free! So please Mako chan just pack your bags and come. She came. Together they left Tokyo for the mountains for a few days of rest. The problem now was that her US visa had expired. Assuming they would have a Japanese wedding, they had not thought about bringing their US marriage certificate with them. Mako couldn’t leave Japan until the paperwork was sorted out. Meanwhile, intermediaries were called in. Friends of Idemitsu, even his mistress, spoke to him on Sam and Mako’s behalf. But Idemitsu continued to rage about the shame this marriage to





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a non-Japanese brought on his family. What would his employees think of him? Knowing that Idemitsu craved the respect of the European art world, Sam wrote a letter to Sir Herbert Read, the English art historian who supported his work and whom Idemitsu admired. Sir Herbert replied. Still, Idemitsu refused even to grant Sam and Mako another audience. Finally, Sam wrote Idemitsu a letter, sixteen pages of scrawl, which were then translated by his poet friend Makoto Ooka. The message was taken to Kyoto, where Idemitsu had escaped to recover from the traumatic news, and read to him by his masseuse. I apologize most humbly for my lack of grace and equally for my lack of necessary effort in showing my respect and gratitude . . . . Even in my most sincere actions I am in error . . . . What I am going to say now is not offered as an excuse but rather as a clarification of my thoughts and feelings so that you may know more about me. It seems you really know little of me. Your anger has helped me. I hope my reply may help you.15

Sam went on to discuss the museum. I never thought of the museum as something for me. I have considered it as a needed gift by you to the Japanese people and thus all people. That you wanted to make space for my work meant for me great responsibility.

He thanked Idemitsu for such an opportunity. He pointed out that the generosity went both ways. Of the many paintings of his that Idemitsu owned, Sam had given him at least three. I thank you for receiving them. In my own way, I believed the space in the museum and the space to paint in Akasaka were given to me in the same spirit.

The etiquette and ritual of gift giving in Japanese culture call for the receiver to twice politely refuse a gift. The giver then gently presents the gift a third time, and the receiver accepts it. To take back a gift is extremely rude. Sam’s reminder that his paintings had been given and accepted placed Idemitsu in the awkward position of breaking with Japanese decorum. To that end I applied myself . . . . I decided that because of my great esteem and love for Japan I would make new works as well as gather some older ones.

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Because of this, Sam explained, he’d reserved his best paintings for the Idemitsu Museum at the expense of collectors and museums in Europe and America. I felt it was of the first importance to have my best works guarded here in Japan where I have found my deepest inspiration.

Then Sam hinted that he would now have to speak with the museum directors of Europe and America to find homes for the work held in reserve for Idemitsu’s museum. He ended his letter by reminding Idemitsu of a past conversation. One day in my studio you said to me “Do nothing for me, just do your work.” I thought then you understood something beyond words. I therefore decided to do nothing and everything for you in my work.

It’s a startling letter, oblique, self-serving, and couched in the language of respect, even humility. Sam acknowledged that the lamentable misunderstanding between them was wholly of his own making. Aware that any mention of Mako or her pregnancy would anger Idemitsu, he alluded to their relationship only once, by referring to himself as Idemitsu’s new son-in-law. I know much better than anyone his weakness, Sam wrote to Idemitsu about himself. It worked. Recognizing that Idemitsu wanted approbation, Sam let him know that the world was watching. Sam understood that Idemitsu’s greatest weakness was his pride. Idemitsu would not want to be seen as small-minded, ungenerous, or xenophobic. Ever since the Medici family commissioned the Uffizi Gallery in Florence in the sixteenth century, art has been used to signify a patron’s taste, financial status, and good deeds. It has helped transform cities into cultural powerhouses. Idemitsu would not want to be misjudged and lose face on the world stage. He returned from Kyoto, called a meeting, and accepted Mako back into the family— conditionally. No public recognition of the marriage could happen for at least a year. At that time, Sam and Mako would have to return to Japan with the baby for Idemitsu to see. In the meantime, he would save face and protect the morals of his ten thousand employees, some of whom





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were impressionable young men who might be considering interracial marriage. I can’t use the studio until next year, Sam wrote Elliott. If Sam and Mako conducted themselves like good boys and girls, then Idemitsu would consent to a new building. I will have my wing and be able to perhaps design the whole building. Amen!16

17

The Space at the Center Is Reserved for You

Sitting with Betty Freeman in his newly completed complex on West Channel Road, Sam pondered the changes in his life. It was the fall of 1966. For the first time since Sam had left Paris in 1957 to journey around the world, both his health and his domestic situation were stable. He spoke extemporaneously about his definition of a hero. “People mistake the hero for the fairy tale prince who had to cut his way through seven dragons to reach the princess he had set his heart on. But real drama and the real hero begin after he has achieved what he wants. Up to that point he has no choice to make. His path is laid out for him to take the one right way. It is after he doesn’t want to be anything else that he can start to realize himself as a person. This is when living really starts. When he has no more irritants or goals and can focus only on the inner man.”1 Freeman had come to interview Sam for a book she was writing about his artistic development. His comment suggests that he was both looking back at his recent adventures in Japan—at defeating his dragon, Sazō Idemitsu—and portending his future. He had a child on the way. He was preparing for a midcareer retrospective. He was also taking initial steps with Freeman to establish a venue for a thriving art community in Los Angeles. Was he done with the distraction of chasing after achievements 200



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and ready for introspection, as his comment implies? He had just begun work on the Edge series, a severe and contemplative body of work. Was he finally ready for real life to begin? •



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Sam and Mako had settled into 345 West Channel Road. For the last two years, Sam had worked extensively on the design, trading artwork with Ed Janss for construction and contracting services. A fence with a wooden gate encircled the property. Behind the fence roamed Susake, their Saint Bernard, and Mushchi, the Abyssinian studio cat. Visitors walked through a Japanese garden, past a koi pond and waterfall, over a footbridge, and up to the front door. The cedar bungalow where Charlie Chaplin had reportedly stored his collection of fire engines had been converted into a spacious, three-bedroom, light-filled, Asian-inspired domicile. A sign at the door asked visitors to remove their shoes so they could tread lightly on the polished wooden floors. Fur throws covered the couch. Shelves stuffed with books and with Sam’s collection of Japanese ceramics ran along the walls. In Japan, he’d gone “ceramic nutty,” shipping home more than two hundred pieces. (In fact, while there, he threw pots, constructed small ceramic sculptures, and considered having a kiln installed in the studio that Idemitsu had built for him in Tokyo.) The kitchen had a built-in wok. For years, the painting For Fred (1949) hung on the living room wall. Created at the end of Sam’s schooling in Berkeley, it represented the moment when the elements of his education coalesced into his own style. In the dining and living room hung the art of friends he’d traded with: Joan Mitchell, Jean Paul Riopelle, Jean Dubuffet, and Walasse Ting, and also younger local artists he collected, like Bruce Conner and Ed Ruscha. Over the bed in the master bedroom, he displayed his prize possession, a Matisse etching of an odalisque. In the bathroom, a wall phone allowed Sam to talk as he soaked in his giant oval tub or sat on the toilet. There was also a deck draped with trumpet vines, an oval pool, and a grove of trees: magnolia, weeping willow, peach, cherry, lemon, lime, banana, naked coral, pine, and palm. Behind a screen of bamboo stood the two-bedroom guesthouse.2 A stepping-stone path led from the main house to Sam’s home studio, a two-story building that backed onto Sage Lane. Along one side, huge

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sliding doors allowed for large deliveries and shipments. Inside the studio, Sam had installed linoleum ballet flooring with bounce and flexibility to accommodate his bad back, a skylight, a stereo system, a sink, a tub for cleaning his large brushes and rollers, and a pulley system for lifting and moving canvases. He had a sleeping loft upstairs for naps, and there was a balcony from which to view his work. He set up a small trampoline so that he could jump and rebound to strengthen his ocular nerves and improve his balance. Sometimes he rode his bicycle around the space to observe his paintings while in motion. West Channel Road was built on top of Rustic Creek, an ancient waterway that emptied into the Pacific. In the morning, Sam liked to walk around the yard barefoot, his toes in the wet dew. Lifting and gingerly setting his feet down was a ritual that connected his body to nature. After a late breakfast, he would wander into the studio to look at the paintings he’d done the night before. By midday, Sam was either painting at his home studio or driving his blue DeSoto a short distance down Ocean Avenue, where he leased additional space above a sail shop at the corner of Ashland Avenue and Main Street. Midway between Venice and Santa Monica, Ocean Park was a quasi-skid row of a neighborhood where artists congregated in cheap studios. Along Sam’s block stood the old Pink Elephant bar, Kilroy’s Sandwich Shop, a laundromat, a repair store, and a surf shop, where in a few short years, a group of outcast teenagers would form the Z-Boys and Dogtown skaters and birth Los Angeles’s skateboard culture. Earlier that year, while Sam was in Japan imploring Idemitsu for Mako’s hand and his museum, he let his friend the painter Richard Diebenkorn move into this studio space. It proved to be a momentous act of generosity. At that time, Diebenkorn was still relatively unknown, compared to Sam, and this was where he abandoned figurative art. Looking out the large steel-pivot framed windows that dominated the north wall of Sam’s room, Diebenkorn started the Ocean Park series, the paintings that brought him renown. Thin, bisecting vertical and horizontal lines gird the corners of these large canvases—these lines are the window frames that Diebenkorn adopted as an architectural scaffolding in his paintings.3 After Sam returned from Japan, he took over the sailmaker’s giant loft next door. Even though he had a home studio, he liked different spaces for





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crafting works of different sizes. The sailmaker’s loft was large enough for monumental projects. And again, Sam remolded the space to his specifications: the ballet floor, the lighting, the large sink, and the indispensable cot for napping. In 1962, in New York, Andy Warhol had taken over the fifth floor at 231 East Forty-Seventh Street as a studio space, calling it the Factory and covering the walls with silver tinfoil, but the clean, white artist’s studio space had not yet been invented. This came out of Los Angeles and directly out of Sam’s aesthetic. As Ruscha said, “Sam brought righteousness to the whole enterprise of being an artist.” One block down Main Street from where Sam and Diebenkorn now painted, James Turrell purchased the Mendota Hotel. Turrell would go on to create large-scale immersive light installations all over the world. As a magnum opus, he would spend nearly fifty years hollowing out an extinct volcano—the Roden Crater—creating the ultimate chamber for contemplation of light and time. But the cradle for all his future work was the Mendota Hotel in Ocean Park. In 1966, Turrell moved into the second floor, turning the ground floor into a studio where he developed his first light projections: Mendota Stoppages. For two years, between 1966 and 1968, Turrell sealed, plastered, and smoothed every surface in the building. He then carved holes in the pristine walls of the hotel, letting car beams, stoplights, and traffic lights from the street project into his space. “The Mendota was a Plato’s cave,” Turrell said. “These rooms were camera like spaces that apprehended the light so as to be physically present within the space.”4 Sam and Turrell had met in 1962 when Sam moved from Santa Barbara to Santa Monica and Turrell was still a student of perceptual psychology at Pomona College. A friendship, based on a bond over airplanes, flight, space, and light, developed between the older, established artist and the young psychology student. Turrell took Sam flying, letting him copilot his small plane. Now their studios were a block apart. Like Mendota Stoppages and the Ocean Park series, the Edge paintings, done during the same period, were statements about the experience of looking, about the eye’s ability to absorb light. These were the paintings Sam had written Kornfeld about in 1965, telling him they would take years to create. He would create them in Mako’s honor. Though friendly and undoubtedly acutely aware of one another’s labors, Sam, Dick Diebenkorn, and Jim Turrell were never close to being an

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artistic cohort. Each resists classification. Sam and Diebenkorn were painters a generation older than Turrell. And though Sam’s sense of scale was certainly western, he would never consider himself part of a California aesthetic. Yet, working a block from the beach, all three artists were interested in describing and apprehending light and in capturing light’s material thingness. The soaring, light-filled space of the sailmaker’s loft and the open bowl of the sky as it touched the rim of the Pacific probably contributed to the vastness in Sam’s Edge paintings. Artists are like that, Sam noted in a letter to Freeman. Light and space excite them and the dream machine is turned on.5 In 1966, up and down Main Street, dream machines switched on. In his Plato’s cave of a laboratory at the Mendota Hotel, Turrell first staked his claim in the Light and Space movement by apprehending random lights from the street. A block away, looking out the windows of the studio he’d borrowed from Sam, Diebenkorn depicted changing atmospheric conditions in the boxlike compartments of his paintings. And in the sailmaker’s loft, Sam imbued the surfaces of his canvases with pure, framed light, creating a hard, almost reflective white coating that traps the viewer in its center. “The whole Light and Space movement,” Turrell said, “came out of painting. It’s a painter’s eye in three dimensions.”6 Each day when Sam entered his studio, he puttered first, washing brushes or sweeping the floor. While his hands were occupied, he was free to think. He never liked to paint as soon as he had an idea. He delayed, letting the idea take its shape. When he was ready, he removed his shoes. This, too, was a menial task meant to prepare him. It was also reverential: it established an intimacy between him and the naked canvas. Finally, with the help of an assistant, he would stretch and size his canvas on the floor, applying as many as six layers of white gesso tinted with green or red. Between each application, the surface was sanded smooth. The Edge paintings were begun horizontally. Turrell called them “a continent of thought.” Sam the explorer sent imagery back to the viewer. Working in his stocking feet allowed him to wander onto the clean white space of his canvas without soiling it. In describing his process, Sam said, “It’s a labor of love. It is as if I am walking over the surface of this terrific continent, and the prairies just kind of lie down in front of me, and I kneel and they kneel too.”7





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After he was satisfied with the degree and tone of the whiteness, he framed the pure space with bands of acrylic pigments: magenta, fluorescent orange, vermilion yellow, or dark green. Over and over, for four years, he worked on the series—sometimes shipping canvases back and forth from Santa Monica to Japan—painting and sanding and painting the surface of his continents. Each was subtly different. The margins of color shrank or expanded; tints darkened or lightened. The smallest was only 24 by 18 inches, the largest 149 by 215 inches. They work best in the midrange, when the white space is vertical like a full-length mirror, slightly larger than human scale. Except for occasional drips, splashes of color, or wavering bands, the finished paintings have a pristine appearance. In interview after interview, Sam said his white was not empty. It was conscious, full, present, waiting, as solid and potent as an iceberg. “The white,” Sam told his friend the art critic Yoshiaki Tōno, “opens up the possibility for viewers to use their own imagination. One can project whatever one wants onto the white . . . . I call white a reflection.”8 As a projection space, the vast expanse of white can be experienced as a threshold, an invitation to the viewer to enter the stage, the container and the arena of possibility in which the artist labored. When Sam’s friend the architect Arata Isozaki saw the Edge paintings, he observed that the whiteness at their centers was ma. For many reasons, Sam must have liked that term. Roughly translated, ma means a gap of nonempty space between objects. “Space is filled with space,” Sam liked to say. Ma is akin to a pause between notes of music or a breath in a line of poetry. It has density and substance. Having lived in Japan, Sam was well aware that in that small, densely populated country, space is scarce and therefore sacred. Rooms hold little furniture and serve multiple purposes. They are never experienced as empty. Instead, they are ma. Within them, things happen. Between beginnings and endings, between birth and death, life happens. Ma is as much a container of time as of space. As an artist, Sam progressed in a circular, gyro-like manner, coming back to an idea he’d explored before by approaching it from a different angle or at another level. When he’d first moved to Paris in 1950, he created the creamy, dirty, atmospheric White series, telling his friend Georges Duthuit that “white is like the space that extends between things.” So ma

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is also the space that Sam painted in the early 1950s. Expounding on the idea, Duthuit wrote about the space “between the world and us.”9 Mako was the muse for this series. One group of Edge paintings is named the Mako series. She was the breath Sam needed to take at this point in his life. For his new marriage was also a container and an arena of possibility. “The Edge paintings,” he said, “actually saved me.”10 Sam may have seen himself as the monumental white forms and Mako as the thin strips of color that defined, contained, and bounded his world. Sam all but confirmed this when he explained to Tōno, “What appears to be unpainted is much more painted than the edge . . . . I need this kind of contradiction.” Since white looks unpainted but isn’t, it is both a hole and a whole. It suggests the paradox that Sam expressed back in 1952 when he’d written his father that he wished to create a whole incomplete world.11 We are always at the center of space, Sam wrote in his journal. We are always at the center of time. He recognized that every individual has a space to inhabit and that each individual is always at the center of that occupied space. This is what he shows those who gaze into the whiteness of his canvas. You are the center, so am I. Furthermore, for you to be at the center of anything, there has to be a boundary, an edge. This is, in part, how we define ourselves. Mako was his edge, and Sam needed the contrast she provided. •

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In those early years, he was starry-eyed over Mako. She made him giggle. His wedding gift to her had been a burgundy Jaguar convertible with a key on a jeweled chain. He loved watching her drive through the canyons, cat’s-eye sunglasses balanced on her delicate nose, long black hair streaming behind her like a banner. When they went to the ocean, he lay like a beached whale, his feet kicking the surf, blowing an endless stream of kisses in her direction. Their mutual friend Elaine Anderson remembered sitting by the pool with them and Mako taking a Kleenex and wiping sweat from her arms. She held the tissue up to her own nose, then, laughing, threw it into Sam’s face. Delighted, he ate it!12 As much as his spontaneity enchanted her, it also provoked conflict and struggle in their home life. He was prone to fanciful exaggeration. After they’d returned to California, the story of winning Mako’s hand in marriage





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Figure 13. Osamu (standing) and Shingo Francis with their mother, Mako Idemitsu, in front of the Edge painting Untitled (1966–67) in Tokyo, ca. 1970.

transformed. Instead of telling the truth, that a long letter had persuaded Idemitsu to relent and agree to the union, Sam told Walter Hopps that he’d rented a P-38 and flown it over the family compound, radioing to Mr. Idemitsu that if he didn’t allow the marriage, he’d fly the plane like a heatseeking missile into the house and obliterate everyone. Mako shook her head when she heard this story. Sam was a romantic and a mischievous clown. Her father didn’t own a radio transmitter. How would Sam have gotten hold of a P-38? The only flying Sam had been involved with in Japan was sky painting. During the ten-minute art performance sponsored by the Tokyo newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, Sam had choreographed five helicopters, crewed not by Sam but by a Japanese aerobatic flying group, Blue Lark, as they zoomed over Tokyo Bay, trailing long plumes of colored smoke. “Everyone says Sam is so Zen,” Mako said, commenting on the spiritual quality viewers projected onto Sam after seeing his ascetic Edge series. “But his everyday life has nothing to do with the spirit.” The Sam she knew was not mystical. He was gregarious and hedonistic—he loved wine, women, food, and any moving vehicle. In the mornings, after she served fruit for breakfast, he would sneak off to the local bakery and scarf down an entire lemon meringue pie. When he noticed a friend driving a 1955 Lincoln, he

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offered to buy the car on the spot. Sam might be a heat-seeking missile, pursuing his desires and driving like a maniac, but he was no daredevil pilot. It was this coexistence of extremes—those in his nature and those in life itself—that occupied Sam as he worked on this serene and reductive series of paintings. He scribbled a brief aphorism in his journal: An increase in light gives an increase in darkness. It was the light that allowed him to peer into darkness. Always the light that he was trying to find. Speaking of this conflict, he said, “Darkness is within me . . . . I try to find the corresponding light in myself. If I didn’t have it, I couldn’t deal with it. I guess all beings have light inside.”13 Twice a week, Sam came home in the late afternoon to meet his oldest friend, Bill Elliott, for a sunset swim in the ocean. For the last three years, they’d swum and bodysurfed together whenever both were in town. Even in the rain, they would swim, then return to Sam’s place and raid the wine closet. Sometimes Elliott would bring one of his daughters, but usually it was just the two men, playing and romping like boys on the beach in the rosy twilight. On the afternoon of October 3, 1966—Sam had been working on his Edge series for six months—he came home to meet Elliott. But Elliott did not bound up to the front door at the appointed hour. Then the phone rang. Elliott had been hit by a car as he was crossing the street on his way over. Rushed to the hospital, he was operated on that evening. Sam and Mako did not go to the hospital. Instead, they hurried to Elliott’s home to care for his children. Elliott regained consciousness once, long enough to say goodbye to his wife. He died the next morning.14 Sam was devastated. At forty-three, Bill Elliott and Sam were the same age. They’d grown up together in San Mateo. When Sam was starting his art career, Elliott had helped support him with a cash stipend in exchange for paintings. As a lawyer, Elliott had shepherded Sam through multiple marriages and divorces and advised him on business matters, studio leases, and the purchase of the West Channel Road property. Elliott was the main reason why Sam had settled in Santa Monica. Like Sam, he was a charming flirt and vivacious entertainer. His daughter remembered parties with guests like their glamorous neighbor Marilyn Monroe and, when they were in town, Jefferson Airplane. Sam wrote Elliott’s eulogy, describing him as “a big





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man in every sense of the word—a man of great stature—physically, mentally, morally, and in heart and spirit. But he was also a dear man—an adjective that today, for some reason, men hesitate to apply to another man.”15 After the service, Sam rode in the airplane that flew Elliott’s ashes over the Pacific. Elliott’s death weighed on Sam. Though Sam made friends easily, Elliott was a touchstone from his childhood. He had two young daughters and a wife, Maureen, who had recently recovered from cervical cancer. Sam was distressed because Elliott had been on his way to see him when the car struck. Questions of life and death were never far from Sam’s mind. Why did he survive his near misses with death while others didn’t? Though he joked about flying a plane kamikaze style, he did not bear his survival lightly. As much as Mako was a muse during this time in Sam’s life, so, too, was death. His White series and the Edge series both followed prolonged, near-fatal illnesses. In this regard, they are his most profoundly spiritual works. Ever since his second bout of tuberculosis, Sam had seen his life as existing within the embrace of death. If death was the edge of all life, the white plague (the name tuberculosis was given in the 1700s) was a life sentence—as long as it didn’t kill him. Sam’s pain was a constant reminder that he was a walking time bomb. When he’d unexpectedly recovered, he vowed that his paintings and his continued existence would pay homage to that doubled life in death, death in life. In “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” written in 1798, the English Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells us that life in death is the lot of humankind. Love alone is capable of lifting life out of death and abating suffering temporarily. In the end, death wins. Now more than ever, Sam felt that, as a survivor, he had to live as fully and sweetly as possible.16 Five weeks after Bill Elliott’s death, Mako went into labor, and Sam, along with Elaine Anderson, rushed her to Saint John’s Hospital. A few hours later, at dawn on November 10, she gave birth to their son. Sam was in the waiting room, gazing out the window, when news arrived of his healthy baby boy. Over the Santa Monica Mountains, the new moon was visible alongside the rising sun. For a brief moment, the two celestial bodies appeared to converge. “That’s an auspicious sign for a birth,” Anderson, standing beside him, noted. Sam agreed. The cyclical process of night giving way to day was not lost on either of them. Death allowing for birth, life

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eventually succumbing to death, but not yet. In honor of Bill Elliott, Sam and Mako chose William as the baby’s middle name. His first name was Osamu, the Japanese word for “disciplined” and “studious” with, at its center, the letters s a m.17 After Osamu was born, Sam and Mako flew to Tokyo to present their son to his demanding, dictatorial grandfather. With the baby in the flesh and in hand, Idemitsu transformed into a doting granddad. He even admits I’m alive, barely, Sam noted in a letter to Freeman. I have my studio back now in Tokyo. I can work again. It’s cold here. He’d shipped over twenty of his large Edge paintings to show at the Minami Gallery and reported gleefully that upon seeing them, Mako’s father was so shocked he bought one before he could reflect.18 •

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In 1967, as Sam continued his series, the edges expanding and contracting like living things, he prepared for his retrospective scheduled to open that October at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Though not as prominent or as prestigious as the MoMA show would have been, it was curated by James Johnson Sweeney, the former director of the Guggenheim. Sweeney had purchased Sam’s Shining Black (1958) and included him in the 1959 inaugural exhibition of the Guggenheim’s new building. Since then, he’d resigned from the Guggenheim after disagreements with the trustees. He disliked Frank Lloyd Wright’s nautilus-shaped building, which he felt was more an ode to the architect than a good place to hang pictures. He then became the director of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts. A retrospective can be difficult for the artist. Typically undertaken in an artist’s later years, it brings reflection and review of past highlights. It can make an artist feel particularly mortal. Mark Rothko’s 1961 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art sent him into a depression. Clyfford Still refused to have his career surveyed at all. At first, the prospect of a career summary did not appear to cause Sam undue stress. He trusted Sweeney, and Kornfeld was helping with the biographical history. After opening in Houston, the show would travel to the Berkeley Art Museum, where Selz was now the director, then to the Kunsthalle Basel, overseen by his good friend Arnold Rüdlinger. He was in





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good hands all around. However, while unpacking for the exhibition, Sam discovered that two of the panels of the Basel Mural—the majestic, atmospheric triptych he had painted in Paris between 1956 and 1958—had suffered severe water damage in the hull of the ship that had brought them from Europe. Luckily, one of the panels now belonged to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it remained. However, rot and mold covered the two canvases that had been shipped to Houston. One might be reparable, but Basel III was beyond saving. When he beheld the decayed and fraying panel, Sam felt so horrified that, in a fit of despair, he grabbed a pair of scissors and sliced the canvas into strips. This was a shocking act for Sam, who rarely destroyed any work he created. Each work, he believed, represented a moment in his life, a trace, and a record of his soul’s existence. Though each painting contained changing elements, all belonged to a continuum. The works, like memories and actions, no matter how bad, were meant to be carried forward through time. In one swift slash, Sam obliterated the possibility that the full triptych could ever be seen again. That glorious permutation of the mural’s life was over. “I have been rolled in paint and rolled out on the canvas,” Sam said. “And all the little holes in a painting are because I have been shredded.”19 On the heels of Elliott’s death and the destruction of one panel of the Basel Mural, a third catastrophe occurred. In November 1967, just as his retrospective was about to travel to Kunsthalle Basel, the museum’s director, Arnold Rüdlinger, suffered a stroke and died. Though not a childhood friend like Elliott, Rüdlinger had been an early champion and a pivotal figure in Sam’s life. He’d helped make Sam an art star and had supported Teruko’s artwork as she got back on her feet. Indeed, Sam had recently convinced Elliott and Rüdlinger to enlist in a project to establish and bolster the Los Angeles art scene. He had hoped that each would use his power, renown, and achievements to create something broader than a personal vision, something that would have a lasting impact on society. If the idea of the Edge paintings—of all art—was to encourage people to look at things in a new way and thereby effect change in the world, then the New Arts Society (NAS), the venture that Sam, Betty Freeman, Bill Elliott, and Walter Hopps dreamed up in Freeman’s living room in 1966 ( just before Elliott’s and Rüdlinger’s sudden deaths), was perhaps the

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most utopian, visionary, and idealistic embodiment of that goal. Though Sam acknowledged that the climate and light of Los Angeles were ideal for creating paintings, he continued to be frustrated by the city’s lack of an art infrastructure. While the competitive atmosphere of New York generated a vital art scene and the less cutthroat environment of Paris allowed artists to live in top-floor studios in all neighborhoods, even luxurious ones, the geographical wilderness of Los Angeles segregated artists from society. For a few, this alienation produced independent thinking. For most, it failed to nurture the community and the business they needed to survive. Artists, Sam believed, were the nerve centers and the consciousness of society. If they were isolated, then much of their talent was wasted. However, if they could engage with business and government, their gifts could inspire the world. To that end, Sam had once suggested that the cosmetics company Max Factor hire Andy Warhol as director of advertising and Ed Ruscha as designer of packaging. One can’t help but wonder if Sam was commenting on Pop art’s commercial inspirations. Having started their careers working in commercial art and advertising, Warhol and Ruscha were probably uninterested in reengaging with that world at this time. But Sam was. He’d already wrangled a position from his friend Ed Janss, the new owner of Snowmass, in Colorado, as a consultant for the development of the ski village. After spending a month on the mountain, Sam gave his verdict to Ed: “Do as little as possible.” Sam’s advice cost Ed a substantial fee, but, Ed said, “it was priceless.” As little as possible was done at Snowmass for as long as possible.20 Sam’s biggest push by far to influence and reshape his environment was in his home city of Los Angeles. His first venture was the New Arts Society. The opening statement, drafted by the first members of NAS (Betty Freeman, Sam, Ed Janss, Walter Hopps, the art patron Gifford Phillips, and the art critic Jules Langsner), explicated their aim: “To act as a stimulator not only to art but also to science, industry, urban life, even mental health and civil rights.” Their objective was to put Los Angeles on the map as an art center and to solve the problem of lack of community by establishing an art-oriented endeavor outside the museum framework. The emphasis would be placed on enabling artists to contribute ideas that would enrich and restructure society. Practitioners from a wide span of creative





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arts would direct the organization, along with scientists, philosophers, and writers. They would take fine art throughout the city. They would be flexible, improvisational, and international. They wanted, at all costs, to “avoid becoming an institution.” This was the midpoint of the 1960s, when any established structure was up for critique. The old model of a museum as a monument to history had lost favor. Instead, the NAS, as a nerve center, would sponsor activities, demonstrations, performances, and happenings. It would include a cultural center that, like a European Kunsthalle, offered symposia and workshops and featured a library, a restaurant, and maybe even low-cost studio space. They would develop new talent, award grants, and train apprentices. Though the NAS would not have a permanent collection, it would mount exhibitions by local artists. Sam would be the first chair, and before he died, Elliott was going to be the lawyer. The advisory council included everyone from Ray Bradbury, Susan Sontag, and Mark Rothko to Billy Wilder and Vincent Price. The local artists’ council drew from the roster of the Ferus Gallery: Ed Ruscha, Ed Moses, Robert Irwin, and Larry Bell. Sam’s court of internationals—Arnold Rüdlinger, Michel Tapié, and Pontus Hultén—would participate too.21 “We live in Los Angeles, the only truly contemporary city,” they declared in the premise for their plan. “We want certain things to happen now.” They had come together, they explained, “to allow artists to direct the purposes and function of art . . . to let ideas expand beyond the studio and the art object into reshaping society . . . to involve in this venture other people who are willing to take a risk without knowing the final goal in advance.”22 At a private event on the evening of March 15, 1967, Sam expressed his vision of the NAS. In an impassioned invocation, he told the group of artists, collectors, and investors gathered at his home, “People ask ‘What is the purpose of art?’ the purpose of one activity is no longer separate from the purpose of any other activity; . . . Nothing has happened here in Los Angeles yet: now everything should happen at once . . . The artist has escaped from tragedy even though he knows he is conditioned totally by it. Having been sick to death he knows he has nothing to lose. He needs then no proofs and he can say, ‘We must risk it.’ Perhaps, perhaps not. Looking at you I want to say ‘Nevertheless, we can act as if now.’ ”23 His speech, while revealing much about Sam and his definition of a hero, was,

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unfortunately, too poetic and too short of information about the aims of the new organization. It did not bode well. The New Arts Society’s dream may have been too big, too loosely structured, too utopian, too ma in its versatile and ambitious conception of space. Within eighteen months of Bill Elliott’s and Arnold Rüdlinger’s deaths, the organization collapsed. Even without their untimely deaths, the project had little chance of surviving. Though collectors like Marcia and Frederick Weisman and Ed Janss had pledged a beginning endowment, it lacked substantial, ongoing financial support. But as an idea, it homed in on Sam’s state of mind at this stage: he put the artist at the center of the enterprise. Having beaten the odds and reached midlife, Sam felt that the true drama of his life was beginning. He wanted to do more than make beautiful objects. He wanted to be a heroic force in the world. Though stillborn, the NAS had a lasting and profound impact. It brought together many of the initial players and planted the seeds for a more stable venture: The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA). Like the Edge paintings, which sought to give preeminence to the viewer, the NAS and later MOCA endeavored to create a place where artist and viewer could meet. “I want to change the world,” Sam said. “I believe all painting should change the world. Whether it does or does not I don’t know—but it should.”24

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The Artist Is His Work and No Longer Human

Flinging open the studio door, Sam danced a little jig as he entered the room. He wore a mischievous, self-mocking grin. “I’m an original!” he proclaimed. This was his way of revving up the engine of his ego, of announcing to himself, to his studio assistants, and to the world that he was unique and ready to work. By 1968, the year Sam received the commission for Berlin Red, the monumental painting that would become the largest single canvas in the world, Dan Cytron and Jerry Aistrup were working as his assistants and sharing the guesthouse on West Channel Road. With the size and scale of his operations expanding, Sam increasingly depended on a crew of assistants.1 Cytron had arrived on the scene first. A student at Otis College of Art and Design, he’d come over one day in late 1967 to help move Diebenkorn’s canvases at the Ocean Park studio. After their introduction, Sam decided to give Cytron some odd jobs in his garden. Several assistants had a trial period in the garden before being allowed in the studio. In the garden, Sam could assess their focus, their willingness to do messy, hard work, and his own comfort level with them. Choosing an assistant was primarily intuitive. Sam’s studio was his safe harbor, the womb where he conceived and nurtured his work. It was crucial 215

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that he feel at ease with whoever worked for him. His assistants were usually the only witnesses to his creative process. In the office, Sam relied on a secretary, first Ellen Thiem and then Nancy Mozur, to handle his daily business. But in the studio, Sam depended on strong young men. They moved his enormous canvases and did construction. Furthermore, the macho art world was still the dominion of men. Sam was accustomed to painting and printing around men. For him, working in the studio was an intimate experience. He liked to work in his underwear, as unencumbered as possible. When they started working for Sam, his assistants were generally art students or recent graduates in their twenties. Many stayed for years. Cytron worked for him from 1967 until Sam died in 1994. Aistrup came in 1968, expecting to work six months but staying for twenty years. Kornfeld called them the charmed Channel Road circle, and they were charmed. They traveled the world, installing shows, attending gala events, and meeting international art luminaries. Sam could be extraordinarily generous, opening his home, his pocketbook, and his contacts. Everyone who worked for him had the use of one of his cars. And there were many, mostly American brands like Ford, Lincoln, Chevrolet, and Dodge. His assistant in Paris, John Bennett, lived and worked for nine years in Sam’s Arcueil studio. Bennett said that Sam could become your best friend within a week and that Sam’s blue eyes could look right through you with a gentle, allowing kindness. Sam shared his dreams, his books, and his albums, whether Mozart or Frank Zappa’s Freak Out! He quoted Shakespeare and Blake. He told stories about visiting the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, living on a houseboat in Bangkok, and camping with his girlfriend in an abandoned spaghetti factory in Italy. He encouraged his assistants to travel and see the world and keep going until the money ran out. But Sam could also be capricious and manipulative. “He understood desire a lot,” Cytron said. “He figured out what people wanted and played with it.” He was frequently fickle, giving one set of instructions to one assistant and contradictory instructions to another. He fostered divisions as a way to maintain control, and he expected the assistants who lived in the guesthouse to be available at any hour of the day or night. He was moody and arrogant. Once, when Aistrup greeted him, Sam replied, “I only converse with geniuses.” “You must be a lonely man,” Aistrup quipped.





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In many ways, Sam ran his studio the same way his father-in-law ran Idemitsu Kosan in Tokyo. Both businesses were patriarchal. Like Idemitsu, Sam often cut out the middleman (his dealer), selling his product (art) directly to the consumer (his patrons). Idemitsu valued his employees’ individual gifts, training them to develop their skills along company lines, while Sam gave his assistants a great deal of autonomy. When he recognized an assistant’s talent, Sam let him run with it. Without compunction, Sam used whatever skill or ability a person had to further his own artistic mission. The studio assistants’ main job was to prepare the arena. They began by cleaning the floor, followed by stretching and stapling the canvas. Next, they applied gesso tinted to the shade Sam chose, sanding the surface between applications. Then they laid out the paints and brushes and spread paper around the perimeter. Before he began, Sam would experiment, working out ideas on these smaller surfaces spread around the canvas. He often took a long time to prepare himself, engaging in menial tasks until his mind and body settled and he felt confident about starting. Once Sam began, once he had waded through the chaos of the physical and reached the pure white field of his imagination, his struggle vanished. Even his constant back pain lifted, for in the arena, he moved without hesitation—a dancer whose partner was the developing image. Sometimes, as he began to work, Sam would play music to relax, rock or jazz or classics like Puccini or Bach. But during a very deep painting session, the only sound was his repertoire of grunts, groans, and sighs. Off to the side, his assistant would stand ready to mix paint, answer the constantly ringing studio phone, wipe Sam’s brow, or change his socks. When the session ended, they cleaned up. After the work was completed and dry, they rolled the canvas for shipping or stored it in the racks. Soon after he was hired, Dan Cytron came up with a proposition. He’d been making his own watercolors at Otis. He had noticed that Sam brought dispersions back from Japan—pigment in a water-based glycol solution that, when stirred with resin, created paint. Cytron realized that he wanted to learn paint making. He told Sam, “I can do this for you.” At Sam’s urging, he enrolled in a two-year program at Los Angeles Trade-Technical College. There he “learned about viscosity, handling properties, drying time, the appearance of paint (gloss and opacity) and was then able to create unique formulas.” Partnering with Sam, he bought equipment, and Cytron began

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producing exclusive, custom-made colors. Cytron created a singular palette of oil paints, watercolors, and printing inks. He sought out rare fluorescents, cobalt blues, and manganese violets, colors he intuited that Sam would enjoy. “Then Sam had something no one else had,” Cytron said.2 About a year after Cytron’s arrival, Sam ran into Jerry Aistrup in Berkeley. Sam and Aistrup had met in 1957 when Sam visited Carol Haerer in Sioux Falls, where Aistrup then lived. Ten years later, they were reintroduced at a party at the ceramic artist Peter Voulkos’s loft by the Berkeley railroad tracks. Voulkos was an Abstract Expressionist whose tool was clay. He revolutionized the medium, turning ceramics from a traditional craft into modern art by creating massive, chunky, monolithic, worn-looking, and ash-fired forms. He sometimes dug his clay out of the ground (when he started, he didn’t know you could purchase clay in a store). He liked pounding it with a meat cleaver. He established the ceramic department at Otis and then, in 1959, moved north and started the department at UC Berkeley. He was loud, muscular, and charming. He threw wild parties where, if inebriated guests weren’t careful, they might stumble into the room where two crocodiles lived in a pit. It was at just such a bash that Sam and Aistrup reconnected. “What are you doing now?” Sam wanted to know. Aistrup was at loose ends. He asked Sam if he had any work. Sam immediately invited him to help out at West Channel Road. He took him home, knocked on the guesthouse door, and, to both Cytron’s and Aistrup’s surprise, announced that now Aistrup would live in the second bedroom of the guesthouse. Similar to Cytron, Aistrup worked in the studio. But once Sam realized he was skilled at designing and crafting furniture, he had Aistrup building shoji screens for the house. “He gave you free rein, occasionally he’d step in, but he wanted you to exercise your own ability, unimpeded by input.” Later, Aistrup renovated studios for Sam in San Leandro and Palo Alto. Of his time working for Sam, especially the early years, Aistrup said, “It was better than going to grad school because every day there was a continuous procession of creative people from around the world coming through the house.” Almost weekly impromptu gatherings happened at the compound. Mingling with the stream of visiting artist friends like Joan Mitchell, Walasse Ting, and Jasper Johns were European and Japanese dealers as well as bohemian Angelenos: writers Christopher Isherwood, Henry



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Miller, and Anaïs Nin; slide guitarist Ry Cooder; a young architect named Frank Gehry; modernist composer Toru Takemitsu; avant-garde composer La Monte Young and his wife, light artist Marian Zazeela; poet Bernard Forrest; and painters Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado, who lived a block away. Sam was good at sharing his bounty. Mako was a gracious host, and Elaine Anderson came down the hill and cooked large bowls of pasta for whoever showed up. But Aistrup noticed that “Everyone wanted a piece of Sam. And Sam had his hand in a lot of pies.” •



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At end of the 1960s, the frontiers of art overlapped those of politics, the psychedelic revolution, and science and technology. Artists’ opportunities to interact with social and political agendas were manifold. The times demanded action, from opposing the Vietnam War to expressing outrage about Soviet tanks rolling through Prague to supporting the Black Power movement. Artists were experimenting with new materials and monumentally sized work. Some used the earth as their medium, digging, cutting, and marking the natural landscape to focus on the ephemeral. Some used their bodies to demonstrate the violence and suffering in Vietnam, plead for peace, or trigger a shift in social norms. In 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged “bed-ins,” lying in bed as a form of artistic protest.3 In contrast, Sam’s work rarely had an overt political message; he was not an activist artist. His imagery was aesthetic. He was primarily a painter whose devotion was to the large canvas, where he distilled a form of beauty that his friend Anaïs Nin called “the source of ecstasy and tranquility.”4 However, like many, he engaged in group events and antiwar protests. In 1966, in response to the escalation of the Vietnam War, a group called the Artists’ Protest Committee constructed a triangular six-story steel tower on the corner of Sunset and La Cienega in West Los Angeles. The painter Irving Petlin spearheaded the project, and the sculptor Mark di Suvero built the tower, with help from the sculptor Lloyd Hamrol and a young feminist artist named Judy Chicago, who did much of the welding. The call to participate went out to artists all over the world: “Here we speak in a manner native to us as artists.”5 More than four hundred

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Figure 14. Sam Francis with Judy Chicago at Easter happening, Brookside Park, Pasadena, California, 1969.

responded, each with a two-square-foot artwork that hung on the tower. Among them were Sam Francis, Hassel Smith, Karel Appel, Judy Chicago, Nancy Spero, Eva Hesse, Alice Neel, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Mark Rothko, Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Ad Reinhardt, and Elaine de Kooning. At the inauguration, Susan Sontag spoke, and Ken Kesey stopped by with a busload of Merry Pranksters. But after three months of battling nearly constant vandalism, the artists dismantled the tower, and the individual works were sold anonymously, raising $12,000 for the Los Angeles Peace Center. A few years later, in the spring of 1969, Sam and James Turrell collaborated on a sky drawing as part of an Easter Sunday love-in organized by Judy Chicago. Two hundred people carrying lilies marched to Brookside Park in Pasadena. While protestors picnicked, Sam and Turrell operated by remote control two World War I biplanes that emitted colored smoke. Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate, and neither did the pyrotechnics. The smoke merely trickled and dispersed.6





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Remembering his successful sky performance in Tokyo three years earlier, Sam wrote his dealer. Do you think we could have those smoke things exported? Could you find the company in Tokyo that makes the best fireworks, so that I could write them so as to make shipments of beautiful, very complicated high firing fireworks in America . . . . I am forming a revolutionary group of artists to make pyrotechnics or sky paintings . . . . I did a sky piece over Berkeley and San Francisco in support of revolutionary students, and I hope to support such and more such manifestations in the future.7 Sam’s sky protest piece over the Bay Area had responded to Governor Ronald Reagan’s order to the National Guard to drop tear gas on demonstrators. In 1969, after community members and students at UC Berkeley converted an empty lot into People’s Park, university officials called in sheriff ’s deputies and the California Highway Patrol. Thousands protested, and a bystander was shot and killed. Many others were injured. During the mass demonstration of students and faculty that followed, Sam hired a helicopter to fly overhead with a banner that quoted Chairman Mao Zedong: “Let a Thousand Parks Bloom.” In reaching for the sky, Sam was touching on both his past as a pilot and the current fever for space-age technology. The Apollo missions were shooting for the moon, sending back pictures of outer space and of the earth as a giant blue ball. Seeking to establish a dialogue between artists and the growing West Coast technology community, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art launched its infamous Art and Technology program in 1967. The mandate matched leading artists with aerospace and technology companies (IBM, RAND Corporation, Lockheed, Walt Disney Productions, General Electric). The dream was that artists, scientists, and engineers would benefit from access to one another and together produce something spectacular. A few did. In conjunction with WED Enterprises (then the design arm of Disney), Claes Oldenburg created Giant Ice Bag, an enormous pink vinyl ice bag pneumatically powered to rise and sag. But of the eighty artists paired with forty companies, only sixteen produced finished pieces. No women were included, and this caused protests, as did many of the corporate partners’ direct connections to the Vietnam War. Quite a few of the projects, including Sam’s and the environmental artist Christo’s, proved too grandiose to realize. Christo wanted to erect a

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5,600-cubic-foot package and wrap fifteen miles of coastline. Sam, paired with the theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner Dr. Richard Feynman, proposed firing a salvo of rockets over Southern California. After that idea failed to materialize, he suggested an elaborate strobe-light environment—a light show in outer space. Intrigued by the concept, Feynman contacted NASA and determined that the cost of Sam’s project would exceed $1,000,000.8 Back on earth, Sam’s vision for a cosmic light show coalesced with his support of the experimental light artists’ collective called the Single Wing Turquoise Bird, formed in 1968 to accompany rock performances at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Turquoise Bird presented extravagant liquid-light shows for bands like the Grateful Dead, Cream, and Pink Floyd. Introduced to the group by one of its members, Sam enjoyed climbing up on the scaffolding to watch the shows. Like the musicians they worked with, the light performers jammed, projecting pulsating light through liquid slides (dishes of colored oil) onto a screen behind the bands. They called their work “a game of physic tag.” They responded to the music and rhythms with textures, graphic and abstract imagery, and hypnotic strobes. The result was an organic symbiosis of snowflakes, eyeballs, bodies, plants, mushroom clouds, and soap bubbles in a swirling nebula of colors. “We use our materials to communicate the collective spirit,” one of the members said. Another added, “Sometimes when the show really gets high, when it’s at a peak, the images are irrelevant. They lose significance. They lose identity as specific images. For a few minutes the images aren’t there and it’s something else, as though you’re looking at nothing and everything.”9 Seeking to dissolve the boundaries between the individual and the collective, between conscious reality and hallucination, they staged a psychedelic mind manifestation. One day in 1969, Sam was driving his crimson Rover sedan through Ocean Park when he spotted Jeffrey Perkins hitchhiking. Perkins was one of the projectionists for Turquoise Bird. He’d named the group by stabbing his finger blindly into a book of Vedic hymns. When Sam asked where he was headed, Perkins said he was going to a rehearsal at Joe Funk’s nearby lithography studio. Having dissolved its relationship with the Shrine, Turquoise Bird was no longer projecting for live bands. They were now performing to recorded music and creating independent light and





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cinema shows. Instantly, Sam offered them the use of his Ocean Park studio and became their backer and patron. “His generosity was boundless,” Perkins said. Sam surrendered his studio, bought them equipment, and threw catered parties to introduce the group to art luminaries. He let them project onto the white center of his Edge paintings. In the summer of 1969, Sam briefly rented the ballroom at the Santa Monica Hotel as a rehearsal space for Turquoise Bird until the manager evicted them. He didn’t like their hippie appearance, and a few members had decided to camp out in the ballroom. The only other example of an artist giving such wide-ranging support to a performing arts group was on the East Coast. In 1967, Andy Warhol collaborated with Lou Reed, paying for the recording session of his band’s album The Velvet Underground and Nico. Such was Sam’s enthusiasm that when he experienced something he loved, he jumped in and participated. He wanted to share the event with everyone he knew, inviting his studio assistants, along with cultural beacons like Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, to Turquoise Bird performances. Nin wrote, “Like a thousand modern paintings flowing and sparkling, alive and dynamic, of incredible richness, a death blow to painting in frames, stills.”10 While Nin and others saw light shows and a multitude of other new mediums available as sounding the death knell of painting, Sam did not. The work of diffusing pigments into fluid elements like smoke and oil probably inspired his transition from the Edge paintings to his next series. In the monumental Berlin Red (1970), he used a wetting agent to dissolve his acrylics so that the color bled and spread like watercolors across the surface. In this painting, organic forms float like embodied liquid light toward the center of the canvas. While he was painting Berlin Red, Sam allowed Jeffrey Perkins from Turquoise Bird to film him. Even with the camera and crew watching, Sam barely hesitated but, like a fisherman, pulled his image from the white ma of the canvas with his paintbrush. The commission for Berlin Red had come from the Neue Nationalgalerie in West Berlin. Located near the Potsdamer Platz, the new glass building for the museum, designed by Mies van der Rohe, was built in the square that was within the “death strip” between East and West Berlin. Sam told his friend and dealer Paula Kirkeby that he wanted to create a painting so big that it could be seen from East Berlin. “From east to west,” he said, “I want people to see blood in the sky.”11

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Figure 15. Sam Francis painting Berlin Red in Ashland Avenue studio, Santa Monica, California, 1970.

Indeed, as a political statement, Berlin Red strikes a tense truce between luscious colors and images of gigantic blistering boils. The white space in the middle evokes the division—the killing field—that for twenty-eight years sliced the country in half. The final canvas was so large, twenty-six by thirty-five feet, that linen had to be specially ordered and woven in Brussels and an aluminum frame with expansion bolts specially designed to hang it in the museum. It seemed there was no limit to Sam’s expansiveness—from creating the most enormous canvas on earth to aspiring to color the heavens. Success demanded originality, new colors, bigger paintings, unique mediums, and more shows and sales. Now Sam purchased a large lithography stone. He wanted to create prints on his own schedule. He wanted his friends to be able to come over and make prints. He hired first Hitoshi Takatsuki and then George Page as master printers. At the urging of his accountant, he incorporated his business as the Litho Shop, opening a printmaking facility at 1664 Twentieth Street in





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Santa Monica. All paintings and prints created by Sam were the property of the Litho Shop. Sam held the shop’s stock shares and entered into an agreement whereby he received a handsome salary from the corporation. In Santa Monica alone, he had a home studio, his Ocean Park studio for large commissions, and the print studio and office at the Litho Shop. In Japan, he still used the studio Idemitsu had built for him. He had his Paris space in Arcueil and Kornfeld’s coach house in Bern. Nancy Mozur, only twenty-two when she went to work for Sam at the Litho Shop, said her job was to be his administrative director, curator, secretary, mother, muse, archivist, driver, babysitter, devotee, greeter, and grocery shopper. Of the fluctuating roles she played during her eighteen years of employment, Nancy mused, “Perhaps because I was so young, it allowed for a fluidity in my nature that worked with the mercurialness of Sam. We grew up and evolved and he allowed us to flourish, but that generated a lot of activity around the studio because Sam was involved in so many projects.”12 People started arriving at the Litho Shop unannounced, often just to visit but sometimes to inquire about work for sale. Sam loved to tell the story of one visitor: a Japanese man who spoke little English showed up wanting to purchase an original Sam Francis. When he heard the prices, he explained that he had very little money. Sam smiled and shrugged. Suddenly the man pointed at some colored cloth flung over the back of a chair: “Those?!” “They’re my boxers,” Sam said. “My underwear.” He explained how he painted in his boxers and, in a distracted way, wiped his paint-wet hands on his hips and across his bottom. That’s why they were decorated with Sam’s trademark Camden red and Prussian blue. The man didn’t care. He begged to buy them anyway. He bought Sam’s underwear for $1,200.13 Jerry Aistrup thought that Sam had a personality “that invited everything in.” That often resulted in funny stories or serendipitous exchanges. But at times, Sam became overwhelmed by the attention he courted. According to Aistrup, his way of dealing with the overload was to become “unavailable.” While it was relatively easy for his studio assistants to deal with Sam’s boastful moments—his boundless, irrepressible, and unfixed nature— things weren’t so straightforward for Mako. When she gave birth to their

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second son, Shingo Jules Francis, in 1969, Sam was away, and Aistrup drove her and the new baby home from the hospital. The compound had become overrun; the family was hardly ever alone together. On the rare occasions when helpers or guests didn’t surround them, Sam was restless. One evening soon after Shingo was born, Sam was watching a television documentary on Paris with the family and the nanny when he suddenly stood up. “I’m going to France tomorrow,” he announced. “Oh no, Sam-san,” Mako protested. But the scenes of Paris on TV had inspired him. He threw some clothes into a suitcase and left the next day. Perhaps he’d been craving a visit or wanted to swing through Switzerland to see Kornfeld, check on Kayo, and pull money from his Swiss account. Mako could never keep up with Sam’s desires. Since he was impulsive and liked to keep all options open, his decision-making process mystified her. When she got upset, he told her she was acting abnormally. She called Anaïs Nin, with whom she’d developed a friendship. By the time they met for lunch, Sam had returned from his Paris jaunt. Yet he was still disappearing. Mako suspected other women, but, when confronted, Sam replied that he’d been at his studio all night. It was his go-to excuse, his way of conveying to anyone and everyone that he was married to art. “Art,” Mako would later write in her autobiographical novel, White Elephant. “That one word meant all was accepted, all forgiven.”14 “The Japanese women expect to be liberated by marriage to an American,” Nin wrote in her diary. “It does not liberate them. The American husband demands a Japanese wife. Liberation comes from within. Mako’s reproaches are vague, as vague as Japanese novels. Sam stayed out all night. To punish him she cuts off her beautiful black hair. He goes to bed with a pile of art books. She telephones me like a woman drowning.”15 While Sam’s world was expansive, with numerous studio spaces, light shows, and escalating activities in the art world, Mako’s world had shrunk to the domestic. She was isolated, struggling to express herself in an unfamiliar language. She felt as if she were in an invisible cage, safe but alone. “I feel like an animal, bloated and stagnant,” she told Nin. She’d come to America to blossom into a writer and escape what seemed her destiny: the role of the crying and submissive wife. Now she was a mother, and a housewife married to a famous artist. She was frequently in tears. With





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two young children and a husband who was constantly traveling, she found little time to write even though she had household help. She knew she was not good at verbal communication. What she’d experienced growing up had been, first, the violence of war, then silence and withdrawal at home. In her social life with Sam, she felt trapped between English and Japanese, and this further inhibited her. But also she discovered that, though she might not be a loquacious conversationalist, she was an astute observer of personal interactions. When Mako turned thirty in 1970, she found herself plunged into an identity crisis. She did not want to be just a mother and housewife. She wanted more. She joined a consciousness-raising group and began to learn what it meant to be a woman and what it meant to be a feminist. One afternoon, on an outing with her boys, she purchased a movie camera. Sam had closets full of cameras, but this one would be hers. If his big dream was to paint the heavens, her dream was small enough to fit in her hand. With her Super 8 camera, she would capture her own world. “I want to do something,” she told Sam. “I want to express and make something.” Hardly surprising since she’d grown up around art and was married to a painter who believed that artists were Übermenschen.16

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My Consciousness Is an Image

When Mako began making films, she wasn’t sure what her subject matter would be, so she focused on what was in front of her: her home life. Her husband and children hiking in the desert, playing at the beach, and frolicking around the pool. The kidney-shaped swimming pool occupied the center of the West Channel Road property, stretching between the house and the studio. In the water, his spine free from gravity and his body relaxed, Sam romped with Osamu and Shingo. The two small boys loved clambering over him and using his plump belly as a flotation device. But their favorite sport by far was to cling to his shoulders, screaming with delight as he dived below the water’s surface and breaststroked the pool’s length. All the while, Mako’s lens observed and documented. At night, when Sam was home, he sat in his Eames lounge chair, a son nestled in a giant bean bag on either side, and told them stories. Their favorites were tales of the Shadow Man. The Shadow Man had superpowers. He could make a child’s dreams come true. In Sam’s made-up stories, a small boy and his dog set forth on adventures propelled by dreams and by the Shadow Man’s magic. Unbeknownst to the children, Sam’s Shadow Man had emerged out of Jung’s idea of shadow work. “Everyone carries a shadow,” Jung writes, “and the less it is embodied in the individual’s con228





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scious life, the blacker and denser it is.”1 Shadow work required people to cultivate a deep understanding of aspects of their personalities they most rejected or suppressed. Shadow work happened when they brought the unconscious self and all its dark desires into the light of consciousness using dreams and creative imagery. By 1971, both Sam and Mako were in Jungian therapy with Dr. James Kirsch. Mako had met Kirsch first, through a teacher at the boys’ Montessori school. After her first few sessions, Sam decided to go too. Though he had studied psychology as an undergraduate, he’d never undergone analysis. For a short time, both saw Kirsch a few times a week to discuss their dreams. Then Mako realized that Kirsch was more interested in treating her famous husband than in treating her, so she found another therapist for herself. This was quintessential Sam. Without being aware of it, he absorbed and appropriated whatever appeared in his orbit. Kirsch had received his medical and psychiatric degrees in Berlin. He’d undergone analysis with Carl Jung in Switzerland in 1928. But after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933, Kirsch’s dreams and visions alerted him to the coming danger. He and his wife fled to Palestine. Eventually, he divorced and remarried and, with his second wife, Hilde Silber, moved to California in 1940. There they established the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles. By 1971, when Sam began therapy, Kirsch had published his first book, Shakespeare’s Royal Self, an in-depth analysis of the individuation process undergone by Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear.2 By all accounts, Sam and James Kirsch adored one another. The personal and professional realms overlapped in the Kirsches’ Los Angeles household, just as they had in Jung’s household in Switzerland. Many of Kirsch’s patients became his close friends. Sam and Mako were frequent guests around the Kirsch table. Kirsch translated Jung’s published and unpublished manuscripts and led seminars about Jung’s Answer to Job and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, along with Jung’s work on alchemy, Mysterium Coniunctionis. Sam took them all. Thomas Kirsch, James’s son from his first marriage and also a practicing psychiatrist, believed that his father and Sam had a transference and countertransference. Sam projected his fantasies of a father figure onto Kirsch while, for Kirsch, Sam was the artist he’d never become.

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Just as Kirsch entered Sam’s life, Sam’s father died. Sam Sr. had been ill for several years, but he still acted as a moral compass for Sam. As a mathematician, he’d pursued what he called the beauty of absolute truth in his life and his work. Quite a contrast to his fanciful son, who had a more creative relationship with accuracy! While Sam would maintain a close friendship with his stepmother, Virginia, after Sam Sr.’s death, he leaned more and more on Kirsch, twenty-two years his senior. “He’s my teacher,” Sam said of Kirsch.3 His sessions with Kirsch were short, perhaps twenty minutes, during which they discussed Sam’s dreams. Highly intuitive and filled with possibilities, Sam was continually falling in love with some new idea or project or woman. For him, the urge to discover something was far greater than the urge to work through the issues he faced. He believed that Jungian analysis facilitated access to his unconscious desires. Since his desires drove him, he wanted to explore that psychic space, to become more fully himself. He wanted to open the doors to his unconscious and let everything through. Ann McCoy, an artist and attendee of Kirsch’s seminars, believed that Sam used analysis as a tool for giving depth to his artwork. Of his dream life, Sam bragged, “I have so much contact with my unconscious. I’m in a dialogue with it.”4 Now fully in the grip of the feminist movement, Mako was fascinated by Jung’s idea of the anima and the animus. In Jungian theory, the human personality embraces both male and female. The anima is the unconscious feminine (the inner woman) within a man. The animus is the unconscious masculine (the inner man) within a woman. Jung believed that when people fall head over heels in love, they are falling for their inner male or female projected onto the other. Only after that projection falls away is real knowledge of another possible. Was Mako Sam’s other half—the feminine within him? Was Sam hers? Had she projected onto him her desires to be loved and cherished by a powerful, hedonistic man? Mako explored these ideas in one of her early films, Inner Man (1972). In this short montage, a woman dressed in a kimono performs a traditional geisha fan dance. Projected onto her form is a naked white man dancing with abandon. Mako used the double exposure of female and male to explore what would become the central theme of her art: What is a woman? Is she only what society demands?





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Figure 16. Mako Idemitsu, still from Inner Man, 1972.

To learn her craft, Mako had enrolled in a night course at the UCLA extension program. Unfortunately, the professor announced that he would not be teaching technique. So Mako turned to friends. The filmmaker Bruce Conner showed her how to combine found footage with her own images. But learning by herself was perhaps the most crucial step in Mako’s artistic self-actualization. While attending her consciousness- raising group, she had an epiphany. She was struck by the idea that some people are strong and others are weak. Specifically, she’d heard since childhood that “women were weak with machines.”5 It occurred to Mako that maybe this wasn’t true. Perhaps it was only something she’d been told and therefore believed. She decided to teach herself everything she could about film machines. She would appropriate what had until then been a male-dominated technology to shine a light on women’s issues. The artist Judy Chicago was encountering a similar problem with her female students. Not only was the male-centric art world inhospitable to

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women, but also her female students lacked familiarity with tools and artmaking processes. In 1971, Chicago had been hired by Cal Arts, along with artist Miriam Schapiro, to establish the Feminist Art Program. However, with the campus still under construction, they lacked studio space. In what would become a groundbreaking feminist project and make Los Angeles the epicenter of the feminist art movement, they took over a dilapidated seventeen-room Victorian in Hollywood. Out of their crisis, they created the pioneering Womanhouse. They refurbished the house, transforming it into a feminist installation and holding all-female performances. What better environment for an all-female group of students to explore their visions as artists than a home, the archetypal woman’s space? They worked for three months, repairing and altering the house, many of the women using power tools for the first time. They held consciousness-raising seminars to uncover their feelings and produced theater pieces about women’s longings, fears, and dreams. Only women were allowed to attend opening night. But eventually, ten thousand people streamed through Womanhouse during its monthlong run in early 1972.6 Mako did not participate in the construction of Womanhouse. Still, she came with her camera and documented the exhibit, lingering reverentially in front of every nook and cranny of the space. The Lipstick Bathroom was strewn with half-used tubes of lipstick. In the Menstruation Bathroom, the toilet and wastebaskets overflowed with tampons. Fried-egg foam sculptures morphing into nipples covered the pink walls of the Nurturant Kitchen. Each room provocatively explored some role women play or some duty they perform. Stereotypes were depicted and dismantled. For Mako, Womanhouse was a profound and revelatory experience, solidifying in her mind that domestic life and her own female reality were topics worthy of consideration and valid subjects for art. Ever since Mako’s father had begun collecting the art of the Buddhist monk Sengai Gibon during her childhood, she’d experienced the visual arts as the realm of men. Now, in the early 1970s, the exploding women’s liberation movement had begun to shake loose preconceived notions of gender and to challenge the territory claimed by the macho artists of Los Angeles’s Cool School and the very male Hollywood film world, where it was rare (even taboo) to find a woman behind a camera. Judy Chicago said she found Sam more supportive of female artists than his cohorts were.





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He considered Joan Mitchell and Grace Hartigan great painters, and he gave Chicago the use of his lithography studio to pull her controversial print Red Flag (1971), showing a woman’s hand extracting a bloody tampon from her vagina. While Sam was learning about his female side through his investigation of Jung, he was still a product of his times. Like many men, he harbored misogynistic attitudes. He screened Mako’s films at home parties on West Channel Road yet never introduced her as a filmmaker. Even Judy Chicago, who knew Mako through Sam and Anaïs Nin, did not realize that Mako was making films until she saw her footage about Womanhouse. If this bothered Mako, she was too conditioned to speak up. Her anger at Sam centered on his promiscuity. When she lost her temper, her English abandoned her, and she resorted to throwing his precious books at him. She was slowly grasping that both his unfaithfulness and his lack of outright interest in her films stemmed from the same source: his grandiosity. As Mako investigated her Japanese feminine identity in her work, her sense of cultural displacement increased. In 1972, her father gave her a piece of property in downtown Tokyo. In collaboration with the architect Raku Endo, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright, Sam designed a new family home. On previous trips to Japan, they’d lived in a hotel or a small apartment, but, with the boys growing up, Mako wanted them to spend more time in her country. She wanted a home that wouldn’t be continually invaded by Sam’s troops. In Santa Monica, his assistants and friends from the Jungian seminar burst into the house unannounced. The young light performers from Turquoise Bird floated in the swimming pool. For the most part, Mako enjoyed Sam’s people. However, their constant unscheduled disruptions made it nearly impossible for her to have any kind of nuclear family life with Sam. And then there was Sam’s roaming, his sudden disappearances. When they’d met, eight years before, she’d been a dreamy young girl. She’d romanticized his need to rove and idealized him as an artist on a quest for self-discovery, just as he’d idealized her as a princess in need of rescue. Now, her consciousness awakened, Mako focused on herself. In response to Sam’s wandering, she flew to Japan. On one of her visits without Sam, she wrote to him: “Who can be unhappier than a wife who is trying to run away from the husband she

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loves? I wish I could forget everything and just love you straightly.” In another letter, she observed, “Life is very simple without you.”7 I know why you have such pain, Sam replied. If I am so bad I want to know it so I can change myself. I want to know if you are right about me. I respect your feelings . . . I will help in any way I can. I will accept any conclusion you come to . . . I will open all the doors of my heart. If after we have opened our hearts this way you decide you must start your life another way I will never do anything to stop you. Inside, he was still the little boy terrified of losing his mother figure. Mako returned to Santa Monica, but their problems continued. •

•

•

•

•

While Mako struggled to express herself within the limitations imposed by working in a different language and a different culture, Sam came off a very hectic two-year exhibition schedule and turned inward, looking to refuel. He had shown jointly with Walasse Ting and Joan Mitchell in Fresh Air School at the Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art. Simultaneously, the largest exhibition of his work to date opened at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo. From there, it traveled to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC; the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; and, finally, to the Oakland Museum in California. Curated by Robert T. Buck, the show spanned twenty-five years and included 120 works. At last Sam had a major retrospective in New York City. Most of the reviews were favorable. Time called Sam a painter of extraordinary robustness and sensitivity. Writing for the Washington Post, Paul Richard reported that the exhibition was stunning. He wondered why the East Coast cognoscenti rarely mentioned Sam’s name or recognized his great talent and the importance of his contribution. He surmised that Sam had been “judged not for his paintings, but for the lands in which he lived.” However, no sooner did the show reach the Whitney than Hilton Kramer of the New York Times took it upon himself to defend the East Coast bias and mount an attack. Acknowledging Sam’s elegance, Kramer speculated that perhaps it was his “willingness to traffic in beautiful effects without apology or disguises—that separates Mr. Francis from some of his New York counterparts.” In a second article in the Sunday Times, Kramer





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continued his assault, claiming that the artworks’ “essential emptiness derives from the very ease with which the artist took possession of his style in the earliest stages of his career.” Other artists, Kramer insisted, wrestled. Sam did not appear to wrestle. Robert Buck responded in a letter to the Times. Rebutting both of Kramer’s reviews, Buck said that Kramer’s opinion underscored the “seeming inability of some New York critics to admit to his [Sam’s] significance.” He called the writer’s attitude “insular, self-serving, and negative.”8 If Buck was right and the East Coast maintained a bias against Sam Francis, preferring art that blatantly displayed an artistic struggle, then so, too, was Kramer. Like all virtuosos, Sam had a gift—what Al Held had defined early on as his “great lyrical hand.” Sam never had to struggle for that hand. That hand was simply his. Another artist might have trained himself away from his gift. Sam embraced it. As resilient and fierce as Sam was, Kramer’s reviews surely stung. However, if the criticism bothered him, he did not speak about it. The view that his work was decorative because he’d gained renown in France was old news by then. He focused instead on what was in front of him. In response to Mako’s need to develop as an artist in her culture, the family decided to move to Japan for a year. At the end of August 1973, the new house in Tokyo completed, they packed up the boys and left Santa Monica. The children, aged six and three, got no explanation. It’s likely that both Sam and Mako were still uncertain about how their relationship would resolve. Mako later told Osamu that she wished she had talked to them. But she’d grown up in a family where no one communicated, so she didn’t understand until much later what her children needed to hear. Osamu, six years old at the time, remembered, “Leaving Santa Monica was like leaving paradise.” When they arrived in Japan, Shingo looked around and said, “Where am I?” But Mako was happy. She loved the new house, “too beautiful for a family with two boys to live.” She wrote Nancy Mozur, sending a list of items Nancy should buy for them because they were too expensive in Tokyo: Aunt Jemima pancake syrup, Formula 409 cleaner, and Sam’s vitamins. Now, readmitted into the family and endowed with property, Mako was not seen in Japan as only Sam’s decorative wife. She was an Idemitsu, a

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Figure 17. Sam Francis, Mako Idemitsu, and their two sons, Osamu (standing) and Shingo Francis, Tokyo studio, ca. 1970.

revered and prestigious name. Within months of their arrival, Mako had her first solo exhibition, at the Nirenoki Gallery in Tokyo, and her video What a Woman Made (1973) was screened at the group exhibition Tokyo-New York Video Express. The video shows a tampon swirling down a toilet bowl while a voice-over clinically announces the birth of a baby girl who must be raised in Japan. Mako had become a feminist whose subject matter was the nature of personal identity and the self in Japanese society. In contrast, Sam was uncomfortable with the change of locale. As a visitor in Japan, he’d been treated like a king. Now that he was a resident, people grew accustomed to his presence. No longer a visiting celebrity, he was sometimes overlooked. When he met his old friends Yoshiaki Tōno and Jasper Johns in Ginza for drinks, Tōno focused his attention exclusively on Johns, and Sam felt slighted. When Sazō Idemitsu entertained André Malraux, the French novelist and former minister of culture, Idemitsu forgot to include Sam on the guest list, and Sam felt offended. He now faced the pressures that Mako had lived under for so long in California, those of the ignored stranger in a strange land.





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Figure 18. Sam Francis holding self-portrait in Tokyo studio, 1974.

During this time of discontent, Sam created his only extended body of figurative work, his self-portraits. They were small works on paper using a technique similar to that he’d devised for Berlin Red. It involved drawing with bands of water, then releasing paint to disperse across the surface. While some of Sam’s self-portraits look whimsical and happy, the majority are dark, angry grotesques. After completing them, he would send them back to the Litho Shop on transfer paper to be realized as print

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editions. “He got to see his dark side,” his printer George Page said. “He never blinked.9 The American art critic Donald Kuspit called these images death masks.10 One is titled After Death, and, as the name implies, Sam’s expression acknowledges the omnipresence of death and endings. In this regard, the self-portraits evoke the aesthetics of the sublime, which weds beauty to power and destruction. Gorgeously painted, they are also terrifying. In these strange personifications, Sam strikes an exquisite balance between the ugliness of the image and the beauty of the color and liquefied technique. In many, Sam’s hideous visage is all but swamped by decorative and colorful paint, as if he were transmogrifying, the demon becoming his lyrical hand. The faces remain unformed, caught in the act of mutation. Sam’s self-portraits were atypical for an abstract artist. Not only were they figurative, but also they occupied the center of his canvas, which, until recently, had remained open. In contrast to his elephantine abstractions, they were modest in size, ranging from eleven by eight inches to forty-one by twenty-nine inches. But they are also a response to and a commentary on the work that preceded them: the Edge series. The center is reserved for you, Sam had said. Now he placed his round head in the center of a square sheet of paper like a mandala. In 1966, Warhol had done a six-image silk screen of himself, his head thoughtfully resting on his hand. A year later, Chuck Close had painted Big Self-Portrait (1967–68), which, at 107.5 by 83.5 inches, is a towering, aggressive image of Close with a lit cigarette sticking out of his mouth. Of this early work, Close said he wanted it big so that it would be hard to ignore. Both Warhol and Close were making statements early in their careers about the personal self versus the public image. The women artists Sam knew who were dealing with their own images—Mako, Cindy Sherman, Lynn Hershman—disguised their identities or merged them with stereotypes. But Sam, who had just turned fifty, was taking stock. More than the art of his contemporaries, the work of historical figures probably influenced Sam’s self-portraits. Like Rembrandt’s nearly one hundred self-portrait drawings, etchings, and paintings, they are intended as visual diaries. Additionally, as a hybrid of monstrosity, revelation, and obsession, they bring to mind Picasso’s many self-representations as a





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minotaur. Sam painted his self-portraits quickly to capture and document his pain and vulnerability before it vanished behind his sublime surfaces. Sam told Peter Selz, who had begun to gather information for a monograph, that the self-portraits emerged from his work with James Kirsch. They are visions of his anima archetype. Just as Mako had expressed her raucous inner man, Sam was portraying his anxious inner woman. But while Mako’s art explored questions about society’s expectations of women, Sam’s was more psychological and personal. He was operating from the privileged position of men. He did not have to take on the world. He did not have to contextualize. His art could afford to be hermetically sealed. He called them “demonic tricksters” and “dabbled demons” and worried that, if not channeled and integrated, they would take over his life. They surfaced when he was struggling to come to grips with the monster Mako saw within him. “Mako was a very austere muse who led me into deep cold water,” Sam told Selz. This deep cold water was his confrontation with himself and his shadow. “I want to reach something deeper. Something more primeval,” Sam said about all his work but particularly about these self-portraits, which were like an “inner kaleidoscope—I don’t use a mirror, I am the mirror.”11

20

Art Is the Heart of the Matter

In the fall of 1974, after a summer back in Santa Monica, Mako and the boys returned to live in Japan without Sam. The couple had agreed on a separation, each realizing that remaining in the other’s country for an extended period was untenable. For the next eight years, the boys lived in Tokyo during the school year and spent their summers with their father in California.1 During those vacations, the boys and Sam would fly to Oregon, Washington, or Canada on extended fishing trips with Sam’s younger brother, George, and George’s family and their four dogs. While Sam sat by the river, hands behind his head, breathing in rhythm with the wind in the trees, George acted as disciplinarian and organizer of the fishing expeditions. George, now the district manager of the US Bureau of Land Management in Roseburg, Oregon, was a reliable parental figure, the rock of the extended family. “When he said something,” Osamu remembered, “he meant it.” Once Osama cursed George in Japanese. When George demanded to know what he had said, Osamu flatly refused to say. “Then we won’t go fishing,” George said. Osamu had never experienced a repercussion, so he didn’t believe his uncle. “I probably called him something stupid like idiot, and Shingo kept 240





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begging me to tell George. He just wanted to fish. I wouldn’t, and we didn’t go fishing. I was so surprised. Sam didn’t know how to set limits.” Sitting off to the side with his head in the clouds, Sam had his own explanation for conflict. People misbehaved out of a lack of contact with their unconscious desires. If people made mistakes or created problems, they weren’t involved enough with their dream lives. “America,” he told his sons, “is wild and uncivilized—the home of the unconscious.”2 Preoccupied with his own world, Sam pretty much let the boys run free. In Santa Monica, he hired, first, a monk with a fondness for Playboy, then the chain-smoking Suzette, and, finally, Kim-san, their Korean housekeeper, who was fluent in Japanese. Kim-san cooked, cleaned, and shopped for groceries. Sam’s former studio assistant Krauth Brand became the boy’s nanny, teaching them to skateboard and surf. Brand stayed at the house when Sam traveled, painted late, or disappeared on a date. He took the boys to the doctor or the dentist. If Sam joined them in the evenings for dinner, the meal was frequently interrupted by calls or visitors. For the boys, West Channel Road was still paradise. In Japan, their grandfather’s chauffeur drove them to school, and their life was circumscribed. In contrast, Brand was a big, lovable Hawaiian man who built them a skate ramp inside one of Sam’s studios. Sam didn’t care if they trailed sand inside the house or leaned their surfboards against the couch. At the beach, they lived on Cheetos, orange soda, and Twinkies, which they bought at the liquor store across the street. After Sam started showing at the Smith Andersen Gallery in Palo Alto, the three sons of gallery owners Paula and Phillip Kirkeby joined Osamu and Shingo during their summer holidays. Now a band of wild boys ran up and down Sage Lane, hooting and hollering with delight. When they were older, the boys grabbed a water taxi at the end of the Santa Monica Pier and rode out to the fishing barge anchored offshore. There they could stay all day, even all night, catching squid, sharks, and mackerel, finally coming home when they were exhausted. Sometimes Sam would join them at twilight for a soak in the hot tub. He loved having people around him, just so long as he was free to withdraw. The boys mostly stayed out of Sam’s studio, though a few times he showed them how to spread water on the canvas, then hit it with paint and watch the colors explode and expand into the moisture.

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If his sons were jealous of the demands on their father’s attention, if they complained that Sam was too tired to play hide-and-seek (when they were little) or take them camping (when they were older), he would merely agree. He was tired. He couldn’t attend to them at the moment. And with all the young assistants hanging around and the Kirkeby boys visiting, there was always somebody to play with them. During the first three years of the separation, Sam and Mako tried to repair their relationship. Sam took brief trips to Japan, and, for a few weeks each summer, Mako joined the boys in California. She too loved and missed the Santa Monica lifestyle. But living so far apart and leading separate lives had further frayed their bond. Both were dating other people. Sam relished his semibachelorhood. He was seeing several women, keeping them compartmentalized. In some ways, the unresolved situation with Mako was ideal for him. It kept the women in his life from getting too attached and having expectations he couldn’t or didn’t want to fulfill. At the same time, it allowed him to keep all his options open. For a short time, Sam dated the German sculptor and light artist Maria Nordman. In his Monday night Jungian seminar with James Kirsch, he met a young single mother, Meibao Nee. Twenty-one years younger than Sam, Nee had three kids close in age to Osamu and Shingo. Often, she would pack up her kids plus Sam’s and take them to the beach or on camping trips. Like the Kirkebys, Nee was ready and available to help. Late at night, the kids asleep, Sam would knock on Nee’s window. In he’d slip, ready for wine, food, conversation, and love. James Kirsch, who knew about their relationship, continued to see both of them. “James must have heard so much from all of us about each other,” Nee mused. When Sam visited her, he’d talk about Blake, Shakespeare, and the universe. “It was very seductive,” Nee remembered. “He told me we could see art everywhere—spoons, forks, bowls, table, chairs—as long as we were attentive. He told me the world only seemed chaotic because the human mind wanted everything in order, but he loved the chaos.”3 If Sam’s heart craved chaos and mystery, the hearts of his children, particularly Osamu, a focused and intense young boy, craved order and familiarity. Mostly Sam loomed in their consciousness as both a larger-than-life presence and an immense absence. “During the winter when we were in Japan he’d send us tapes,” Osamu recalled. “One was of John Denver singing





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‘Take Me Home, Country Roads.’ At the end of the song, Sam’s voice would come onto the tape. ‘I miss you,’ he’d say, and then: ‘One more time.’ And ‘Take Me Home’ would play again. We played that tape until it shredded.” All of Sam’s kids desperately wanted to know him. Soon they would show up on his doorstep, eager to claim their father’s love. Kayo was the first to arrive. In 1977, after graduating from gymnasium in Switzerland, she decided to move to California. Until then, she’d spent so little time with Sam that she barely knew him. He was the man who swung through Bern with gifts that were either extravagant or inappropriate. He bought her a remote-control airplane that she was too young to operate, a book she’d already read. When she was thirteen, he took her to Paris. They stayed in a fancy hotel, partied with his bohemian friends, went dancing at a nightclub, and watched the cancan girls perform nude at the Crazy Horse. It was all exhilarating but unsuitable for a preteen. “Sam was a flamboyant hippie and symbolized America to me,” Kayo recalled. “I wanted to leave Switzerland, which was square and conservative. I wanted to live an exciting life like Sam.” Kayo had met her half brothers briefly the summer when she was fourteen and they too were in residence. But up until 1976, when she arrived on Sam’s doorstep on West Channel Road with her pet boa constrictor and her congas, her father and his family were an idealized mystery to her, bathed in brilliant California sunshine.4 In Switzerland, Kayo had experimented with drugs. It was the freewheeling 1970s. Soon Osamu and Shingo, too, would try mind- and mood-altering substances. Sam believed that it was okay to try everything once as long as you didn’t get pulled in deeply. He’d smoked pot a bit until one afternoon with the artist Ed Moses when he left his wallet containing $32,000 in a restaurant. After that, he decided to stop. Sam’s way of parenting Kayo through her crisis was to introduce her to all manner of holistic healers. Just as Sam did, Kayo saw Tom Nagaser, the acupuncturist and shiatsu masseur, and Chakrapani, the Vedic astrologer. She received colonics, took vitamins, and ate a sushi-rich diet. Almost every day, someone came to the house to perform a treatment. When Kayo wasn’t taking classes at Santa Monica College or receiving treatments, she was meditating with the swami Muktananda (the founder of Siddha yoga) in a tent set up near the Santa Monica Pier. With their mild climates and available land, Southern California cities like Pasadena and Santa Barbara

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had long been marketed as health resorts, first for tuberculosis, then for alcoholism and mental disorders, and finally, with the Betty Ford Center, for drug addiction. Additionally, the Hollywood film crowd and the Laurel Canyon music people gravitated to swamis and astrologers. Sam had many compulsions, especially women and food. By the 1980s, he was addicted to vitamins and healers. Ill health continued to plague him. He traveled with a suitcase packed with nutritional and mineral supplements. If there was a pseudoscientist in the vicinity—someone who practiced with crystals, magnets, beet juice, or hands-on magic touches; someone who drove up in a Rolls-Royce and charged exorbitant fees— Sam employed them. If a treatment was scheduled and Sam didn’t show up because he was sleeping, painting, or just late, Kayo, one of his sons, one of the Kirkeby boys, or even an assistant would take his place.5 In the midst of all this confusion—kids, girlfriends, doctors, assistants, and Jungians drifting through the property—Sam would grab his brushes and flee to the sanctuary of the canvas. This was what he required: ongoing agitation outside the studio, which propelled him into retreat. He walked a knife-edge between noise and quiet, turmoil and peace. “Sam was always complaining about everyone wanting him,” Osamu noticed. “Yet he kept encouraging everyone to come.” Of his process, Sam said, “I’ve created a kind of drama, and now I have to go into my hole.”6 Because art stood at the heart of his enterprise, he created a mesh of people so he could accommodate his children but also keep working. This net of helpers held together the many moving pieces in his life. Sam’s painting had undergone a significant change since the 1970s. After the hollow-centered Edge series had come works in which color, bright and joyful, billowed back from the sides. Next, he had done the small self-portraits. Now, Sam walked back and forth across his canvases with a wet paint roller, spreading water in a crisscross pattern. Into these water tracks, he dripped, splattered, flung, or applied paint, creating shimmering trails that formed lattices. Inside each set of crisscrossed bands of color was a square of light, as if Sam were splintering and shattering the gigantic centers of the Edge paintings. William Agee calls this body of work that merged pure feeling with structure “a brilliant fusion of those old opposites, the organic and the stable.”7 Agee suggests that Sam was inspired by





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Figure 19. Sam Francis painting Dynamic Symmetry in Ashland Avenue studio, Santa Monica, California, 1978.

the Suprematist compositions of Kazimir Malevich, which were exhibited at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1974. The geometry of Piet Mondrian’s late paintings was another influence, as was the work of Conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt, who was using a mathematically based system. Though many people referred to these paintings as grids, Sam rejected that description. “I hate the word grid,” he said. “It’s more like a matrix. An intense field.” When Peter Selz asked him to define matrix, Sam replied, “Womb math.” Sam always loved wordplay. “Matrix” comes from the fourteenth-century French word matrice, meaning “womb” or “uterus,” from which was derived the word “origin” and, finally, “matrix,” meaning “a rectangular array of quantities.” For Sam, “womb math” combines the maternal (womb) with the paternal (his father the mathematician) or, as Agee suggested, marries feeling to structure.8 Later, when interviewing Sam for Flash Art, Jan Butterfield asked him where the matrixes came from. He replied, “Well, matrixes are to catch little essences of infinity which go floating by.”9

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Whatever the matrixes trapped in their crystalline structures, they captured Sam’s attention, for he worked on this series for nearly a decade. Indeed, like a net, they caught and held Sam as he padded across their surfaces while working. With a paint bucket in one hand and a brush in the other, he jumped like a gazelle from white spot to white spot. Mark Whitney, who moved into Sam’s guesthouse in 1974 just as Mako and the boys relocated to Japan, called the paintings an attempt to make order out of the increasing chaos in Sam’s life. “He had a really interesting way of negotiating order and disorder,” Whitney said. “There was an agony to that process that I thought was really integral and important.”10 Mark Whitney was the son of the pioneering experimental filmmaker John Whitney and the painter Jacqueline Whitney. He’d met Sam after seeing his show at Nicholas Wilder Gallery. Again, Sam developed an interest in a young person’s budding career. Sam was far better at adopting other people’s grown-up children than he was at parenting his own small ones. Mark Whitney was creating a series of films about water, which Sam underwrote. The young filmmaker was in his midtwenties when he moved into the guesthouse and carted in a truckload of hay and spread it all over the floor because he liked the golden color. Sam didn’t care. Ultimately, Sam suggested Whitney as the director, cinematographer, and editor for a documentary about Carl Jung that he was developing with Kirsch’s Jung Institute. Conceived and written by the analyst Suzanne Wagner, with blessings and probably a little eager pressure from James Kirsch, and funded by Sam, the film would chronicle Jung’s life and ideas and include interviews with most of the first-generation analysts who’d studied under him: C. A. Meier, Joseph and Jane Wheelwright, Laurens van der Post, and James and Hilde Kirsch among them. “We’d all seen Marcel Ophuls’s The Sorrow and the Pity,” Whitney remembered, “and we responded to the oral history technique Ophuls used in that documentary.” This was the epic film, released in the United States in 1972, that documented the collaboration of Vichy France with Nazi Germany. Whitney didn’t want his film held together with narration. “That was too formulaic. I wanted it to connect organically without an exoskeleton.” This was many years before Ken Burns applied the device of using interviews and historical footage to structure the narrative of his Civil War documentary. Eventually titled Matter of Heart, the Jung film





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took eight years to complete. It has the intimate feel of what Sam called “a Jungian home movie.”11 The film crew, often accompanied by Sam, traveled back and forth to Switzerland at least half a dozen times. Kayo helped as a translator while Teruko, Kornfeld, and Paula Kirkeby joined in to raise additional funds. As usual, Sam involved everyone in his newest passionate endeavor. And just as with his studio assistants, Sam gave Whitney free rein and did not interfere with his work. “He enabled me to do something, and because he had such faith in me, I gave it my all.” One stiflingly hot afternoon in 1976, while his sons were in Santa Monica under the care of Brand and the film crew was waiting for the heat to break, Sam suddenly appeared on the set in Zurich and grabbed Whitney. “Come with me,” he said. Off they flew in a Swissair jet over the Alps to Milan. There, Sam rented a car and drove too fast on the autostrada, stopping to say hello to Count Giuseppe Panza and take in his collection of postwar American art. They saw magnificent paintings by Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns and also conceptual works like those of Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt, and Robert Ryman, all of whom were then using the grid as their organizational format. Perhaps Sam undertook this spontaneous visit so he could enter into a dialogue with these concept-driven artworks. Or maybe he wanted to see the site-specific installations Panza had recently commissioned from James Turrell and Maria Nordman. Sam was involved with Nordman at the time. Or maybe he didn’t know why he was there, he was simply chasing his desire on a perpetual search for the next possibility, the next way to incorporate some new element into his expanding vision. After their afternoon visit with Panza, Sam and Whitney raced south to Venice, where a speedboat ferried them across the lagoon. It was dusk by the time they sped by the Lido. “It was the first time I saw Venice,” Whitney remembered. “An island of buildings floating on the horizon line.” This was Sam at his most irresistible. A small, white-haired man in a straw hat, swooping in, scooping up whoever was in his sight, and taking them on an adventure. By the mid-1970s, Sam was deeply enmeshed in the Jungian community. Besides the film, a project conceived by Bob Thomas, an aeronautical engineer, had emerged from the Monday night seminars. In the early 1970s, Thomas had vividly dreamed about a star pattern carved into the

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earth. Thomas believed that his dream delivered to him the image for a vertical axis wind turbine (VAWT) design. When Thomas spoke with Kirsch about it, Kirsch told him the dream “needed to be acted upon.” Out of this dream, Thomas created a prototype. Sam saw it and immediately decided that this wild idea was the next great “dream project.” Thomas, along with Sam, Kirsch, and George Wagner (an environmental attorney and the husband of Suzanne Wagner, the analyst and writer of Matter of Heart), formed the company Wind Harvest in 1976. Sam designed the whirling star pattern that became the company logo. In 1980, Thomas briefly left Wind Harvest to head the nascent wind energy program at then-governor Jerry Brown’s California Energy Commission. By 1983, Thomas had returned full-time to Wind Harvest. Brown was no longer governor, and Ronald Reagan was president. Not only did Reagan remove the solar panels from the White House, but he stopped all wind energy tax credits. Most American wind technology companies went bankrupt. Due in large part to Sam’s financial backing, Wind Harvest was able to stay afloat. Sam loved to drive over to Thomas’s house periodically with a grocery bag of $100 bills. Eventually, other investors were pulled in to fund new iterations of the designs, but Sam’s contribution came to about $2 million (close to $12 million today). According to George Wagner, when he told Sam that China had ripped off Wind Harvest’s turbine design, Sam said, “Great, that’s why we did this. To save the earth.” The company, now called Wind Harvest International, is the oldest in the United States and the world’s leading developer of VAWT design. The fact that it started as a dream delighted Sam. Dreams were to be made real, to be manifested. But Mark Whitney began to wonder what would happen if Sam’s ego grew too large, too ungrounded, too detached from a healthy community. What would happen if he chose the wrong dream?12 In the summer of 1978, Sam opened a show of his recent matrix paintings at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Instead of inviting Mako, who was still his wife, he’d asked his new girlfriend, the Chinese artist Liga Pang, to accompany him to the celebration. Mako was involved with another man in Japan, so Sam’s choice of companion was understandable. But he was still trying to have it all, the wife and the girlfriend. Visiting with the boys in Santa Monica, Mako was hurt by the exclusion.





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The show at the recently erected Pompidou was a coup. The new interdisciplinary complex, combining centers for art, literature, performance, and cinema, had been the brainchild of André Malraux and Georges Pompidou. They hoped to reinstate the old dream: Paris as the cultural capital of the world. Finally completed in 1977—three years after Pompidou’s death and five months after Malraux’s—the Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano design, with a glass exterior and an escalator running up the outside, was the first “inside-out” building in architectural history. It appeared to herald a radical change in the art-viewing experience. The founding director, Pontus Hultén, had come from Moderna Museet in Stockholm, where he’d previously shown, among others, Sam Francis. Hultén’s first show at the Pompidou was a Marcel Duchamp retrospective; it was followed by the blockbuster interdisciplinary Paris: New York, which documented the nearly century-long dialogue between the two major art centers. In 1978, only a year after the Pompidou’s grand opening, Sam’s exhibition premiered. Ellsworth Kelly, Joan Mitchell, and Jean Paul Riopelle attended. A handful of Sam’s studio assistants did too, as well as Kornfeld and Sam’s Paris dealer, the elegant Jean Fournier. According to Mitchell’s biographer Patricia Albers, Mitchell and Kelly got into a heated argument. Mitchell was probably drunk, and the spat caused her to laugh so hard she wet her pants. “She dashed to the ladies’ room to remove them, then returned to wave them grotesquely in the face of Fournier, who turned green . . . . Sam was furious, afterward telling friends, ‘I will never speak to her again! I’ve had it. She ruined my whole dinner. (Later they reconciled.)’ ”13 Joan Mitchell might have been jealous, drunk, or happy to take Sam down a peg. Like Sam, she had problems curtailing her desires. The opening caused further distress when news arrived from home: Mako had filed for divorce. She was in love and wanted to devote herself to that relationship. She’d finally reached her limit with Sam. Devastated by the final and irretrievable loss of Mako, Sam’s palette, which had been joyful and brilliant, darkened, and the matrix edifice thickened until it nearly blacked out the surface of his canvases. What had been delicate lattices of melodic colors hardened into dark barricades. The white spaces shrank to pinholes. Mark Whitney, who continued to live at the guesthouse while working on Matter of Heart (he would stay there for

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eight years), remembered feeling that Sam was overextending himself in his life. They began to have impassioned discussions about Jungian theory. Whitney took the position that the collective bond was the apex of culture, while Sam held that it was the individual. He believed that the artist epitomized Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch, the superman. “In the end, that chewed him up,” Whitney said. “He became vulnerable to his own inflated and unmoored ego.”

21

A New Era for Los Angeles

In the spring of 1980, Sam flew to Paris with a mission. He was there to inquire if his old friend and supporter Pontus Hultén, the legendary founding director of two large museums, would consider leaving France to establish another museum: the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. Hultén, a six-foot-tall bear of a man, was credited with originating the interdisciplinary exhibition. Sam knew that Hultén’s contract with the Pompidou was up in a year. Hultén considered the offer for a moment. He was tired of the bureaucracy of working for a public institution. He liked the weather and unconventional lifestyle of Southern California. Besides, he told Sam, “there’s a good ocean there.” Pontus Hultén loved three things above all: art, Sam Francis, and his boat.1 Two years earlier, the dream of a Los Angeles museum devoted to contemporary art had finally found traction, spearheaded by the indomitable Marcia Weisman. The wife of the business tycoon Frederick Weisman, she was an avid contemporary art collector. It was at the Weismans’ home that the outlandish Walter Hopps had led his classes in art collecting in the early 1960s, educating and nourishing novice Los Angeles art collectors like the Weismans, Ed Janss, Betty Freeman, and Monte Factor. The Weismans had been involved in the failed dream of the New Arts Society 251

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in 1967. A few years later, in 1972, Marcia Weisman’s brother, the billionaire industrialist Norton Simon, had stepped in to rescue the financially bankrupt Pasadena Art Museum. He took on their $850,000 loan and million-dollar debt. In return, the Pasadena Art Museum was renamed the Norton Simon Museum. It turned over 75 percent of its gallery space to Simon’s inventory of works by old masters, Impressionists, and Asian art. Until then, the Pasadena Art Museum had been a bastion of contemporary art. Now, as the Norton Simon Museum, it relegated contemporary art to the storage racks. This was a huge disappointment and a setback for the developing Los Angeles art scene. Marcia Weisman, whose art focus was on post–World War II art and whose collection included Willem de Kooning, David Hockney, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol (who had done screen-print portraits of Marcia and Frederick), most of the Cool School, and Sam Francis, took it personally. At a political dinner, she bent the ear of her friend Tom Bradley, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles. By the end of the meal, she’d persuaded him to provide city land through the Community Redevelopment Agency for a museum of contemporary art, a place she envisioned as devoted to the “city’s cultural well-being.”2 Bradley appointed a ten-member committee that included Weisman and the real estate mogul Eli Broad and that became the future museum’s first board of trustees. A site was secured in a downtown section of Los Angeles’s business district: nine acres of the blighted area known as Bunker Hill. Because the Community Redevelopment Agency stipulated that all commercial developers had to use 1.5 percent of their construction budget for the arts, the developer had to absorb the cost ($20 million) of some one hundred thousand square feet for a museum building, plus adjoining land for a sculpture garden—nine acres in all, combined into one package. The trustees agreed to raise an additional $10 million for an endowment. Eli Broad donated the first $1 million, and the venture capitalist and film producer Max Palevsky pledged to match it. Sam’s connection to MOCA came a few months later, after Robert Irwin got wind of the project from Marcia Weisman. She’d invited Irwin to an informal meeting at her home. Excited but nervous that the project would be taken over by the establishment, Irwin spread the word to local artists, including Sam and the minimalist sculptor De Wain Valentine. They began meeting every Monday night to voice their preferences and concerns. “If it





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was going to happen,” Irwin said, “we wanted to put our oar in the water. We were the constituents it was theoretically supposed to deal with.” They formed the Artists’ Advisory Council. They wanted the new museum to be an international institution but also to recognize California art. They determined that it should be a museum by and for artists. Who does the museum belong to? Sam wrote in his journal. What does it serve? Eventually, Irwin and Sam were invited to join the museum’s board, and, by 1980, both were sitting on the director’s search committee. From the beginning, Sam wanted Pontus Hultén to be the director. He wanted someone sophisticated with star power. Irwin liked Hultén but felt he had the wrong sensibility for a no-man’s-land like Los Angeles. Irwin wanted someone sharp but unpolished, someone “who would roll the dice with us. We were a bunch of surfers.” Soon it became apparent that two directors were needed: one an esteemed internationalist to give the venture credibility, the other a local, grassroots person. In July 1980, Pontus Hultén was named MOCA’s first director, and Richard Koshalek, from the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, became the deputy director and chief curator. The next hurdle was finding the right architect. Again, Irwin and Sam were named to the search committee, along with Hultén and Palevsky, who wanted design control for his million-dollar pledge. All agreed that they needed a flexible architect who would listen to their suggestions and give them a design that was friendly to contemporary art. This architect would need to solve complex design problems and have a large architectural vocabulary. In his journal, Sam noted, A building that does not compete with what goes on inside. They did not want to replicate the Guggenheim effect, that of the Frank Lloyd Wright structure on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which many artists felt vied with and overshadowed their work. Big names were proposed: Richard Meier, Frank Gehry, James Stirling from England, Edward Larrabee Barnes, the firm of Roche and Dinkeloo, and Sam’s old friend from Japan, a young architect who’d never done a building outside of his country, Arata Isozaki. The architect Richard Meier was an early favorite. Then Irwin said they didn’t need an architect, that he could do the job. Sam, who sat back in the meetings and intervened only toward the end of the discussions when everyone was exhausted, quietly suggested that the committee travel

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around the world to look at buildings. Off they went to Sam’s favorite spots: Paris, to look at the Pompidou; Copenhagen, to visit the Louisiana Museum, a modern art gem outside the city on the shore of the Øresund; and, finally, to Japan, where they met with Isozaki. Arata Isozaki had been a young architecture student when Sam first arrived in Japan in 1957. Though Isozaki had heard about the visiting artist painting a mural at Sōgetsu Hall, the two men didn’t meet until the early 1960s, when Yoshiaki Tōno took Sam to Isozaki’s studio. On the table was a design for a fantastical project, City in the Air, a future city with capsule-like modular habitats suspended like clouds above bombed ruins. Their mutual fascination with cloudlike formations brought the two men together. At first, they barely spoke each other’s languages, but soon they realized they also shared a passion for the topic of infinity and the challenge of conceptualizing it in design. This preoccupation with the mathematics of space is evident in Sam’s matrix paintings from the 1970s and 1980s and in the buildings Isozaki created from the 1970s onward. In each body of work, space divides into microcosms.3 Back in 1966, when the then-director of the Pasadena Art Museum, Walter Hopps, was redesigning that building—before the museum went bankrupt and Norton Simon bailed it out—Sam had suggested Arata Isozaki as the architect. Isozaki didn’t get that commission, but now Sam wanted him for MOCA. Not only an innovative architect with a large and varied repertoire of architectural styles, Isozaki was also a connoisseur of ma, of living space. As soon as the committee arrived, Isozaki took them to Fukuoka, on the island of Kyushu, southwest of mainland Japan. There he’d designed the Fukuoka Mutual Bank headquarters, a strong, rectangular structure built with beautiful red sandstone. Although Irwin, Sam, Hultén, and Broad argued about almost everything else, “they all fell in love with the red sandstone,” Isozaki said. In January 1981, Isozaki was named the architect for MOCA. Following the announcement, Sam threw a party at his Santa Monica studio to celebrate and raise funds. Into his barnlike space, past the painting racks, trooped the Los Angeles art world plus a sprinkling of film celebrities. Among the crowd was the kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely chatting with Paramount president Michael Eisner, Henry “the Fonz” Winkler, and comedian Steve Martin. Eli Broad stood on a bright green ladder,





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welcoming guests. Sam’s girlfriend, Liga Pang, handed out pins that read “MOCA.” Tables overflowed with fresh sushi. By the end of the evening, the endowment was over $3 million in the black. Because the design and construction of MOCA would take several years, and Hultén didn’t want to lose momentum, the directors proposed opening a guerrilla, pop-up space: the Temporary Contemporary. Before coming to Los Angeles, Koshalek had presented 9 Spaces/9 Artists, a series of pop-up exhibitions in abandoned gas stations and empty warehouses in Minneapolis in 1970 while the Walker Art Center was under construction. Sam got Mayor Bradley to agree to lend two adjacent police garages occupying fifty-five thousand square feet in a section of the city known as Little Tokyo. Frank Gehry was hired to renovate the interiors. For MOCA’s permanent building, Isozaki imported red sandstone from Agra, India. But problems multiplied. The access to the Grand Avenue site was steep. The developers didn’t want the museum’s parking structure to obstruct the surrounding residential views. They insisted that pedestrian access to the commercial space around the plaza be unimpeded. Isozaki wanted a facade that was recognizably an Isozaki. Max Palevsky wanted a neutral building—none of the usual Isozaki barrel vaults or pyramids. The artists were less concerned with the exterior and more concerned with the interior, where the art would be displayed. They cared about skylights and volume. So many people were meddling with his design that Isozaki threatened to quit. Hultén and Koshalek said if Isozaki quit, they would quit too. Sam calmed Isozaki down. “It will resolve,” Sam told him. Isozaki knew there were always people who thought they could run the show better than the architect. He’d just started another project, designing the interior of New York’s infamous Palladium nightclub. Andy Warhol kept showing up at the Palladium construction site, trying to supervise. “He spent more time there than I did,” Isozaki said. The Palladium opened in 1985, before MOCA. Using a vocabulary similar to that of Sam’s incandescent matrix paintings, the interior of the Palladium showcased a series of luminous, cubic, disco-dance spaces in a grid formation. Pontus Hultén, now in California full-time, parked his beloved boat in Sam’s driveway. Hultén and Sam often went fishing. Returning with their catch, they’d leave the fish swimming in the bathtub until Kim-san cooked up their bounty for dinner. But Hultén was increasingly homesick. He was

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an anarchist at heart, an electric idea man good at conceiving exhibitions but ill-suited for fundraising and administrative work. He started drinking boilermakers for breakfast, a whiskey chased by two beers. The board noticed. By 1983, even before the Temporary Contemporary opened, Hultén decreased his responsibilities at MOCA, and Richard Koshalek took the helm. By then, the Los Angeles Times was calling MOCA “the most famous non-existent institution in the world.” Calvin Tomkins, an art critic for the New Yorker, had a different opinion. He said that in giving artists a say in the design process, MOCA was “rethinking the idea of a modern museum.” Indeed, before Hultén stepped back, he had helped secure international respect for the museum.4 On November 20, 1983, the Temporary Contemporary opened with eighty-one works from the Count and Countess Giuseppe Panza. This was the art collection Sam had taken Mark Whitney to see in Italy a few years earlier. Thanks to MOCA’s endowment, the museum had been able to acquire this collection of post–World War II art. The cost was $11 million. One of the museum’s fundraising projects was the sale of Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary, a portfolio of limited-edition prints. Sam, along with Hultén, the gallery owner Leo Castelli, and Count Panza, co-chaired the Print Committee. The resulting portfolio included works donated by Sam Francis, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, and Andy Warhol. The artists were determined that this venture, which they believed portended the future of the Los Angeles art scene, should reach fruition. In the meantime, Isozaki finally got the board to approve a design for the Bunker Hill MOCA. Palevsky was sidelined. (A year later, in 1984, he tried to rescind his million-dollar pledge and sued MOCA to retrieve the half million he’d already given. He lost the suit.) In the finished building, opened in 1986, the entrance is a barrel vault on pillars. Light pours into the galleries, partially buried underground, through pyramidal skylights. In the Los Angeles Times, the art critic William Wilson called it “a self-evident masterpiece.” At MOCA’s opening, Eli Broad said that the museum marked “a new cultural era for Los Angeles.”5 The legacy of MOCA is complex. Sam eventually donated ten paintings, and a large share of Marcia Weisman’s collection went there as well. But





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Figure 20. Sam Francis and Pontus Hultén, Venice studio, California, 1989.

later, Eli Broad clashed with MOCA and built his own museum across the street. By the time the Broad opened in 2015, it had become almost de rigueur for billionaire collectors to turn their art collections into museums. While the Broad has a stellar, curated collection, it competes with MOCA for attendance, usually winning. However, MOCA is still a beacon and an inspiration for artists. For many years, it was the museum of contemporary art in America, founded and inspired by a handful of Los Angeles artists who sought to create a space for the diverse art of their

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times. MOCA crystallized the fact that Los Angeles was no longer a noman’s-land. It had become a major center of the international art world. As Los Angeles evolved into an art mecca, Sam’s profile rose. Art tours began to arrive at his studio. When the busloads showed up, Sam hid. The tasks of greeting and lecturing to visitors were added to Nancy Mozur’s, Dan Cytron’s, and George Page’s growing lists of responsibilities. In 1982, Sam had moved the Litho Shop to a bigger space at 2058 Broadway. The Litho Shop now included a reception area, an office, and a print studio. George Page still created lithographs with Sam, but Sam had hired an additional printer, Jacob Samuel, to make aquatints and etchings. A few steps away, at 2210 Broadway, Sam leased a warehouse as a painting studio. In San Leandro, in the Bay Area, he rented a hangar where he painted two commissioned murals: one for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the other for the United Airlines terminal at San Francisco International Airport. But Sam preferred to work at his complex on Broadway in Santa Monica. He liked to migrate between the Litho Shop and his studio, talking on the phone, dictating letters, printing, and painting. Sam was transforming into an industry. Just as the Temporary Contemporary opened its doors in 1984, Sam inaugurated Lapis Press, a fine art publishing company housed in the Litho Shop. (It was a subsidiary of the Litho Shop.) A booklover since childhood, Sam had long dreamed of creating a venue for livres d’art, books that for various reasons—complexity, size, cost, avant-gardism— might otherwise not be published. One of the goals for the New Arts Society, back in 1966, had been a publishing arm that would disseminate books and ideas. Now, Lapis Press would, among other things, partner with MOCA and other museums on books by and about contemporary artists. (The sculptor Martin Puryear and the multimedia artist Alexandra Grant are among those who undertook joint Lapis and MOCA ventures.) For years, Sam had pondered the idea of a publishing venture. The trigger was an event he saw as an example of Jung’s concept of synchronicity, a mysterious connection between the personal psyche and the visible world. A year earlier, in the midst of the MOCA discussions, he’d boarded a plane from Los Angeles to San Francisco. He was still undecided but thinking hard about Lapis when Jack Stauffacher sat down beside him. Sam and Stauffacher had known one another in childhood. Stauffacher had been in





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the bathroom when the gun went off in Sam’s hand and killed his friend Roy Powers. They hadn’t met for many years. Now Stauffacher was a world-renowned typographer. During the flight, they discussed Sam’s idea for a press. A few days later, as Sam was returning from San Francisco, Stauffacher sat next to him again, purely by chance because the seats on the shuttle were unassigned. “I decided then that I was going to make books. That’s a synchronistic event,” Sam said. Many would have chalked it up to coincidence. To him, it was a sign. A “pet idea,” he called it. “It’s like when you go to buy a dog. He chooses you . . . . I was chosen by my pet ideas. They don’t come from sitting around being rational.”6 Sam envisioned Lapis, like the museum, as a space that could bring people together. Jan Butterfield was hired as executive director. Later, the art dealer Robert Shapazian took over that job. Jack Stauffacher designed one of the early books for Lapis: Robert Irwin’s Being and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art. Shapazian called Lapis “an artistic venture of desire to create something unusual that would nourish people through ideas.” Lapis had three main branches: trade books, fine printing, and artist’s books. Like Sam, the press was globally oriented, acquiring and translating material from around the world. It went on to do volumes on history, art, literature, psychology, philosophy, and poetry. In 1986, Lapis published a colorful picture book for kids on the transmission of HIV written and illustrated by Niki de Saint Phalle. Sam’s old doctor, Silvio Barandun, was the medical advisor for her book: AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands. But Lapis’s first book, A Testament to the Wilderness, paid homage to the Jungian analyst C. A. Meier. It included a speech Meier gave about the wilderness and an essay, among others, by Sam. Half prose, half poem, Sam’s “Nature Aphoristic” expresses many of the ideas and aphorisms he’d been playing with for years. It is mostly a rhapsody on nature, her colors, her stars, her magnetic fields. In the middle of his essay, he attributes a quote to William Blake. Sam frequently misquoted authors, and his misquotes, like Freudian slips, are often revealing. Sam writes: “As William Blake said, what can be imagined is true.” In fact, what Blake wrote in his aphoristic text Proverbs of Hell was “what is now proved was once only imagin’d.” Blake meant that God imagined all things before he created them. Perhaps this is true of God and of Sam Francis, who sought to uncover the

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wilderness within himself and make it manifest. Sam’s distortion of the aphorism—from Blake’s idea of imagining something before it becomes a reality to Sam’s idea that whatever is imagined is reality—reveals something central about him. His imagination was the most real, vivid thing in his life. The imaginary had to be true because he utterly believed and followed it no matter where it led. “To consciously live in chaos is to live within perfection,” he wrote in “Nature Aphoristic.” He continued: “Perfection means the most possible relationships (an infinity of relationships) made all at once without regard to order. Order is always invisible.”7 An infinity of relationships made all at once could give rise to a work of art, a museum, and a publishing company. But it could also cause disaster.

22

My Virtue Is to Be Myself

After Sam and Mako’s divorce was finalized in 1982, Osamu announced that he wanted to return to the United States for high school. To the boys, California was a place of continuous sunshine and a distant, idealized father. Even though Mako was unsure of what was best for her sons, she agreed. Her father had died a year earlier. If he’d still been alive, he might have tried to prevent his grandsons from leaving for America. He’d desired for them to be raised traditionally in Japan. By the time Osamu and Shingo moved in with Sam and his entourage in Santa Monica, Kayo had married and was living in Jamaica. The boys entered Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, a private school that was a favorite of entertainment industry insiders. It was a good school but a world away from their tiny, protective international school in Tokyo. Crossroads had a surreal social atmosphere. The actor Denzel Washington was the assistant basketball coach, the actor Dustin Hoffman and the screenwriter Robert Towne were guest teachers, and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma played with the school’s chamber orchestra. It provided unique educational opportunities in an environment of privilege, wealth, fame, and drugs.1 Fifteen-year-old Osamu was studious and shy. He craved order. He couldn’t ask Sam for advice about fashion or girls. Sam was comfortable 261

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wearing the same paint-spattered shirt four days in a row, and his idea of a gift for a girl was a handful of paintbrushes. The women Sam dated swooned when they received his artistic bouquets, but this would not go over well at Crossroads. One day, Osamu wore a plaid shirt over plaid pants. Plaid was in style. Double plaid was an epic faux pas. Embarrassed, Osamu withdrew into himself. His younger brother, Shingo, was immensely popular but loved mischief. Twelve-year-old Shingo skipped school to skateboard and surf. He was famous for stuffing the toilets in the boys’ john until they overflowed. Sam was unaware of these pranks. He tried to be a good father. After their Saint Bernard, Susake, died, he brought home a border collie to ease his sons’ transition, but Sam’s method of parenting was to provide money, animals, and caretakers. In all other respects, he was hands-off. He still occasionally took his sons fishing, but most of the time, he was either painting, attending meetings for MOCA, working at the Litho Shop or Lapis Press, or traveling. When there were issues of misbehavior, the school knew not to call Sam. Instead, they reached out to Brand or to Kim-san or, more and more frequently, to Sam’s girlfriend, Liga Pang. Born in 1939 in Japan to Chinese parents, Liga Pang came to America after high school to study painting. Most of Sam’s friends and assistants thought Pang was good for Sam. She hosted his dinner parties dressed in exquisitely self-designed outfits, and he respected her art. She was thoughtful but also forthright. When he quoted one of his favorite aphorisms, Artists are great liars, she replied, “I never lie intentionally.”2 “There’s no such person,” Sam shot back. Later she would remember that conversation. She would remember, too, the many times he came over, flopped down on a patio chair, and said, looking around with a bemused smile, “I’m too comfortable.” As ever, Sam’s primary focus was his work. Late at night, after taking care of MOCA negotiations and other business, after attending openings or dinners, Sam painted. In 1978, he hired Jerry Sohn. Unlike Sam’s previous assistants, Sohn was not an impoverished artist. He was a young art collector—his parents owned a Van Gogh and a Renoir—who wanted to be involved in the creative side of the art world. Soon after he came to work for Sam, Sohn financed a house built by Arata Isozaki in Venice Beach. (Later this property was sold to Eric Clapton.) Sam called Sohn his





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facilitator. Sohn had a knack for expediting and arranging things. He traveled to Brussels, where he found a loom capable of weaving a tenmeter-wide stretch of canvas. Though the loom was out of commission, Sohn talked the owner into restarting it for Sam. Then he ordered thread from Ireland, where flax, the plant from which linen is derived, has been cultivated since 1000 BCE. For $20,000, Sohn had a piece of canvas made for Sam that was a fifth of a mile long. When Roy Lichtenstein came for dinner and heard about the giant loom, he too wanted canvas woven from it. “No way!” said Sam. He didn’t want to share the materials, like his huge canvas or his original paints, that helped make his art unique.3 Since 1975, Sam had been traveling regularly to Northern California to work on enormous monographs with Garner Tullis, the founder of the International Institute of Experimental Printmaking. Even though at the Litho Shop he employed his own master lithographer, George Page, as well as Jacob Samuel, his master etcher, Sam’s collaboration with different talent allowed for variations and diverse approaches. Additionally, Tullis’s institute offered another escape hatch for the artist who loved migrating between worlds. Though the printmaking medium demands a stage-bystage process in which adjustments are made during proofing, Sam threw his whole body into creating a print. As when he painted, he worked with brushes, knives, rags, cotton balls, his palm, a hammer, and even a kitchen rolling pin. Sam’s motto, said Tullis, was “Everything but the kitchen sink.” He combined watercolors, acrylics, and oil-based paints that weren’t supposed to mix. By 1980, Sam’s desire to print on a gigantic scale had propelled Tullis to engage his twin brother, Barclay, a PhD in aero-astronautical engineering, as well as a group of computer technologists at Stanford, to reconstruct the world’s largest printing press. They accomplished this using beams from the old Carquinez Strait Bridge. A permit was granted to close the Bay Bridge to transport the equipment in five trucks to Tullis’s studio in Emeryville. There the magnificent press, christened Big Bertha, was assembled. At eighteen feet high, eighteen feet wide, and seven feet deep, it weighed half as much as a Boeing 747.4 “Far out,” Sam said when introduced to Big Bertha. At his first encounter with the enormous press, he printed for three days straight, napping on a chair or stretching his back on a work table. “What has happened is that I have found a way to get in that machine,” he told Jan Butterfield of

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his experience printing on Bertha. “When I am working with these prints, I am the paper, I am the paint, I am the machine . . ., I am not trying to ‘make something.’ The images are very alive for me.” Sam’s nature, like that of water, was to fill every available nook and crevice and then keep seeping and spreading.5 It was the materialistic, excessive, and brash 1980s. Everyone was competitive, and everyone seemed to be making fistfuls of money. This was the decade when the contemporary art market took off. In the United States, Ronald Reagan’s Great Expansion was in full swing. The president had lowered top personal income tax rates from 70 to 28 percent. Japan, where Sam sold well, was in the midst of its own breathtaking economic boom. While auction prices for blue-chip modern and Impressionist works had risen steadily for years, they soared during the 1980s. In 1980, the record for a Van Gogh at Christie’s was $2,507,013 for Le jardin du poète, Arles (Public Garden at Arles). Ten years later, in 1990, Van Gogh’s Portrait de Dr. Gachet (Portrait of Dr. Gachet) went for $49,121,762. With the global proliferation of museums, galleries, and art fairs focusing on contemporary art, this market, once considered speculative, began to boom too. In the early 1980s, a twenty-year-old African American artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat was selling his expressive graffiti paintings for as little as $1,000. By 1989, a year after his early death—during a time when an artist’s work usually loses value while the estate is being settled— a Basquiat painting fetched more than $300,000.6 No longer a young painter (many of his deals were old-school transactions made with a handshake and a smile instead of an invoice), Sam nonetheless saw his prices reflect this surge of interest in art. A midsize Sam Francis acrylic was listed at $42,000 in 1978. Eleven years later, in 1989, his small acrylics started at $250,000. He achieved the position of revered elder statesman and art luminary after he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 1983.7 A multiplicity of styles accompanied this frenzied market, a postmodern smorgasbord that included everything from the brutish, expressive works of Julian Schnabel, David Salle, and Jean-Michel Basquiat to the iconic (and often ironic) photo collages of Barbara Kruger, the truisms of Jenny Holzer, and the Neo-Pop kitsch sculptures of Jeff Koons. Against this expanding, media-saturated backdrop, Sam plied his trade.





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In Santa Monica, Jerry Sohn set about reorganizing and simplifying Sam’s studio. He bought buckets with covers. He replaced the bowls into which Sam dipped his brushes with dispensers with spouts. These allowed Sam to pour thin streams of paint directly onto the canvas. To interfere with an artist’s process is a risky proposition, but Sam genuinely appreciated and encouraged input from his assistants. Now, instead of Sam wading through chaos to create his order on the canvas, Sohn’s system organized it for him. Though his output was prodigious and his prices good, the quality of the work sometimes suffered. In the past, Sam’s hedonistic tendencies had been balanced by his refined, elegant aesthetic, his exuberant colors held in check by white space. Untitled (1980), painted in response to the death of his friend the art dealer Kusuo Shimizu, illustrates this equipoise. Here a tiny mandalic void in the center manages to both suck and hold the dark, whirling energy of the colors surrounding it. But as the decade progressed and the noise and hype in the art world increased, Sam shot off in different directions. Sometimes he still painted matrixes or mandalic configurations, but more often than not, he abandoned formal structures entirely. He began to pour from the buckets, vast puddles of color that pooled on the canvas. With a brush or a stick, he splattered and pulled the paint à la Jackson Pollock. William Agee suggests that, though this work was assured, it was also uneven.8 Sam’s ability to move paint with ease was unmatched, as was his grasp of color. But without an organizing system (a grid, a square, an edge), he relied on intuition alone. “Great art comes from poverty,” Sam once told Jeffrey Perkins.9 It is born from the need to cope and improvise in the face of scarcity or hardship. In the early 1950s, Sam created his White series in a tiny room with so little money that he resorted to mostly cheap white paint. His restricted circumstances liberated him to start again, from nothing. Now, his pockets full, his process streamlined, Sam had no restrictions: not money, not time, not the energy it took to wade through his mess, not even an organizing form. He was untethered. Perhaps Sam felt trapped by his need to keep his industry afloat and to support his many obligations, commitments, and causes. “I don’t like the idea of saving money,” he told the French philosopher Yves Michaud in an interview in 1985. “If I get money from selling paintings, I want to spend

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it immediately, but there is nothing to spend it on, except books or research or medicine or windmills. . . . The problem is that when you get rid of the money, more comes in.”10 He joked that, with his lithography business, he could print more money than the government. The garbage cans outside his studios were frequently raided by people who thought they could find a scrap of paper or canvas painted and then discarded by Sam Francis. Like the paint-stained boxer shorts he’d sold for $1,200, even his trash was sought after. Often, during this period of the mid-1980s, Sohn filmed Sam’s painting sessions. Padding around his canvas in his underwear and stocking feet, his shock of white hair on end, Sam grunted at the camera. “I’m not a painter,” he snarled, and, frequently: “I’m tired of being Sam Francis.” He had woven a web around himself, and he must have wanted to break away, to retreat far from the frenzy and the crowd clamoring for his attention. Twelve years earlier, in an interview Jeffrey Perkins filmed with him in 1973, when he was still married to Mako, Sam talked of feeling drained by all the interruptions. He said he wanted to escape like Merlin into a cave with “a young witch.” Speaking in the third person, Sam described his vision. “She wove a kind of thicket that he couldn’t escape from. She taught him all about sexual love in there. He wanted to be bewitched. It was his time. He was ready for it.”11 If Sam was drained in 1973, he was sapped by 1985. Without warning, he surprised everyone who thought they knew this mercurial man. On November 13, 1985, in a Shinto ceremony at the Meiji Shrine in Tokyo, he remarried. Practically no one in Sam’s life—not his assistants; not his girlfriend, Liga Pang; not his accountant, Marty Sosin; not even his kids— had heard a peep about Margaret Smith before the wedding photos appeared in the Japan Times and phones started ringing across the world. At thirty-seven, Margaret was twenty-five years younger than Sam. Born on a farm fourteen miles east of Liverpool in the flatlands of St. Helens, England, she was the oldest of five siblings. She’d wanted to be a painter since she was five. To achieve this goal, she’d learned to compensate for her shyness with tenacity and will. She was resourceful, intense, and unwavering in her determination. After art school in England and a brief foray into the fashion industry in Sweden, she made her way to





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Japan. In Tokyo, she studied traditional Eastern painting and calligraphy. Besides mastering the muscle discipline of moving her brush, she learned to breathe so calmly that “when an earthquake rocked the house, you didn’t notice.”12 She also learned to think like a lily. A lily has one main desire: to face and worship the sun. If Margaret was Sam’s earthquake, Sam was her sun. Introduced in Tokyo in 1983 by a mutual acquaintance, Sam and Margaret had quickly became involved. For two years, the relationship had been long distance, at the periphery of Sam’s life, for he saw Margaret only when he traveled to Japan. Separated by an ocean, with infrequent in-person contact, the two scarcely knew each other. However, when they were apart, Sam called her. He was a flirt, a man who loved all possibilities. And he found Margaret very entertaining. Though she came from a family of tenant farmers, she had the wit and eccentricities of a British aristocrat. When her dog, Joy Boy, died, she threw him a funeral. She enjoyed competing in amateur singing contests in Tokyo, where foreigners (gaijin) performed Japanese songs at events sometimes broadcast on local television. Like Sam, she was an embellisher and a dreamer with a fanciful imagination. Margaret probably surpassed Sam in her ability to inflate and extrapolate. Her green eyes sparkled, and her fingers danced through the air as she spun a tale worthy of Scheherazade. Above all else, she trusted her intuition. “I don’t look before I leap,” Margaret said. “I have faith in fate.”13 According to Margaret, Sam proposed over the phone from Paris. When she asked him how he got his “blue to be so blue,” he replied, “Marry me, and I’ll take you to the desert and show you.” According to her friend in Tokyo Lora Sharnoff, Sam proposed again over the phone after Joy Boy died, to cheer her up.14 The night before the Shinto ceremony, Sam went to visit Liga Pang. She was in Tokyo too, for an exhibition of her work. At dinner, he was thoughtful and quiet. Finally he said, “I’m getting married tomorrow.” It was such an utter shock to Pang that her mind went “white.” Stunned but able to maintain her dignity, Pang said, “If that’s what you want, Sam, then I hope you’re happy.” Later Pang would echo Mako’s assessment that when Sam was content, he blew things up. The Shinto ceremony was Margaret’s idea. Their legal marriage would take place a year later in Reno, Nevada, after Margaret was pregnant.

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Figure 21. Sam Francis and Margaret Smith, Shinto marriage ceremony, Tokyo, 1985.

Many of Sam’s friends then opined that he hadn’t wanted to get married but had agreed on the Shinto ceremony to satisfy Margaret. But as everyone in Sam’s world knew, he was capable of telling one story to one person and a different truth to another. No one but Margaret could testify to the seriousness of his proposals since practically no one knew about the relationship. Even in jest, he hadn’t proposed to Pang or to Jan Butterfield, whom he was also dating in California during this period. Margaret wore a white silk kimono with a white paper hood on her head to signify purity. Her hair was done up in a traditional Japanese style, and her face was powdered white. Sam wore a tuxedo she’d ordered, giving his inseam measurement over the phone. To the adoring Margaret, Sam looked like Beethoven with his wild hair and white collar. To the nononsense Pang, who saw the newspaper photos of the wedding, Sam





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looked uncomfortable. He was wearing dress shoes, and Sam never wore anything on his feet but sneakers or sandals. Osamu remembered hearing the news over the phone from Mako. In the fall of 1985, he was a freshman enrolled in his first semester at UC Berkeley, his father’s alma mater. “What do you think of your new stepmother?” Mako asked her son. “Dad got married?” Osamu said. Sitting alone in his dorm room, he felt betrayed. He’d traveled through Europe with his father that summer. Now he wondered why Sam hadn’t told him then or thought to introduce Margaret to any of his children. In contrast, Margaret had told her family. She invited many of her Tokyo friends to the Shinto ceremony. Sam, a man with close friendships and associations worldwide, invited only one person to his fifth wedding, the architect Arata Isozaki. Sam must have known it would be challenging to integrate Margaret into his life in Santa Monica. He called his friend the painter Luchita Hurtado and asked her to be kind and welcoming to Margaret. Most of Sam’s circle was close to either Pang or Butterfield. Hurtado graciously came over to meet Margaret. Later she described Margaret as “a hummingbird with boots.” She appeared to be gentle and sweet, but she had heft and determination. Like any new wife, Margaret desired to create her own home with Sam. She’d shipped all her furniture from Japan. Crates arrived, and she began to redecorate West Channel Road. Out went the refined Japanese modernist pieces, and in came massive English antiques. She repainted the house. When Osamu came home on a visit from college, the surf posters that had covered his walls were gone, and his room was bare and white— his posters and memorabilia had vanished. He made the best of it. He kept silent, but he retreated further from the family. Still at home, Shingo had carefully chosen the colors of his walls, a deep red, blue, and yellow. But his walls too were now whited out. Margaret bought new silverware and wanted Shingo to pour milk into a pitcher before bringing it to the table. His father told him to go along with Margaret. She needed to nest. Shingo could adapt to fancy silverware and milk pitchers. He could get used to white walls. However, the real conflict came when Sam arrived home one afternoon with three Lhasa apso puppies in a picnic basket. Margaret had lost her

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beloved Joy Boy, and Sam knew she longed for a new dog. He bought three. The history of the Lhasa apso breed, used by Tibetan monks to guard holy temples, appealed to him. Unfortunately, Sam disregarded the reality that there was already a dog, his sons’ territorial border collie, living at West Channel Road. There were now four dogs—one that had been there for years plus three yapping new arrivals. Turf wars and dogfights ensued. A section of the property was cordoned off to keep the border collie separate from the puppies. “Why didn’t you think?” Shingo asked Sam. Sam said he was just trying to make his new bride happy. Then their Korean housekeeper, Kim-san, part of the household since the boys were young, quit. One day she appeared at Shingo’s door and told him she’d found an evil charm in Margaret’s drawer. It was a sign that she had to leave. Shingo was shocked and tried to dissuade Kim-san, but she was adamant. Sam told Shingo it was better this way. Kim-san and Margaret clashed. “It broke my heart,” Shingo said. With Kim-san gone, Margaret hired more people, different people: chefs, cleaners, and drivers. But the most difficult adjustment for everyone came when the locks were changed. West Channel Road had always been a place where anyone and everyone could drop by unannounced. Sam had loose boundaries. His generosity was legendary. His gate was open, his dinner table spacious, his swimming pool available, his guesthouse free if an assistant or a friend needed housing. That had been a problem for Mako, but she never put her foot down. Though Margaret had married a famous painter and changed her last name from Smith to Francis, she didn’t want to be subsumed by Sam or his world. She wanted to protect her identity, to cherish their married life together, to guard Sam’s ability to retreat into his cave to paint. She said, “My job as the wife was to help protect him from the onslaught of fans, friends, enormous amounts of people that brought him energy but also took his energy.” Margaret proceeded to do this even as it isolated Sam and locked out the people who loved and needed him most.

23

Don’t Be Sorry for Nothing

By the time Augustus James Joseph Francis was born on December 30, 1986, Sam and Margaret were shuttling between West Channel Road and a new home and studio in Palo Alto. Margaret thought of the Palo Alto space as her honeymoon home. None of Sam’s prior wives or other family members had lived in it, and she proudly hung her dried wedding bouquet in the bedroom. For Sam, Palo Alto was an easy airplane commute from Santa Monica. It was familiar ground. He’d grown up twenty miles north in San Mateo. He was close to the Smith Andersen Gallery, where the Kirkebys not only showed his work but also allowed him to create prints on the large monotype press they’d installed. Indeed, Paula Kirkeby lived only a leisurely bike ride away. Previously a Viking Motors auto body shop, Sam’s Palo Alto space needed a toxic chemical crew to sterilize it before construction commenced. The completed renovation included a large open painting area, a bedroom with an en suite pink sandstone bathroom, a top floor with extra rooms for assistants and family, and a plunge pool. Sam enjoyed rituals before painting. He washed dishes and walked barefoot through his garden with his toes in the dew. He bounced on his trampoline and read poetry. Even his boasting declaration, “I am an original,” was a method of preparing himself 273

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to face the blank, white canvas. To all this, he now added a cold plunge pool so he could stimulate his body and mind before he started to create. Since his marriage and the birth of Augustus, Sam’s canvases had exploded in a carnival of erotic imagery and ferocious colors. Upon seeing an exhibition of his recent works at the Galerie Jean Fournier in Paris, Joan Mitchell remarked bluntly that the imagery looked like “huge phalluses.” “Once you see them, it’s hard not to see them,” Sam replied when questioned later about her comment. “But for me these pictures were more like an ‘homage to my son.’ The baby is in the picture a lot. There is something fertile in the paintings, and the shapes are phallic. It is a celebration of the fertility of the white space.”1 With high-keyed reds, yellows, and greens, and titles like Ecstasy, Erotic Arabesque, and Augustus Image and Word, Sam reveled in his latein-life potency. When Augustus was born, he had been in the delivery room to cut the umbilical cord. He hadn’t witnessed the births of his previous children, and he called the event “cosmic.” There is a primordial quality in his thick, visceral painting of the late 1980s. Gone are the quiet portals to the infinite. In these paintings, time is tumultuous and instantaneous. Saturated with colored matter, syrupy paint oozes over their sides. Sometimes Sam even cut the canvases to include these spill-over puddles in the finished work. “He wanted to bring it all in,” Margaret said of these paintings. “Everything he’d done before.” In a sense, Margaret was right. Sam was bringing it all in as he circled back to the artist whose canvases had had the most powerful impact upon him when he was an art student. Unlike Rothko, Still, Monet, Matisse, or Malevich, all of whose techniques and methodologies Sam had absorbed early in his career, he had waited to engage directly with Jackson Pollock. Ever since the mid-1960s (earlier counting his time in the hospital), Sam had positioned the canvas below him. Now, in the late 1980s, Sam began to embrace the thingness and matter that he observed in a Pollock painting. As Sam dripped, splattered, and poured paint, he incorporated the primitive materiality of Pollock with his own reach toward the celestial. Linking the two artists, Walter Hopps observed that “the overriding subject matter of Sam’s art, as it was with Pollock in a beautifully different configuration, is absolutely nature and what nature exists within.”2





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Margaret called the way Sam stroked paint through the air, flinging it onto the canvases with a stick, “the gesture of a swordsman.” She liked to sit in the studio beside him, working on her Turneresque landscapes, atmospheric washes of clouds, water, and hillsides. “Can’t you get rid of the horizon line?” Sam would cock his head in her direction. “Paint me a deluge, darling!” Sam’s dealer in Switzerland, Eberhard Kornfeld, was not very keen about this new body of work. He preferred the earlier paintings in which Sam’s dance with the canvas was tempered and melodic. André Emmerich, who represented Sam in New York, was still a big supporter, but even Emmerich felt that Sam’s work required judicious editing. Not all of these paintings were of the highest quality. Sam began casting around for additional, more enthusiastic representation. His old friend Walasse Ting introduced him to Nico Delaive’s gallery in Amsterdam. Besides Ting’s saturated erotica, Delaive showed CoBrA artist Karel Appel and the exuberant, cartoonlike work of Niki de Saint Phalle. Before becoming an art dealer, Delaive had been in the diamond business. In contrast to the old-world, genteel sophistication of Kornfeld and Emmerich, Delaive was young, sharp, eager, and passionate about Sam’s new paintings. He adored the sensual, carnal quality of the canvases. They were a steal compared to the older, more sought-after pieces. Delaive had a big laugh and enjoyed food as much as Sam did. When Sam needed money, Delaive flew over with a suitcase full of cash, picked out new work, and took it back to Amsterdam to sell. Soon Sam began dropping hints that he wanted Delaive to run his business, a task Delaive astutely refused. While others saw Sam embracing chaos, Delaive understood that by stirring up instability on all sides, Sam could remain in control. When Sam’s accountant, Marty Sosin, complained that he didn’t like the arrangement that favored Delaive, Sam snapped, “If you know so much, why aren’t you rich?!” Once having derided money, Sam had come to respect all that it could acquire. His marriage to Margaret had not simplified his life; it had just added another dimension. Except for his compound on West Channel Road and the Palo Alto studio and home, Sam had not acquired any real estate

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up to 1985. Now, over four years, Sam and Margaret purchased nine properties.3 Near their place in Palo Alto, they bought a Victorian house. Margaret thought she might want to turn it into a home. After Sam’s Paris studio was razed, they purchased a modernist home with a connected atelier on the rue Georges Braque. In Berkeley, they acquired the former residence of Sam’s first mentor, the painter David Park. Up the coast from San Francisco, they purchased a home at Sea Ranch. This was the first of many properties they accumulated along the seventy-five-mile stretch between Inverness and Sea Ranch. Soon they amassed three buildings in Point Reyes Station, 10 acres in Inverness, and 413 acres and a ranch in Marshall. In Southern California, Sam leased a sixteen-thousand-squarefoot building with Joe Goode, Laddie John Dill, and Ed Ruscha in Venice. Each artist was to have a space. And just two months after Augustus’s birth, Sam rented what was quietly referred to as his Malibu hideaway. Though all good purchases, many of these properties went unused or barely used. For a while, Sam thought he would turn his section of the building in Venice into a museum. He ended up painting in one section and converting another into an apartment for visiting authors and artists working on Lapis Press projects. The Victorian in Palo Alto proved too fussy and gothic for Sam. It sat empty. Osamu lived in David Park’s old house during part of his time at UC Berkeley. As for Paris, a city close to Sam’s heart and his beginnings, he wanted to keep a base there. He’d been invited to paint a ceiling at the Louvre, but the project was never realized. He did complete another ceiling, a triptych for the entrance of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie, the neoclassical opera house in Brussels. However, instead of creating it in France, Sam painted it in Santa Monica and had it shipped. The beautiful modern home in Paris remained empty, except for a short time when Sam’s brother, George, stayed there with his wife, Nancy, and another time when Osamu spent a semester at cooking school in Paris. Why then all the rentals and purchases, the rush to scoop up property? Every time Sam saw a new space where he could imagine painting, a sense of possibility opened up inside him. He felt rejuvenated, and what he called the dream machine was turned on. The ten acres in Inverness were located on the irresistibly named Dream Farm Road. Sam asked Arata





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Isozaki to design a Dream Studio for him there. Sam envisioned the Dream Studio as a place where his unconscious could have free rein, much the way Carl Jung had built a private retreat, Bollingen Tower, on Lake Zurich. In addition, Sam intended to reforest part of the hillside of the 413-acre ranch in Marshall. The three buildings in Point Reyes were for Sam, Margaret, and the assistants to live in while all these projects were underway. Each of these sites carried a promise, not only of new visions but also of future opportunities endlessly unfolding. Sam had always traveled as a way to spark and engender work. When he moved about the world or traversed the surface of a canvas, he felt boundless. He felt timeless. And Sam was always trying to escape the ticking clock. Now in his midsixties, with a new family and many business obligations, he tended to travel shorter distances. He was no longer jetting off regularly to Switzerland or Japan, yet he still felt compelled to keep moving. Sam, the dreamer, was ruled by desire. So, too, was Margaret. All of Sam’s previous wives had had one thing in common: they were women with modest material aspirations. Margaret’s were boundless. Her need to reinvent herself as a woman of means, combined with Sam’s peripatetic tendencies, unleashed a buying maelstrom. Not just properties but all the accoutrements: Stickley furniture, Tiffany lamps, cashmere throws, silver, and china. Where Mako or Teruko might have tried to restrain Sam, and Muriel would have demurred, Margaret encouraged him, pushing him onward. “Krauth,” Sam would say, “drive me to the airport.” Krauth Brand would drop whatever project he was working on and shuttle Sam to LAX, and Sam would fly to San Francisco, where he kept a car at the airport garage. Then he’d drive to Palo Alto, rarely informing Margaret before he vanished. A distressed Margaret would ask Shingo if he knew where his father had gone. Shingo would telephone Osamu, who, at least in the beginning, advised empathy. Sam had hoped Margaret would be a good stepmother for his sons; after all, she spoke Japanese. But Margaret wasn’t interested in remaining behind. Shingo’s border collie had gotten loose and bit the eye out of one of her puppies. Shingo and his tribe of friends smoked pot and left trails of wet towels every time they returned from surfing. In this regard, Margaret was similar to Teruko, who’d also refused to be abandoned and had chased Sam from New York to Paris and from Japan to Switzerland. Margaret

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was not going to be stuck with the drudgery while Sam skipped off to paint. It’s easier to track a man up and down the California coast than across an ocean. A few days after each of Sam’s breakouts, Margaret would appear. With her came a car packed with baby Augustus; Randy, the fulltime nanny; a housekeeper or a cook; and a driver because Margaret didn’t like to drive. No matter how much Sam tried, he couldn’t outrun the clamorous circus he’d created. Except for the Malibu hideaway. Sam put his foot down about preserving the Malibu house as his escape, and Margaret respected his wishes. When he rented it, she was still recovering from a difficult pregnancy and Augustus’s premature birth. She let him have this sanctuary. At least at the beach house on the Pacific Coast Highway, with its deck overlooking the ocean, Sam could retreat. It’s hard to know what Sam’s intentions were for his Malibu property. Did he anticipate setting up a studio there? Did he just want to read poetry and watch the sunset? Was it a love shack? In 1988, he’d reconnected briefly with his former girlfriend from the Jungian workshop, Meibao Nee. According to Nee, Sam told her he adored Augustus and was not unhappy with Margaret. He just needed to escape. “I have too many people I have to feed,” he said. If Margaret knew about Nee, if she was jealous of Sam’s unabashed staring and wiggling eyebrows at the gallery girls who swarmed him at openings, she was convinced that, having been divorced four times, he wouldn’t have remarried if he didn’t believe their marriage was the real thing. It would stick. He needed her. At sixty-five, Sam was tired. For most of his adult life, he’d been in pain. It was a rare day when he wasn’t dealing with physical discomfort. He was considerably overweight with a hernia for which he refused surgery. He had high blood pressure. His back gave him trouble. To relieve his aches and spasms, he lay on a slant board, and in all his studios, he had multiple chairs, including a kneeling chair. Tom Nagaser, his acupuncturist, believed that the toxic paints Sam had used for years had polluted his system. Sam now took the precaution of wearing gloves and using the less hazardous acrylics. However, his diet continued to be erratic. He went on a wheatgrass fast. Then he tried restricting himself to healthy choices like





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sushi—his favorite was fatty tuna and sea urchin—but he could never curtail the amounts he ate. Chewing duck legs flavored in hoisin sauce, slurping down oysters, stuffing himself with berry pie, whatever was around, Sam consumed all of it. Many mornings, he administered a coffee colonic to stimulate his bowels.4 By now, Sam’s interest in alternative medicine was more than personal. In 1987, he founded a nonprofit, the Sam Francis Medical Research Center. The mission of the center was to conduct naturopathic research in infectious and environmental diseases. AIDS was devastating the country, particularly the art community. “You got to do something,” Sam said when he hosted a benefit, selling his prints at J. W. Robinson’s department store in downtown Los Angeles and raising nearly $100,000 for his center.5 He wanted to support the holistic treatments of Robert Jacobs. A follower of Jung for years, Sam believed in the mind-body connection in health care. No one understood AIDS in the mid-1980s, but many, like Jacobs, thought they could find a solution. Unfortunately, Jacobs did not have a medical degree. He had treated Sam with a crystal pendulum, magic water, and electromagnetic healing. In 1986, Jacobs proposed to counter the AIDS virus and chronic fatigue syndrome with natural supplements and two devices. The first used magnetic waves to stimulate the immune system. The second was a magnetic table in which a layer of quartz was embedded. Lying on the magnetic table, Jacobs believed, reduced stress and improved vitality.6 Both Dr. Silvio Barandun, Sam’s former physician in Switzerland, and Dr. Jordan Gutterman, an oncologist and a collector of Sam’s art, signed on as loose board members of the Sam Francis Medical Research Center, out of deference to Sam. They doubted that Jacobs’s electromagnetic procedures would net any real or lasting results. But if Sam wanted to invest money and purchase and lie on a magnetic table embedded with quartz crystals, that appeared reasonably harmless. Throughout the spring of 1989, Sam and Margaret’s relocation to Northern California continued. They planned to commute to Santa Monica and the Litho Shop only as needed. In Point Reyes Station, they settled into a modern house with a vaulting glass entrance, exposed wooden beams, a cement floor, and a view of a grassy meadow and wetlands. Another inspiration for the dream machine. Here they could live while Sam planned and executed his Dream Studio five miles away. Sam

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envisioned teaching Augustus to fish in nearby Tomales Bay. When Sam’s mother was still alive, his parents had rented a cabin nearby where he’d fished with his father and brother. Margaret seemed excited by the countryside, which reminded her of England. She immediately hired a landscaper to convert the native grass meadow surrounding the house into an English perennial garden. Sam approached Brand and his wife, Theresa, as well as Doug Shields, a new painting assistant, asking if they would relocate to Point Reyes. All three agreed. This necessitated additional houses and a two-story painting studio in a colonial building known locally as the Bank. But as Sam focused on re-creating his dream life in Northern California, he somewhat forgot the rest of his family. Years of neglect and confusion would reverberate through the lives of his children. After a difficult marriage, Kayo had left her husband and returned from Jamaica. She was living in Occidental, not far from Point Reyes, a single mother with two young children. As for Shingo, he’d remained at West Channel Road for his last year of high school, a latchkey kid mostly cared for by Brand and the housekeeping staff. In 1988, he graduated and enrolled at Sonoma State University. At Sonoma State, he was only fortyfive minutes away from his father. While at this juncture both Kayo and Shingo tried to pull closer to Sam, Osamu pushed away. His troubles had started just as Sam and Margaret threw themselves into their purchasing spree. In 1987, when Osamu had returned to Santa Monica for his summer vacation, he survived a terrible car accident. He was a passenger in a friend’s car, on his way to a party, when the driver suddenly turned without stopping. A truck slammed into them, sending Osamu through the windshield. When he regained consciousness, he was covered in blood, his jaw broken in two places. Sam, Margaret, and Augustus were in Point Reyes. They flew down the next day, just as Osamu went into surgery. After his rehabilitation in Hawaii with Mako, Osamu left the States for a semester abroad. By this time, he was struggling with his own demons. It didn’t help to witness his father so disengaged and in the grip of compulsive behavior. After Osamu returned to Berkeley, he kept enrolling in classes, then withdrawing. “I was withdrawing and withdrawing,” Osamu said. “Just kind of wandering.”





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Sam’s support system of friends and associates started dying. His Jungian teacher, James Kirsch, succumbed to a long illness. Then Ed Janss, the developer who’d collected his work and supported many of his enterprises, jumped to his death rather than face a debilitating terminal disease. Nancy Mozur, who’d been Sam’s assistant, den mother, and curator since 1973, resigned from the Litho Shop. She would continue to work with him on a contractual basis for individual projects and finish gathering the materials and images for the catalogue raisonné of his prints. But she’d decided she could no longer hold down the fort. After she’d spent weeks organizing his records and files, Sam used to sneak in and reshuffle her filing system. Though aggravating, his boyish mischief had been charming. Now, as his spending ballooned, his provocations took a darker turn. There were worries that he was dual-dating and perhaps even backdating paintings because his earlier work was more valuable than his recent work. In these activities, Sam was in good company. Wassily Kandinsky, Robert Delaunay, and Kazimir Malevich had engaged in similar behavior. Kandinsky and Delaunay backdated their work in efforts to preserve their legacies as the “first” abstract artists. Sam was savvy about the business side of the art market, but, like Malevich, he reconsidered previous ideas in the context of new philosophical insights. Both artists resisted a fixed notion of time and believed in regeneration through disruption. Since art transmogrified the boundaries of reality, questions of chronology were pedantic. Perhaps Sam also wanted to see if he still had his graceful, lyrical touch. Older paintings started appearing out of nowhere. When Kornfeld got wind of the situation, he exploded. It compromised all their reputations.7 In the meantime, Sam’s relationship with Paula Kirkeby deteriorated. Margaret and Kirkeby did not get along. Margaret preferred to ally herself with Nico Delaive, who hadn’t known Sam’s prior wives or girlfriends. Paula Kirkeby was one of the people Margaret felt Sam needed protection from. If Sam grieved the breakdown of many of his old relationships, he was stoic. If he was in pain, he refused to show weakness. Amid all the deaths and dissolutions, Stefan Kirkeby remembered going sailing with Sam in a catamaran on Tomales Bay in 1989. They were moving fast, a strong wind blowing thirty miles an hour. Kirkeby was at the jib sheets, Sam braced

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behind him, when a big wave hit the bow. Kirkeby ducked, but the wave pounded Sam, soaking him to the bone. As the boat hiked up on one pontoon, Kirkeby looked back and yelled, “Sorry.” “Don’t you tell me that,” Sam screamed into the wind. “Don’t be sorry for nothing!” Later, Kirkeby realized that Sam already knew he was sick. He was angry and scared. He didn’t want to slowly diminish like James Kirsch or throw himself out a window like Ed Janss. In response, he pushed people away. But perhaps Sam’s reply to his young friend on that windy sailing outing was also because he didn’t want anyone to feel sorry for him.

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Tom Nagaser found Sam holed up in his home in Point Reyes, hiding in bed. It was the winter of 1991, and Nagaser had flown up at Margaret’s request. “You’re his friend,” Margaret had pleaded with Nagaser over the phone when she reached him in Santa Monica. “You’re the only one who can help him.” Nagaser had been Sam’s acupuncturist and shiatsu masseur since 1983. He’d worked on the whole family and on many of Sam’s assistants. “Please come,” Margaret begged. Sam had been diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer.1 Upstairs, with the sheet pulled up, and only the top of his eyes peeking out, Sam grunted a hello when Nagaser entered the room. According to Margaret, he wouldn’t eat. He just lay in bed, barely responsive, his eyes dull and vacant. “This is crazy,” Nagaser said. “How long has he been here?” Three weeks. He was running away from his doctors. The diagnosis and prescribed treatment terrified him. Instead of following medical advice, he’d called a taxi in Santa Monica, and, after a seven-hour drive, he’d been delivered to Point Reyes. Margaret had followed him there. The next morning, Nagaser sat down with Sam and Margaret. If he was going to help Sam, he wanted to be the only person treating him. Nagaser would cancel all his appointments for the next month and move up to 283

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Point Reyes, where he would help Sam exclusively. He would prepare all the food. He would provide herbal medicine and give Sam three acupuncture or shiatsu treatments a day. Sam would have to get out of bed and exercise. Sam would have to behave. •

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By this time, Sam had been sick for two years. He had been diagnosed in the fall of 1989 when he’d undergone his long-overdue hernia surgery. At first, Sam kept the news a secret from everyone but Margaret. The doctors had recommended he have his prostate removed, but he refused. He declined injections of the hormone suppressor Lupron, which would have shrunk his tumor by suppressing his testosterone. Sam did not want to curb his testosterone. Margaret expressed the desire to have another child. This went on for some months, while Sam grew progressively weaker. In the dark about the cancer diagnosis, his assistants wondered why he was taking so long to recover from a simple herniotomy. On Friday, February 9, 1990, Doug Shields was helping Sam in the Santa Monica studio when he noticed that Sam kept running to the sink to pee but couldn’t. Concerned, Shields called the house the next day only to discover that Sam was in Saint John’s Hospital with acute urinary retention. When Shields arrived at the hospital, he found Nancy Mozur sitting beside the bed. Sam was catheterized, the secret of his cancer finally revealed. Again, Sam stubbornly refused all the orthodox treatments. When anyone tried to talk to him about it, he fled from the room. It took another three months and intervention from Dr. Barandun, who traveled from Switzerland to have a heart-to-heart talk with Sam and Margaret, before Sam finally agreed to take Lupron and Flutamide. His tumor shrank, and the catheter was removed from his bladder. He went into remission. Sam hated the medications. The side effects of the Lupron especially upset him. He had mood swings, angry outbursts, night sweats, nausea, and hallucinations that made him tremble. Attached though he was to imaginary visions, Sam had always been particularly reluctant to take hallucinogenic drugs. He liked to control his environment. Now he felt he no longer had jurisdiction over his body, let alone his mind. The most



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distressing side effect was the loss of his libido. This terrified him. He believed desire drove him. He did not want to blunt the biochemical urge that was the wellspring of his creativity. Knowing that Sam championed alternative, holistic medicine, Dr. Barandun agreed that, as long as he adhered to conventional treatments, he could follow Bob Jacobs’s unconventional recommendations. But this should not be done ad hoc. A good oncologist or urologist should supervise his care. In the fall of 1990, three months after Sam began Lupron and Flutamide, he abruptly stopped taking the medications. He was feeling better. He switched to the alternative therapeutic route, refusing to let a medical doctor oversee his regimen. Some of the treatments he used were harmless— drinking lots of water, taking hot and cold sitz baths, using visualization therapy, soaking his feet in beet juice, lying on a magnetic and crystal bed, wearing magnets near his groin. But others, like taking shark cartilage pills, could upset his stomach and make him dizzy. Still others—like consuming DHEA and receiving testosterone injections—were downright dangerous. A synthetically derived hormone, DHEA increases testosterone levels, and testosterone promotes prostate cancer cell growth. His friend Bruce Conner observed, “Anybody who could tell him it was possible to heal without surgery, he went for this wholeheartedly.”2 Even during this period, Sam had good days when he napped until the afternoon and then went to the Litho Shop to work on prints or to his studio to paint. Shields said that Sam had incredible energy and stamina when he was painting. He spoke little about his illness. He was an optimist and a romantic by disposition. He believed he could find a cure. After all, he was funding the Sam Francis Medical Research Foundation. This was what Mark Whitney meant when he said Sam was vulnerable to his own inflated ego. Margaret supported Sam’s choices. When he came home, she rubbed his feet and sang opera to him. Music, she’d heard, opens the solar plexus, the network of nerves that radiates through the body. Besides, her singing made him happy. Sam had painted himself out of illness before. He attributed his healing from both of his serious bouts with tuberculosis not to antibiotics but to his ability to create art. Since he was committed to curing himself, Margaret decided to do everything in her power to back him up.

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“I have to get sick to change,” Sam told Pontus Hultén. “I have to do it myself.” Soon after Sam received his cancer diagnosis, Hultén had come to Santa Monica to interview him. Hultén was writing a catalogue essay that would accompany a big Sam Francis retrospective due to open at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, Germany, in 1993 and from there travel to Paris and Los Angeles. “I am in disarray,” Sam admitted to Hultén. He was tired and disordered, his body in turmoil. The two men were old friends; Hultén had interviewed Sam before, in 1986, and so many of Sam’s stories weren’t new to him. They began by discussing chaos, its beauty and perfection. “It’s like a shadow on the wall,” Sam said. “It is always alive. And you are never going to get away from it. You might as well deal with it from the beginning . . . . It is a kind of perfection. It is the only one.” Living with chaos, with conflict, Sam believed, was in itself an act of redemption. At one point, Hultén had to stop the interview for Sam to rest. That’s when Sam told him he had to get sick to change. Then he commented hopefully, “The healing process is a really strong effect on me . . . . Convalescence is sensational.” He saw his sickness as necessary chaos: it would birth a new order, restoring him and even propelling him into another body of work.3 Clearly, magical thinking occluded Sam’s reasoning about his physical health. He’d spent his life conjuring universes on canvas, following dreams, and trusting the powers of instinct, intuition, and desire. He resolutely clung to his narrative of miraculous regeneration and redemption. But his cancer remission was not the result of magic or alternative practices or a willingness to endure suffering. It had been brought about by the Lupron and Flutamide. Now, in 1991, his blood tests revealed that, without the medication, his tumor was spreading. Within a few months, Sam began to feel weak again. Dr. Barandun, who kept track of Sam’s test results via fax whenever Sam agreed to send them to him, became alarmed. Sam’s testosterone had risen. Barandun did not know about the DHEA or the dentist Sam had hired to come to the house and give him shots of testosterone. Barandun knew only that his friend was getting worse and needed to go back on Lupron. Sam did not want to restart Lupron. He did not want to listen to Barandun or consult a urologist. Barandun pleaded with Sam to come to Tiefenauspital in Bern, where he’d recovered from testicular tuberculosis



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in 1961. Kornfeld even flew over with an airplane ticket for Sam, but Margaret vehemently opposed this option. Kornfeld thought Sam refused to seek help in Bern to appease Margaret. He was too ill and fragile to withstand the fighting. Perhaps it was also because of news that his old friend the kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely had recently died in Bern. Sam was terrified of going far away to Switzerland to die. His mother had died far from home. He did not want to hear that his cancer had progressed. He wanted a cure. He took a seven-hour taxi ride to Point Reyes to hide from the truth. •



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In Point Reyes, Tom Nagaser worked a miracle. For the first time in years, Sam followed his instructions and ate a balanced diet. His sleeping and waking schedule returned to normal. Nagaser coaxed him out of bed. Soon Sam was pedaling his mountain bike, following Nagaser around the lagoons and through the redwood forests. Standing in the driveway, Nagaser and Sam taught Augustus to ride a tricycle. Nagaser even got Sam onto the tennis court. With all his years of flicking his wrist to release paint, Sam knew how to put a mean spin on a ball. Three times a day, Nagaser gave Sam acupuncture treatments. He massaged him every night. Most importantly, Sam stopped sneaking injections and supplements. At the end of thirty-five days, Nagaser returned to his practice in Santa Monica. The miracle he effected was not a cure. Sam still had cancer, but he was again in good shape. Tom Nagaser lived by the philosophy that less is more. Not so Sam and Margaret. Once Nagaser was gone, they reverted to their old viewpoint: never too much. Sam fell off his diet and overdid the oysters. And with Nagaser no longer supervising Sam’s care, he started pounding down supplements, and the parade of healers and practitioners returned. Like many illnesses, Sam’s cancer had an ebb and flow. After Nagaser’s miraculous regime, it took a while for him to feel bad again. Through much of 1991 and into 1992, he experienced an upswing. In October, when the catalogue raisonné of his prints was published, he arrived at the Litho Shop elegantly dressed in a shimmering silver jacket and his trademark blue shirt. He spent the evening jovially signing copies of the book,

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along with a limited edition of art watches he’d designed for the Swiss company Swatch. Sam had finally painted time. He also secured a milliondollar commission for a canvas approximately forty by forty feet for the new German parliament building in Bonn. But, though he traveled to his Palo Alto studio and began work on the canvas, he could not sustain his mojo and finish the giant commission.4 “While Sam’s mental and physical states seem to be in good shape,” Robert Shapazian wrote Dr. Barandun, “he is spending money with great abandon, without much concern for practical considerations.” As the executive director of Lapis Press, Shapazian had developed a friendship with Barandun during the creation of the AIDS book. Shapazian wondered if Sam’s carelessness with money might reflect a feeling that the end was in sight. Sam had some spectacular sales in the early 1990s. Nico Delaive continued to show up every six weeks to purchase art. Sam was paid in advance for the parliament commission, and, in 1991, he sold several works to the Idemitsu Museum, amounting to almost a million dollars. But Shapazian was right. He was hemorrhaging funds. “Sam was rich,” Nico Delaive said. “But not so rich.” 5 Healers were expensive, and they wanted cash. Sam bought some properties on a line of credit; others he paid for outright. On most of them, he did extensive renovations. He paid off the mortgage on Margaret’s family farm in England and signed the deed over to Margaret and her mother. Then he refurbished the creamery and turned the barn into a studio space. Not far away, he’d helped acquire land for a new Wind Harvest site. In California, workers had begun clearing land for the Dream Studio, a series of attached buildings that would snake through the trees. While the Dream Studio would take time, the 413-acre ranch in the neighboring town of Marshall was almost ready. Then Sam and Margaret ran into trouble with the ranch. Sam decided to install a pond, but it was dug without a proper permit. A neighbor complained, and the building department showed up. It turned out that nothing was up to code: not the pond, not the barn, not the refurbished house with its heated tiles. Additionally, Sam wanted to reforest part of the area. The building inspector informed him that Marshall was designated dairy country. He couldn’t have a permit for his ranch if he didn’t own cattle. So they purchased a herd of black Limousin cattle and, because Margaret wanted horses, eleven Arabian stallions. The stallions required a live-in



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trainer. “Margaret wanted to be Marie Antoinette,” her neighbor Laura Reichek said, referring to the queen who was fond of dressing up like a shepherdess and pretending to be a peasant. In fairness, Margaret had grown up on a farm, though she wasn’t out milking the cows or even riding the horses in Marshall.6 To all this, Sam shrugged. “Throw money at it,” he told Brand. “I want it done before I die.” After Augustus entered Crossroads Elementary School, the family spent more time in Santa Monica. Sam had stopped driving himself. Whenever they changed houses, a three-car caravan transported them. In February 1993, Sam and his entourage flew to Bonn, Germany, for his retrospective at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle. Curated by Hultén, it was the largest exhibition of Sam’s work ever assembled. It covered two floors of a city block–sized building and included 325 works on canvas and 58 prints. Sam had been excited to go, but Margaret insisted they stop for two days in London. Perhaps she thought breaking up their travel would help him adjust, but by the time they arrived in Bonn, he was exhausted. Traveling with Sam, Margaret, and Augustus were Doug Shields, who was now operating as caregiver and driver for Sam, and Tom Nagaser, in case Sam required treatment while abroad. At the preopening event, Shields took Sam to view the show. More than three hundred members of the European press stood outside the building. Sam found it all a bit overwhelming, the crowds and the people who wanted to meet him and shake his hand. He was a frail, snowy-haired gnome with shining blue eyes. When Shields started to guide him gently through the show, Sam stopped in front of the big monochrome canvases he’d created in Paris in the mid-1950s. Shields thought Sam wanted to talk to him about the pieces, but instead, Sam grabbed his shoulder: “I can’t do this.” He had tears in his eyes. Though Kayo, Shingo, and Osamu knew that their father was ill, they were unaware of how dire his situation had become. They recognized their father’s preference for alternative medicine. They were aware that he was more likely to consult a naturopath than a urologist. But they were not in his new family loop. In 1989, Kayo had remarried and moved to Hawaii. By 1993, both Osamu and Shingo were living in the Bay Area. One afternoon in May 1993, Shingo received a call from Tom Nagaser. “You have to get to Mexico,” Nagaser told him. Nagaser had heard that Sam was in

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Tijuana receiving some sort of unsanctioned treatment. “He really needs you,” Nagaser said. Shingo was only twenty-three. He’d graduated from Pitzer College a year earlier and was living with friends in Oakland. He immediately packed his car. He stopped in Santa Monica long enough to leave his border collie in the care of the housekeeper, then arrived in Tijuana the next day. Sam, Krauth Brand, Margaret, and Augustus, along with Randy the nanny and Margaret’s sister Helen, who was offering emotional support to Margaret, were staying in a suite of rooms at the Fiesta Americana Hotel. A few months earlier, after Sam returned from Bonn, he’d suffered a spontaneous fracture in his right humerus, the upper bone of his painting arm. With cancer invading his bones, setting the shattered humerus was deemed impossible. In desperation, they’d resorted to an alternative cancer treatment developed by an Australian practitioner named Sam Chachoua. By the time Shingo arrived, they’d been in Tijuana for several months while Sam underwent Chachoua’s induced remission therapy (IRT). Chachoua claimed that common infections like measles and mumps interfere with cancer. He professed to have created a viral vaccine that tagged cancer (and AIDS), allowing the immune system to attack diseased cells. In Tijuana, Sam was wheeled daily from his hotel room to another room in the hotel where Chachoua had set up his clinic. There, Chachoua injected Sam with his IRT vaccine. Wheeled back to his room and put in bed, Sam proceeded to experience the symptoms of whatever virus had been injected. He was racked with fever, chills, sweats, and nausea. The next day the procedure would begin again. Shingo was horrified. Shivering from the bed, Sam said, “I want you to be here.” 7 Pulling him aside, Brand told Shingo, “You need to be here to walk him out the door.” Shingo put his life on hold. He committed to staying for the duration. He would help, but Sam and Margaret insisted he not interfere with his father’s treatment modality. Unfortunately for Sam, this included Chachoua’s instruction that he not receive morphine. Morphine would supposedly counteract his viral treatment. But in early June, Brand and Shingo did intercede, insisting on evacuating Sam to Sharp Memorial Hospital in San Diego. When admitted,



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Sam was wheelchair bound, incontinent, and suffering from the untreated fracture in his right arm. The bone cancer was now affecting his spine and left tibia—his lower leg. He had a tumor in his mouth and another behind his eye, blurring his vision. After a three-week stay in the hospital, Sam gained strength and was discharged. Frantic for a cure, still unwilling or lacking the humility to face mortality, Sam and Margaret prevailed over Shingo and Brand’s concerns. Sam moved into a suite at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego. There he was close to both the hospital, in case of emergency, and the border so that he could be driven daily to Tijuana for Chachoua’s treatment. It wasn’t until August that Sam finally returned to Santa Monica and was put under the care of the oncologist Dr. Kenneth Tokita. Despite Tokita’s presence, Sam continued to ingest more than forty herbal supplements daily, and Margaret summoned the healers and the dentist with his testosterone injections back to the house. Not even Tokita could keep them at bay. Sam’s brother, George, flew down from Oregon to persuade him not to heed the advice of charlatans. But George, Kayo, Osamu, and Shingo all failed to change the situation. Margaret insisted that Sam’s cancer was cured. Persisting, Barandun wrote, “Dear Sam, time is very limited for both of us. We are old friends and we should be frank to each other . . . . I am afraid that some people around you try to keep you off from clinically proven academic medicine, and may not be so much interested in pathogenesis of this disease than their own esoteric ideas.” Still, though Sam was frequently in horrific pain, the last fifteen months of his life were not without levity. Sam’s devilish, tenacious nature persisted. For his seventy-first birthday, he wanted a celebration. He crafted the text of the invitation: “I am healthy and ‘hornier’ as ever,” he wrote friends, “and I wish you the same!” Thirty people came to the compound on West Channel Road, including his old friend Betty Freeman, his dealers André Emmerich and Nico Delaive, the artists Ed Moses and Billy Al Bengston, and his children Kayo, Shingo, and Augustus. Steve Skrovan, one of the writers on the comedy series Seinfeld, was hired to tell jokes. Sam wanted to laugh. Decked out in a multicolored shirt, Sam was in good spirits, sitting in a wheelchair and telling people how much he loved them. There were festive balloons and a birthday cake with one giant candle rising like an

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Figure 22. Sam and Augustus Francis in Santa Monica, California, 1993.

erection from the center. But, unable to wield the knife with his left hand, Sam could not cut it. The party, with its jocular, off-color invitation and erection-candle cake, was in stark contrast to Sam’s reduced state. Though friends were relieved to see him, many left with a sad and uncomfortable impression. Nothing—not bravado, denial, or defiance—could conceal the fact that he was dying. His situation deteriorated. Though he had initially designed his own treatment, he’d become a test subject for multiple experimental therapies. He’d lost control of the care prescribed for him, undergoing so many



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simultaneous treatments that often more than thirty caregivers from around the world thronged the house. In agony, he told Shingo, “They do whatever they want with me—I have no say in the matter.” And to Stefan and Peter Kirkeby, when they came to visit, he cried, “I’m a guinea pig.” 8 One day, when Margaret was out, Sam’s accountant brought Muriel, Sam’s second wife, to say goodbye. Muriel, the once doe-eyed girl who’d journeyed with him to Paris, trembled from Parkinson’s. “Look what’s become of us,” she said. Then, in her quiet voice, she began to sing “On Top of Old Smokey,” a folk song his father had sung on fishing trips. It made Sam smile. 9 Osamu drove down from San Francisco to watch Monday night football with his father. Joe Montana, the Comeback Kid, was playing for the Kansas City Chiefs. And Mako stopped by on her way to a film festival to see Sam for the last time. He was in his wheelchair sitting by the pool, wearing a Matisse T-shirt. By then, he could barely speak, only whisper the name “Matisse.” To cheer Sam up during those last six months and get him out of the house and away from the multitude of helpers that Margaret had circling him, Doug Shields and Shingo sometimes drove Sam up the Pacific Coast Highway. They would stop at the nearby Will Rogers State Beach to watch the sunset. After darkness fell, they would head to Griffith Park, where they could park the car. Below stretched all of Los Angeles, a carpet of lights spreading as far as the horizon. It was on one of these excursions that Shields finally convinced Sam to paint again. He’d been nagging him for weeks. “You were born to paint,” he told him. Sam grunted, gesturing at his lame right hand. What had been his great gift, his lyrical hand, was useless. “It doesn’t matter,” Shields insisted. “Let me set up the paints.” 10 And that’s what they did. Painting had been Sam’s therapy at the beginning of his career. Maybe it could help him again. Shields set up a table in a section of the garage that had been converted into a small studio. He covered the table with small sheets of paper, then poured Sam’s colors into little buckets and lined them up in a row: cobalt blue, ultramarine violet, crimson red, emerald green, and burnt orange. Sam’s eyes lit up when he saw the room. It had been fifteen months since he’d last tried to paint. His skin was translucent, his bones as fragile as glass. He couldn’t lift his right arm, and he could barely pour with his left. But he could still move a stick, still produce a squiggle of color on a piece of paper. Sam didn’t want to die. And as long as he was painting, he was alive.

Epilogue

Two months after he put down his paints for the final time, Samuel Lewis Francis died on November 4, 1994, at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica. He was seventy-one years old. His son Shingo and a private nurse were by his side. Powerless to authorize painkillers, Shingo could only reassure his father. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m here for you.”1 Margaret, a Catholic, insisted on a mass at Saint Martin of Tours Church. Before and after the mass, she held a viewing, a rather elaborate orchestration of his body encircled by his paintings in the small studio on West Channel Road. It lasted for several days. At the viewing, Sam was dressed in a royal purple velvet robe and laid out in a bright blue steel casket on a platform. One hand clutched a paintbrush: a rosary was entwined among the embalmed fingers of the other. A profusion of long-stemmed red and white roses perfumed the air. On three sides of the casket hung the paintings Sam had created the summer before his death. He’d made them using a stick in his left hand. Sometimes he’d been so exhausted and weak that he had to be hooked up to an IV. They numbered 152 works, averaging less than two feet in height and width. As Sam finished each one, his assistants hung it on the wall. Jacob Samuel, Sam’s master printer, who came to help as the end approached, 295

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remembered “watching the thing take shape in that room every day, starting with two or three, and then there’s ten or twelve paintings. It was outside of time.”2 Margaret said Sam thought of them as an opus, a single work of art titled Joie de Vivre. The name alludes to both Matisse’s great 1905 painting Le bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life) and Sam’s own hedonistic, celebratory life force. Yet Sam’s Last Works, as they are now commonly called, are anything but joyous and exuberant. They are dark, explosive, muddied, and angry abstractions—each a gesture against his approaching death. At Margaret’s request, a security detail was hired to patrol the compound, ensuring that no one walked off with any art. Men in dark suits with earbuds and walkie-talkies added to the surreal atmosphere of the display of Sam’s dead body alongside his newest creations. The paintings would soon be for sale. While some of the guests applauded Margaret’s business savvy—Ed Moses saw positioning Sam with “his magical little creatures” as a brilliant promotional decision—others found the display in poor taste. Osamu was revolted by the attempt to capitalize on his father’s death. Shingo believed that Sam would have preferred to be remembered for images created with his full ability, not images that were “therapy to get his mind off his body.” Eberhard Kornfeld concurred. “This is the work of a seriously ill artist,” he said.3 While opinions on the carnivalesque marketing aspect of Sam’s viewing differed, what was evident in these Last Works was Sam’s immense determination. The works are small compared to the mural-sized paintings for which he was acclaimed. Yet Sam’s effort to produce them in his weak state was monumental. His lyrical touch and astute elegance are missing. The color is intense. Thick, livid black lines often cross out knots of other colors. The delicate balance Sam normally struck between pigment and space is gone. However, somber and lacking in rapture though they are, these paintings, with their brutishness, capture the mortality of this painter of eternal time. Matter blots out infinity. “My paintings are a footprint of my whole life,” Sam told Jan Butterfield. “Each painting is like my body print, taken at different moments.” These images were his last relentless steps, his bursts of energy before gravity finally trapped him. They exemplify what Nietzsche termed man’s “raging desire for existence.”4





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With Sam’s death, the fractiousness that had been brewing below the surface erupted. Margaret informed the family that she intended to take Sam’s body to England and to bury him in her family plot, ergo her purchase of a steel casket. His children (save Augustus, who was only seven), his assistants, and his brother, George, thought he’d want his ashes scattered over the ocean, as he’d once done for his friend Bill Elliott. Unfortunately, cremation was incompatible with Margaret’s faith. Cremation denied the possibility of the body’s resurrection at the end of times. When she couldn’t arrange permission to transport his body, Margaret consented to bury him in the Olema Cemetery in Northern California near where they had amassed property. Though not dispersed to wind and air, he would at least rest in sacred ground where everyone could visit him. This was accomplished after another viewing at their Point Reyes home. By now, it was evident that Sam, the man who equated chaos with perfection, had left his estate in disarray. At the time of his death, he owned thousands of his own artworks and about four hundred works by other artists. He also owned the Litho Shop; Lapis Press; thousands of shares of Wind Harvest; a compound in Santa Monica; a house in Paris; a home and studio in Palo Alto; a home and studio in Point Reyes; another home in Inverness; a ranch in Marshall with a herd of cattle and eleven Arabian stallions; interest in a building in Maui; property in Washington State; a library including rare first editions; and approximately ten cars. The value of the estate was estimated at just over $79 million. Sam’s longtime accountant, Martin Sosin, had filed the original will, dated 1981, and the codicils from 1987 and 1992. These documents stipulated that Margaret and his four children should each receive five Sam Francis artworks. Sam left only $400,000 in a family trust for the children’s care until they reached the age of twenty-three. He bequeathed the Paris property to Margaret. The bulk of his estate was to go to the charitable art foundation that he had established to perpetuate his legacy. Six weeks later, Margaret surprised everyone when she produced a revocation dated August 6, 1994. If valid, this document would revoke all previous wills and codicils and leave most of his assets to his spouse. It was drafted and signed during the final stages of Sam’s disease when he could not use his right hand.

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Outraged, Osamu and Shingo immediately challenged the revocation. They claimed that Sam had been mentally incapable of understanding what he was doing and had been coerced into signing the documents. Ever since his illness in 1961, Sam had systematically selected art to go to his foundation. His sons contended that Sam would not have changed his mind about his legacy at the last moment. Kayo filed a separate lawsuit against Margaret for alleged “cruelty and torture” inflicted on Sam during his final months by denying him pain medication and forcing him to produce paintings even on his deathbed. She claimed that Margaret had, in effect, been looting the estate. The accountant, Martin Sosin, was accused of mishandling and destroying files. After the children and Margaret petitioned for his removal, he was dismissed. In the meantime, Muriel Goodwin, Sam’s wife from 1955 to 1959, requested a widow’s allowance. Muriel argued that their Alabama divorce was invalid because Sam had not been a resident of that state. This act was so out of character for docile Muriel that it bewildered everyone. But Sam had helped Muriel financially for years and had promised to take care of her—he had promised many things to many people. As George Francis said in his eulogy for his brother, “I remember him for his difficulty in ever saying no.”5 Muriel lost her case and the appeal. Eventually, Fred Nicholas, an old friend, a collector of Sam’s work, and a trustee at MOCA, was appointed to administer the estate. It took two and a half years, but Nicholas brokered a settlement among all parties. It followed Sam’s original will and early codicils, while acknowledging Margaret as the widow and joint owner of community property. She got what she was entitled to as the surviving spouse, minus an estimate of what she’d already shipped to England. The family trust was divided among the children. Each also received property, cash, and five artworks not designated to fund the Sam Francis Foundation. In addition to promoting Sam’s legacy, the foundation’s goal was to make grants to nonprofit, tax-exempt institutions for education in the fields of art and creativity. “If we’d continued to litigate,” Shingo said of the decision to settle, “the foundation wouldn’t have been viable. It was important to respect Sam’s primary wish.”6 Margaret returned to England, where she purchased Gledstone Hall, a crumbling twentieth-century manor with a formal garden. There, she





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dedicated herself to extensive restoration of the property, to painting, and to raising Augustus to become an artist. Indeed, two of Sam’s sons, Shingo and Augustus, are now painters. While Shingo’s paintings are luminous and minimal, advancing ideas of the spiritual and sublime that his father focused on during Shingo’s childhood, Augustus’s pictures are as colorful and jazzy as Sam’s late work. Sam’s daughter, Kayo, is an acupuncturist. She credits her father for helping to lead her to a noninvasive healing practice. Osamu works in New Zealand, revitalizing local agriculture and developing kiwi orchards. Of all of Sam’s children, he chose an occupation that diverges most starkly from his father’s interests. Yet West Channel Road had a small fruit orchard where Sam loved to garden. Kayo, Osamu, and Shingo have children of their own and are devoted parents. The Sam Francis Foundation went on to donate works to museums and libraries; to produce books and exhibitions around the world; to catalogue Sam’s work; and to support educational programming in the arts and sciences. In 2009, the foundation gave two vertical fragments salvaged from Basel Mural III to Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum. These narrow strips come from the atmospheric panel Sam shredded after discovering that his enormous dream, the pinnacle creation of his early career, had been damaged by water and mold. The restretched and restored pieces now hang in the same room as Basel I, which Sam had worked tirelessly to repair many years earlier. Basel II belongs to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The monumental, enveloping triptych that Sam intended no longer exists. Yet the thought of the journeys these panels have made since he began painting them in Paris in the winter of 1956 is poignant. From their challenging birth to their exalted incarnation to their division, the panels of Basel Mural reprise Sam’s journey through life. Separated yet still one work of art, Basel Mural spans continents. Like Sam, it has been ravished and reborn. Each panel still utterly fills the vision. “It is,” as Walter Hopps said when he saw it, “a living thing.” Hopps continued: “Somehow, spirit to gesture to form gives us a painting like that.”7 Pontus Hultén proclaimed Sam Francis to be the first international artist, and Eberhard Kornfeld called him the last great painter of the twentieth century. Though the statements might be a stretch, they are not entirely untrue if viewed in the context of an era that lauded conquest, expansion, and male ambition. Yet Sam’s greatest paintings reach beyond

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their historical moment. As objects, they are audacious in their ability to effect sensuality on a heroic scale, combine macho power with an almost feminine delicacy, and revel in luxuriant color alongside vast lacunae. As beautiful objects, they chart what the art critic Dave Hickey terms “the iconography of desire.”8 Though beauty delights, it also makes people, especially art critics, uncomfortable. It hijacks reason. It is, as Hickey states, “the snake in the garden.” During the period in which Sam painted, beauty was deemed anti-intellectual, suspect for its seductiveness, and therefore untrustworthy. When my father, Peter Selz, wrote his monograph on Sam, he attributed the lack of attention Sam received in his home country to America’s “Puritan tradition of repression and struggle, a heritage that has produced individuals who have been unable to admit beauty for its own sake.” While concepts of beauty, of the graceful union of form and color, are central to Sam’s art, beauty, in his hands, is not static, not present for its own sake. It is a force. Pushing off the edge of the canvas, his forms allude to a grand and glorious expanse far beyond his human reach yet gathered into our realm by his touch. His paintings act as conduits between ourselves and all that is beyond ourselves. This type of beauty embodies elements of awe, of terror, and of the struggle from which it was born. In his last interview with Pontus Hultén (done after my father published his book), Sam said: “Beauty has to do with transformation . . . it is always in movement.” And movement to Sam meant life.9 Sam set a template for the global artist charting his own path. Until recently, there has been a lack of critical attention to his artwork. Sam never fit easily into a niche. Like quicksilver, he was hard to grasp and codify. By traveling to Europe and Japan, he chose a trajectory that went “sideways”10 to Greenberg’s “march toward purified modern art.”11 Yet, the very traits that make Sam hard to place allowed for the introduction of mutant strains into his creative process. Finally, in the last few years, there has been a desire to shift the paradigm, to investigate the spiritual nature of art, the representation of consciousness, and the role of art (and of the artist) in bridging cultures. This is borne out in reexaminations and analyses by Natalie Adamson, Elizabeth Buhe, Bert Winther-Tamaki, Richard Speer, Debra Burchett-Lere, and Aneta Zebala. Each of these writers has focused on different aspects of Sam’s diverse oeuvre.





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One afternoon in 1979, soon after he began helping establish MOCA, Sam sat in his studio with Jan Butterfield. They discussed the meaning of his work, what he called the “whole oeuvre,” which at that time included his aphorisms, his print studio, and his forays into film production and wind energy and would soon embrace book publishing and medicine. “The real thing is not the art,” Sam told Butterfield. “That is a trace.” He meant that what mattered to him was the current of desire hurtling through him, causing him to reach beyond even what he created. “The artist part of me is a very beautiful pearl, almost like my consciousness. It is a small God. It is a holy thing to me. But it certainly is not the whole question.” And yet, he admitted, on this mystery of his whole creative life, the art was the clue. It was the ladder. The art pointed the way to what was and what would be. “It is,” he said, “the absolute key to everything.”12

Notes on Sources

I was privileged to have the full cooperation of the Sam Francis Foundation (SFF), which holds original and digitized archives on Sam Francis and includes a rich array of books, photographs, personal letters, journals, catalogues, newspaper articles, reviews, ephemera, other print materials, and films. Additionally, the SFF sponsored the Oral History Project (OHP; 2001–18) documenting Sam’s life. The OHP includes more than one hundred taped interviews, primarily conducted by Jeffrey Perkins, with Sam’s friends, collectors, artists, dealers, business associates, and family members. Many of these people have since died, so I am indebted to Perkins and the SFF for having gathered this material. Unless otherwise indicated, the oral histories cited reside with the SFF in Glendale, California. The majority of Sam Francis’s papers (including his rich early correspondence) are held at the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, filling more than three hundred boxes. Spanning the artist’s lifetime, the files’ contents include family and personal material as well as correspondence with friends and art institutions around the world. Sam’s art-related businesses, the Litho Shop and Lapis Press, are well documented. There are also numerous prints, products, and art-making tools. I conducted interviews with the following members of Sam’s world: family: Augustus Francis, Osamu Francis, Shingo Francis, Kayo Francis Malik, Margaret Francis, Mako Idemitsu, Teruko Yokoi, Kathy Doctor, Steve Francis; assistants: Jerry Aistrup, John Bennett, Krauth Brand, Debra Burchett-Lere, Dan Cytron, Nancy Mozur, Doug Shields, Beth Silverman, Jerry Sohn; printers: 303

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George Page, Jacob Samuel; gallerists, art historians, and business associates: Will Agee, Nancy Boas, Nico Delaive, Charles Gimpel, Foster Goldstrum, Robert Green, Peter Kirkeby, Stefan Kirkeby, Eberhard Kornfeld, Jim Newman, Frederick Nicholas, Jack Rutbeg, Paul Schimmel, Peter Selz; artists and friends: Joe Barnes, Judy Chicago, Nancy Genn, Pat Gollin, Luchita Hurtado, Jerry Ingles, Robert Irwin, Arata Isozaki, Al Leslie, Fred Martin, Ann McCoy, Hazelle Miloradovitch, Ed Moses, Meibao Nee, Liga Pang, Jeffrey Perkins, Ed Ruscha, Mark Whitney; medical professionals, healers, and astrologers: Dr. Jordan Gutterman, Dr. Thomas Kirsch, Tom Nagaser, Chakrapani; others: Diana Elliott, Wendy Elliott, Cheri Fulton, Marcia Goodwin, Maya Marguerite Rivers, Carole Selz, Anouk Shambrook, Lora Sharnoff, Beth Sosin, Mary Ann Sullivan, Susan Wallace. I am immensely grateful to them for their time and patience in sharing their memories and answering my questions. All my interviews have been used either as narrative material or as direct quotes, and all were captured on a digital recorder. Two films have been crucial to my understanding of Sam Francis. Jeffrey Perkins directed and produced The Painter Sam Francis (New York: Body and Soul Productions, 2008), which includes the first filmed sequence of Sam in the act of painting. Viewing Sam in stocking feet and boxer shorts leaping across his vast canvas as he conjures an image was essential to writing his biography—as was Michael Blackwood’s 1975 art documentary Sam Francis (New York: Michael Blackwood Productions). In this film, Blackwood and his crew follow Sam as he meets with friends, family, and contemporaries in France, Japan, and California. Sam Francis: Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings 1946–1994, hereafter SFCR, edited by Debra Burchett-Lere (Berkeley: University of California Press and SFF, 2011), includes an extensive essay by William Agee and a biographical timeline by Burchett-Lere. This source was invaluable for both the sober-minded, art-historical accounting by Agee and the detailed chronology by Burchett-Lere. I have quoted Francis’s aphorisms throughout the book and used them as titles for the five parts of the book. A number of chapter titles are also pulled from his aphorisms (specifically, the titles of chapters 8, 13, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, and 24). Francis’s own writings—dream poems, lists of possible painting titles, essays, and the aforementioned aphorisms—have been compiled in Sam Francis, Saturated Blue: Writings from the Notebooks (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1995), written and selected by Sam Francis and published posthumously, and in Cobalt Blue: Writings from the Papers of Sam Francis, selected and edited by Jaime Robles, with an introduction by Nancy Mozur (Glendale, CA: SFF, 2019). Since his notebooks are undated, and because he often worked the same phrases into letters or interviews, it is nearly impossible to date any aphorism. All writings by Sam Francis are © 2020 Sam Francis Foundation.





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All of Sam’s letters quoted in this book are housed in the Sam Francis Papers, GRI, with digitized copies in the SFF archives. Citations are to copies in the SFF archives unless otherwise noted.

introduction 1. My description of Sam’s Basel Mural, painted in Paris between 1956 and 1958, draws on multiple sources, including photographs of Sam at work in his Paris studio and letters to his father and stepmother (Sam and Virginia Francis) and dealers. “Enormous dream” from letter to Zoe Dusanne (ca. 1956); “The brush is up . . . ” from letter to Franz Meyer Sr. (1956); “Perhaps I have created . . . ” from letter to parents, December 20, 1956; “It comes from me . . . ” from taped conversation between Sam Francis and Jan Butterfield (ca. 1976), Jan Butterfield Papers, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. On the accident when Sam was finishing the mural, see Betty Freeman, “Sam Francis: Ideas and Painting” (unpublished manuscript, 1969), 25, 28, SFF; and Debra Burchett-Lere, “Sam Francis: A Biographical Timeline,” in SFCR, 187. 2. Pontus Hultén, OHP. 3. My summary of Sam’s early success and expansive career relies on my interview with Eberhard Kornfeld, August 20, 2017, Bern, and on Hultén, OHP. In Perkins’s 2008 film, The Painter Sam Francis, Hultén states that at one point in the 1950s, Sam was the most expensive living artist in the world. 4. Jan Butterfield, “The Other Side of Wonder,” Art International 23, no. 8 (December 1979): n.p. 5. Sam believed that without painting he wouldn’t live, telling Yves Michaud, “without painting I wouldn’t have lived, it’s a reality for me.” Michaud, Conversations with Sam Francis, Santa Monica, California, May 14, 15, 16, 17, 1988, in Entretiens, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Jean Fournier, 1988), 18. He told Pontus Hultén that painting “was really a matter of life and death for me.” Hultén, transcript of conversation with Sam Francis, 1986–90, 17, in SFF. Indeed, Sam told this to so many people that it has become one of the bedrocks of his personal creation story. For his remark “I feel those parts of me healing,” see Hultén, transcript of conversation, 7.

chapter 1. traumatic beginnings 1. Sam’s aphorism “Color is light on fire” and all other cited aphorisms are in Sam Francis, Saturated Blue. On the heat wave, see David Wincer, “The Heat

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Wave of 1936,” Toronto Evening Telegram, July 10, 1936. According to the National Weather Service, Weather Underground, and the Farmers’ Almanac, the 1936 heat wave remains the most intense and widespread ever recorded in US history. 2. Account of Sam Sr.’s early life from interviews with family members and his obituaries (Palo Alto Times, January 3, 1973; Times of San Mateo, January 4, 1973). His marriage to Katharine Lewis reported in St. John’s Daily News, July 7, 1922. 3. On the spread of the Methodist religion across Newfoundland: Calvin Hollett, Shouting, Embracing, and Dancing: The Growth of Methodism in Newfoundland, 1774–1874 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010). Quoted hymns from United Methodist Hymnal Book of United Methodist Worship (Nashville: United Methodist Publishing House, 1990), nos. 400, 349, 532. 4. In Michaud, Entretiens, 55. 5. Sam’s childhood history primarily based on interviews with Michaud and Hultén, as well as George Francis, OHP; author interview with Kathy Doctor (George’s daughter), (August 2, 2018); a taped conversation between Margaret and Augustus Francis (digital file emailed to author on February 18, 2017); and visits to Sam’s home and surrounding area. “I set fire . . .” and “On those lots . . .” (below) in Hultén, transcript of conversation, 4, 5. 6. In J. C. Steele, History of San Mateo County, California Including Its Geography, Topography, Geology, Climatography, and Description (Florence, OR: B. F. Alley, 1883), 22. 7. In Hultén, transcript of conversation, 11. 8. Clark Wissler and Alice Beck Kehoe, Mythology of the Blackfoot Indians: Sources of American Indian Oral Literature, 2nd ed. (Lincoln, NE: Bison Books, 2008), 20. 9. In Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. The California Death Index lists Katharine’s age at death as forty, but her gravestone gives her dates as 1891– 1935 and a census report lists her as nineteen in 1910, indicating that she was probably forty-four when she died. 10. In Michaud, Entretiens, 47. 11. On the shooting and death of Powers: San Francisco Examiner, April 2, 1936; Sacramento Bee, April 6, 1936; Times (San Mateo), April 14, 1936. 12. In Michaud, Entretiens, 58. 13. On the 1936 aurora borealis: “Telegraph and Short Wave Radio Service Interrupted by Electrical Disturbances,” New York Times, June 20, 1936; and “Telegraphic Transmission Hit by Aurora Borealis,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 20, 1936. 14. “Because it is always . . .” in Hultén, transcript of conversation, 8. “Light is the evidence . . .” in Blackwood, Sam Francis.





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chapter 2. first love, first muse 1. On Sam’s meeting Vera, her childhood, and their courtship: Vera Miller, OHP. Further information from author interview with Vera’s daughter, Cheri Fulton, March 17, 2017, Kentville, CA. Sam’s joining the First Congregational Church of San Mateo is recorded in the church’s archives. 2. In Helen Nester, Family Portraits in Changing Times (Troutdale, OR: New Sage Press, 1986), 76. 3. Throughout, all quotations from Sam’s correspondence with Vera in SFF. 4. All quotations from P. D. Ouspensky from his Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World (1922; Santa Cruz, CA: Evinity Publishing, 2009), Kindle. Although some accounts have stated that Sam read Ouspensky’s In Search of the Miraculous as a teenager, that is impossible, as it wasn’t published in English until after Ouspensky’s death in 1949, when Sam was twenty-six. However, Sam’s brother, George, remembered him reading and discussing Ouspensky when they were kids, so it is probable that Sam read Tertium Organum, published in 1922 and a runaway bestseller in the United States in the mid1920s. Certainly, Sam read In Search of the Miraculous later in his life, after its 1949 publication. Both books cover much of the same material on mystical thinking. 5. In Michaud, Entretiens, 5. 6. On California’s mobilization for World War II: Roger Lotchin, “Mobilization for the Duration: The Bay Area in the Good War,” National Park Service, https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mobilization-for-the-duration-the-bay-area-inthe-good-war.htm.

chapter 3. an unexpected battle 1. In Hultén, transcript of conversation, 3. 2. On Sam’s going off to war: George Francis, letter to Nanny and Aunt Lucy, March 1, 1943, Sam Francis Papers, box 13, folder 1, GRI. On Sam’s subsequent Air Corps training: 1943 letters to Vera Miller and Nanny, SFF; a timeline Vera Miller constructed with Debra Burchett-Lere, SFF; and yearbook Gosport Class 44-C, vol. 2, no. 2 (Blythe, CA: Morton Air Academy, 1943). 3. On statistics: Anthony J. Mireles, Fatal Army Air Force Aviation Accidents in the United States, 1941–1945 (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland, 2006), xi. 4. General Henry Harley Arnold, Global Mission (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 117. 5. Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 59. It seems significant that even before he began to paint, Sam established his desire to have a visual role in the war effort. Already in December 1943, Sam wrote Vera that he’d decided on reconnaissance

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work (rather than being a fighter pilot). On Eisenhower’s reliance on reconnaissance pilots, see Dino Brugioni, Eyes in the Sky: Eisenhower, the CIA, and the Cold War Aerial Espionage (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011). 6. It is a misconception that Sam’s TB was caused by a crash. My research uncovered his US Army medical records from the Department of Veterans Affairs, a 340-page report documenting his medical, dental, and psychological history (copy at SFF). It clearly states that as a cadet, Sam began having low back pain radiating down his legs when he returned from flying. There is no mention anywhere of a flight accident. On January 17, 1944, the report clarifies: “Patient states that his back trouble began while in primary about 3 months ago. He doesn’t remember, but at that time states that he lifted some heavy object. . . . Also states that coughing and sneezing will cause pain. The patient denies any injury to his back and also states that he has never had any such trouble prior to approximately three months ago” (209). Between 1943 and 1947, Sam wrote numerous letters to Vera where he mentions coughs, f lus, mumps, a tooth abscess, a fever, scoliosis, a virus, a bacterial infection in his spine, and finally TB. He never once writes about experiencing a crash or even a difficult landing. Quotation about killing his “closest friend in the lavatory” in medical records, 212; comment to Hultén in Hultén, transcript of conversation, 15. 7. I am indebted to Drs. David Seidenwurm, Michael Klein, and Richard Stark for help in interpreting the probable origin, progression, and treatment of Sam’s TB. Though in the 1940s, sunshine and dry air were considered to benefit TB patients, they do not in fact help cure the disease. My account of Sam’s hospitalization, including his hallucinations and emotional condition, relies on his medical records and his descriptions in cited interviews with Pontus Hultén and Peter Selz. 8. In Hultén, transcript of conversation, 18. 9. Peter Selz, Sam Francis (New York: Harry Abrams, 1975), 19. 10. E. Bogen, “Streptomycin Treatment for Tuberculosis,” Journal of the National Medical Association 40, no. 1 (1948): 32.

chapter 4. the keys to the kingdom 1. In Michaud, Entretiens, 54. 2. In Blackwood, Sam Francis. Sam also talks about his vision in Michaud, Entretiens, and told the same story to many of his studio assistants. 3. In Michaud, Entretiens, 54 4. In Blackwood, Sam Francis. 5. Sam was introduced to Jung’s ideas in a psychology class at Berkeley in 1942 (see his UC academic records, SFF) but began further reading of Jung while in the hospital.





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6. In Hultén, transcript of conversation, 17. 7. On the 1940s San Francisco art scene, see Susan Landauer, San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism (Berkeley: University of California Press with Laguna Art Museum, 1996), and Landauer’s essay in The Great California Art Movement: U.C. Davis Fine Art Alumni Exhibition: 1960–1990 (Davis, CA: John Natsoulas Press, 2016); also Thomas Albright, Art in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–1980: An Illustrated History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Paul Karlstrom, ed., On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and James E. B. Breslin, Mark Rothko: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). On Grace McCann Morley: Kara Kirk, “Grace McCann Morley and the Modern Museum,” February 2017, https://www.sfmoma.org/essay/grace-mccannmorley-and-modern-museum, and Susan Landauer, “Painting under the Shadow: California Modernism and the Second World War,” in Karlstrom, On the Edge of America, 41–46. 8. In Hazel Holly, “Crippling Ailment No Obstacle to Vet Artist,” San Francisco Examiner, March 17, 1946; with follow-ups on March 23 and June 16, 1946. Various art programs existed for wounded World War II veterans around the country, taught by volunteers like artists Alexander Calder and Grant Wood. See Tara Leigh Tappert, “In Service to the Nation: Military Arts and Crafts,” lecture at La Salle University Art Museum, 2012, https://digitalcommons.lasalle .edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=winwyt_events. 9. Here and below, quotations from Nancy Boas, David Park: A Painter’s Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 89; also from Boas’s transcript and notes of her interview with Sam Francis, June 30, 1991, Point Reyes, CA (© Nancy Boas). 10. Hultén, transcript of conversation, 16. 11. Hultén, 20; also in Boas, David Park, 89. 12. William C. Agee, “Sam Francis: A Painter’s Dialogue with Color, Light, and Space,” in SFCR, 8. In discussing this painting with Nancy Boas, Sam mentioned the art books David Park had brought him, noting “the profile being incorporated into the head on the portrait” (interview, 1991, 6; © Nancy Boas). 13. Hultén, transcript of conversation, 19.

chapter 5. a first coalescence 1. In Dave Weinstein, “Road to Bohemia,” https://www.eichlernetwork.com /article/road-bohemia?page=0,0. 2. On California Grey Coast: Agee, “Sam Francis,” 17–18. For more on Sam’s shifting, disorienting perspectives, see Elizabeth Buhe, “Space without Place: Francis’s Travel Paintings,” In Focus: Around the Blues 1957, 1962–3 by Sam

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Francis, July 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus /around-the-blues/francis-travel-paintings. 3. In my interview with Vera’s daughter, Cheri Fulton, March 17, 2017, in Petaluma, CA, Fulton revealed that her mother told her she was a virgin when she married Sam and she didn’t enjoy the sexual part of intimacy with him. See also Nancy Francis, OHP. 4. Quotation on his professors’ attention in Selz, Sam Francis, 27; on still-life setup in Walter Hopps with Deborah Treisman and Anne Doran, The Dream Colony: A Life in Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 151; on approach to color, in Blackwood, Sam Francis. Sam, who had begun his studies at UC Berkeley before the war (1941–43), completed his BA in 1947–49 and his MA in 1949–50. In 1969 he received an honorary PhD from UC Berkeley. The account of his time at Berkeley draws on author interviews with Peter Selz (November 5, 2016) and Fred Martin (November 20, 2018). 5. In Paul Karlstrom, “Oral History Interview with Jay DeFeo, June 3, 1975; July 18, 1975; and January 23, 1976,” AAA, 3. 6. On the art Sam saw during this period: Hultén, transcript of conversation, 7, and Burchett-Lere, “Biographical Timeline,” 148. Gorky and Motherwell exhibited in 2nd Annual Exhibition of Painting, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, November 19, 1947–January 4, 1948; Pollock’s Cathedral was in 3rd Annual Exhibition of Painting, California Palace of the Legion of Honor, November 30, 1948–January 16, 1949. 7. Still’s comment re “European heritage” in Breslin, Mark Rothko, 225; “cultural opiates” in Still’s letter to Gordon Smith, January 1, 1959, quoted in Clifford Ross, ed., Abstract Expressionism: Creators and Critics (New York: Abrams, 1990), 194. 8. In Albright, Art in Bay Area, 38. 9. In Selz, Sam Francis, 27. 10. Agee, “Sam Francis,” 28; see also Selz, Sam Francis, 29–30. 11. For a brief time, Muriel went by her first husband’s surname, Calahan. 12. On Sam’s meeting Muriel: Muriel Goodwin, OHP, and Goodwin’s recollections for Jeu de Paume, September 1, 1995, in Sam Francis Papers, box 20, folder 1, GRI. 13. In Blackwood, Sam Francis.

chapter 6. a tiny room at the hôtel de seine 1. Harold Rosenberg, “The Fall of Paris,” Partisan Review 7, no. 6 (1940): 440– 48. On Nazi-occupied Paris, also see Sarah Wilson, Paris: Capital of the Arts (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), and Alan Riding, And the Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-Occupied Paris (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 2. In Riding, Show Went On.





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3. In Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s–1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 27. 4. On degenerate art exhibit: Exhibition of artworks despoiled and found in Germany: Masterpieces from private French collections found in Germany by the French Commission for the Recovery of Artworks and the Allied Services (Paris: Musée de l’Orangerie, 1946), 194. On French aid to foreign students: Summer Crosby, “Report on Conditions Relating to Research and Study in the History of Art in France,” College Art Journal 7, no. 3 (1948): 202. 5. Letter to parents, October 22, 1950, SFF. On Sam’s early days in Paris, also see Goodwin, Jeu de Paume recollections; Goodwin, OHP; Al Held, OHP; Paul Cummings, “Oral History Interview with Al Held, Nov. 19, 1975–Jan. 8, 1976,” AAA; and Michael Plante, “Fashioning Nationality: Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, and American Expatriate Artists in Paris in the 1950s,” in Out of Context: American Artists Abroad, ed. Laura Felleman Fattal and Carol Salus (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 135–46. 6. In Michaud, Entretiens, 44. 7. Al Held, in Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 8. “Baudelairean dandy” in André Parinaud, “Sam Francis: La création est une méditation courte et ardente,” Galerie jardin des arts 199 (1980): 33; “Come to Les Trois Marronniers” in Pierre Schneider, OHP. On Sam’s introduction to Duthuit, see Natalie Adamson, “Sam Francis and Painting in Paris,” In Focus: Around the Blues 1957, 1962–3 by Sam Francis, July 2019, https://www.tate .org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/around-the-blues/painting-in-paris, and Elizabeth Buhe, “Friendship Is a Solitude Split in Two,” in Un Art Autre (London: Lévy Gorvy, 2019), 11–20. 9. The Matisse painting Francis admired in Duthuit’s office is thought by Burchett-Lere to be Matisse’s Nu au tapis espagnol (1919; private collection). Schneider, OHP, describes seeing Femme en robe sitting on Duthuit’s desk. 10. Sam Francis, “Bonnard or Be Kind to Yourself Human Being,” Bijutsu Techo (Tokyo), April 1968. 11. “The substance of which light is made” in James Johnson Sweeney, Sam Francis, exh. cat. (Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Berkeley: University Art Museum, 1967), 14; “I had come from California” in Blackwood, Sam Francis. 12. On Brancusi: Avis Berman, “Interview with Shirley Jaffe, September 27–28, 2010,” AAA, 28. On interaction with Schultze: Schultze’s August 1967 letter to Annaliese Hoyer, in Sweeney, Sam Francis, 17. Also on Monet: Held, OHP; Sam Francis, Mon art, mon métier, ma magie . . .: Entretiens avec Yves Michaud (Strasbourg: Atelier Contemporain, 2015), 56. 13. Letter to parents, December 7, 1950, SFF. On existentialism in relation to the arts: Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (London: Chatto & Windus, 2016), and Jean-Philippe Deranty, “Existentialist Aesthetics,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2019

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edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia /archinfo.cgi?entry=aesthetics-existentialist. 14. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Humanism, trans. Phillip Mairet (1946; Brooklyn, NY: Haskell House, 1977). 15. “We were like babies” in Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 16. On Sam’s painting at Hôtel de Seine: Goodwin’s Jeu de Paume recollections. Also Debra Burchett-Lere and Aneta Zebala, Sam Francis: The Artist’s Materials (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2019), 21–26. 17. Georges Duthuit, “Sam Francis, Animator of Silence,” Nimbus 2, no. 1 (July–August 1953), 41–43. It is believed this essay was translated by Samuel Beckett for Art News but not published there. 18. Franz Meyer, “Sam Francis in Europe,” in Sam Francis Paintings 1947– 1972, exh. cat. (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Gallery, 1972); Robert T. Buck Jr., “The Paintings of Sam Francis,” in Meyer, 17; also Hazelle Miloradovitch, email to Debra Burchett-Lere, August 30, 2008, SFF. 19. Yoshiaki Tōno, “Sam Francis,” in Chatting with Artists (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 7; translated from the Japanese by Tara Nettleton for SFF in 2017. In the interview, when Tōno suggested that the paintings “capture the origin of picture-making,” Sam replied the series was “a natural invention.” 20. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Psychology of Imagination (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 81. 21. Michaud, Entretiens, 56; Kazimir Malevich expressed his exhilaration in a manifesto published in conjunction with the first public exhibition of the series, in Moscow in 1919 (see https://www.moma.org/collection/works/80385). 22. “It was like painting” in Selz, Sam Francis, 34; “beautiful basin” in Blackwood, Sam Francis; “white wasn’t the color” in Duthuit, “Animator of Silence.” 23. Goodwin, OHP. 24. Pontus Hultén, “Portrait,” in Sam Francis, exh. cat. (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, 1993), 13–14; Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 119.

chapter 7. ambition and lies 1. Francis, letter to parents, April 17, 1951, SFF. 2. Francis, letter to parents, April 12, 1952, SFF. 3. “West Coast” in Francis, letter to Jerry and Andrea Inglis, November or December 1950, SFF; see also Fred Martin, letters to Francis, 1949–59, Sam Francis Papers, box 5, folder 9, GRI. Jaffe: Berman, interview with Jaffe. 4. See Sidney Geist and Geoffrey Jacques, Galerie Huit: American Artists in Paris 1950–52, exh. cat. (New York: Studio 18, 2002). In addition to Rivers and Francis, members included Sidney Geist, Burt Hasen, Al Held, Shirley Jaffe, Paul Keene, Jules Olitski, Robert Rosenwald, Carmen d’Avino, and Herbert Katzman.





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5. Francis, letter to parents, March 27, 1951, SFF. 6. “[F]ocused intensity” in Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 7. Hazelle Miloradovitch’s descriptions from author interview with her, March 21, 2017, Palo Alto. Jan Butterfield, “Interview with Sam Francis,” Flash Art, no. 106 (February–March 1982): 22. 8. On Sam’s sexual promiscuity: Goodwin, OHP; Joe Barnes, phone interview with author, May 25, 2018. 9. On the Sèvres house: Schneider, OHP; Held, OHP; and Francis, undated correspondence with Shirley Jaffe, SFF. 10. In Hultén, transcript of conversation, 11. 11. Francis, letter to Mary Hutchinson, August 15, 1952, in Mary Hutchinson Papers, box 13, folder 4, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, Austin, TX. On Blake’s influence on Francis: Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 53–54; Selz, Sam Francis, 18; Agee, “Sam Francis,” 6, 115. 12. William Black, Proverbs of Hell, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Project Gutenberg, 2014, www.gutenberg.org/files/45315/45315-h/45315-h.htm. 13. Michaud, Entretiens, 1988, 15, SFF. 14. For multiple reasons, I believe Sam’s mythologizing of his illness took flight in Paris when he was far from home and not around the people who knew him when he was ill. However, it is important to point out that before his trip to Paris, Hazel Holly mentioned a crash in “New Vista in Art Career of Crippled Army Flyer,” Smart Set, San Francisco Examiner, March 17, 1946. This may be a reporting mistake or a fabrication Sam told Hazel at the time. When Sam’s father recapped his son’s biographical data for Zoe Dusanne (for an exhibit in Dusanne’s Seattle gallery in the mid-1950s), Sam Sr. did not mention an airplane accident, only the inability to read the X-rays correctly and the eventual TB diagnosis. Schneider, OHP, remembered that at their first meeting, Sam said he was a pilot who’d survived a fiery crash in the Arizona desert. Though we may never know the truth, Sam’s personality suggests it was a fabrication. “I long for the wide open spaces of the west” in Francis, letter to parents, March 30, 1951, SFF. 15. “I’ve been given” in Blackwood, Sam Francis. 16. Francis, letter to his parents, March 30, 1951, SFF; “Probably god” in Michaud, transcript of conversation, in Entretiens: Sam Francis et Yves Michaud—Paris le 17 juin, 1 et 2 juillet 1985, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Jean Fournier, 1985), 13; see also Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 23.

chapter 8. i paint time 1. J. P. (Jacques Peuchmaurd), “Tout Paris: Sam Francis,” L’Express, February 15, 1952, quoted in “Chronologie,” in Sam Francis: Les années parisiennes, 173n56; “Art and Artists,” Herald Tribune (Paris), February 27, 1952.

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2. In Karlstrom, “Interview with DeFeo,” 4. 3. Paul Schimmel, OHP. 4. The term Un Art Autre is used synonymously with Art Informel. While Un Art Autre is probably broader (encompassing figurative works), I chose Art Informel, the preferred term in Japan and one that encompasses both Sam and Tapié’s global reach. On Art Informel, see Michel Tapié, “A New Beyond” (from his 1952 book Un Art Autre), in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 603–5; and Frances Morris, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945–55 (London: Tate Gallery, 1993). 5. Quotations from Tapié, “New Beyond,” 603; Morris, Paris Post War, 212. See also Juliette Evezard, “The Eye of Michel Tapié, ‘Art Lover,’ ” July 2018, Franck-Prazan Archives, https://www.franck-prazan.com/en/2018/07/26/theeye-of-michel-tapie-art-lover-by-juliette-evezard/; and Catherine Dossin, “To Drip or to Pop? The European Triumph of American Art,” Artl@s Bulletin 3, no. 1 (2014): 80–103. 6. Tapié quoted in Dossin, “Drip or Pop?,” 83. 7. “Jackson Pollock: A Questionnaire,” Arts and Architecture 61, no. 2 (February 1944): 14. 8. On animosity to Americans, see Michaud, Entretiens, 41. Pierre Schneider’s comment on Davy Crockett hats is quoted in Linda Stratford, “Cadillacs, Jet Planes and H-bombs: American Art in France Following the Liberation,” Journal of the Western Society for French History, vol. 41 (2013), https://quod .lib.umich.edu/w/wsf h/0642292.0041.012?view=text;rgn=main. Duthuit’s quote on Francis’s and Riopelle’s renewal of European tradition is quoted in Marie-Claude Corbeil, Kate Helwig, and Jennifer Poulin, Jean Paul Riopelle: The Artist’s Materials, with an essay by Stéphanie Aquin and a preface by Yseult Riopelle (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2011), 25. Duthuit advocating art trailblazed by Matisse quoted in Eric de Chassey, “Paris-New York: Rivalry and Denial,” Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900–1968 (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2002), 346. For Francis’s comment on l’École du Pacifique, see Michaud, Entretiens, 51. Jean Dubuffet’s nebulous soup quoted in Jean Dubuffet, letter to Michel Tapié, December 21, 1952, in Jean Dubuffet, Prospectus et tous écrits suivants, vol. 2, ed. Hubert Damisch (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), 308. Jean Dubuffet, “Place à l’incivisme,” Art and Text, no. 27 (December 1987—February 1988): 36. Francis’s quote on authentic creative impulse is from Francis speaking in a group debate, “L’École du Pacifique,” published in Cimaise 7 (June 1954): 6–9. See also Adamson, “Francis and Painting in Paris.” 9. Yvonne Hagen, From Art to Life and Back: N.Y.–Berlin-Paris 1925–1962 (self-pub., Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2006), 182. Francis, letters to parents, January 18, 1952, and February 15, 1953, SFF. 10. Francis, letter to Shirley Jaffe, ca. 1953, SFF.





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11. Francis discusses developments with galleries and sales in letter to his parents, May 7, 1952, SFF. See also Burchett-Lere, SFCR, 159–65. 12. Francis, letters to parents, January 18 and August 24, 1952, SFF. 13. Goodwin, letters to Francis, ca. 1953, SFF. 14. Francis, letter to parents, February 15, 1953, SFF. 15. Francis, letter to Jerry and Andrea Inglis, ca. 1953, SFF. 16. In Blackwood, Sam Francis. 17. Susan Powers, conversation with Yves Michaud, Paris, January 24, 2020, SFF. 18. “Duration is,” Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell, chaps. 1, 4 (1911; New York: Gray Rabbit Publishing, 2019). 19. Agee, “Sam Francis,” 55, 57. 20. Rachel Jacobs, Sam Francis, exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Rive Droite, 1956), 2. Sam and Jacobs were close friends and brief ly romantically involved. Joe Barnes described Jacobs as a philosophy student given to “wild antics.” Claude Duthuit, OHP, remembered Jacobs and Sam talking incessantly about philosophy. 21. On their motorcycle trip: Goodwin’s Jeu de Paume recollections, and Francis, letter to parents, October 12, 1953, SFF.

chapter 9. a homecoming of joy and anguish 1. Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 5. The description of Sam’s painting process is derived from photographs and Goodwin’s Jeu de Paume recollections and OHP. 2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Duineser Elegien (Frankfurt: Insel, 1948), trans. by author. 3. It was previously believed that Sam and Muriel traveled to the United States together, but travel manifests put them on separate ships with Sam leaving Le Havre on November 5, 1954, and Muriel sailing from Cherbourg on January 7, 1955. Sam described his state of mind, his intentions, and his situation with Muriel in letters to his father on November 21, 1954; March 5, 1955; and April 7, 1955, SFF. 4. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5 5. Irving Sandler, The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). 6. On the post–World War II economic boom in New York: Robert Sobel, The Great Boom, 1950–2000: How a Generation of Americans Created the World’s Most Prosperous Society (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016), 8. On the New York–Paris art world rivalry: Guilbaut, How New York Stole Idea; Irving Sandler,

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The Triumph of American Painting: A History of Abstract Expressionism (New York: Praeger, 1970); and Dore Ashton, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). Eric de Chassey, “ParisNew York: Rivalry and Denial,” Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900–1968 (London: Royal Academy of the Arts, 2002). 7. Clement Greenberg, in “Symposium: Is the French Avant-Garde Overrated?,” Art Digest (September 15, 1953); 12, 27. 8. On Pollock’s punching the window: “Willem de Kooning on Pollock,” Partisan Review 34, no. 4 (1967): 603–5. On Rothko: Breslin, Mark Rothko, 304. 9. Held, OHP. 10. On Kelly: Jeffrey Kastner, “Ellsworth Kelly’s Journey, from All Angles,” New York Times, May 4, 2003. On Held: Irving Sandler, “Al Held (1928–2005): A Maverick in the New York Art World,” American Art 20, no. 1 (2006): 108–11. 11. On Sam’s difficulties in New York: Muriel Goodwin, letter to Sam’s parents, February 24, 155, SFF. On his distaste for the business side of art: Francis, letter to parents, July 19, 1954, SFF. Martha Jackson’s letter, August 26, 1954, in Sam Francis Papers, box 41, folder 1, GRI. 12. Francis, letter to father, January 18, 1952, SFF. A Pan American passenger manifest lists Sam on a February 27, 1955, flight. 13. Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 19; “chasm” of space in Francis, letter to Shirley Jaffe, ca. 1953, SFF. On In Lovely Blueness, see Pierre Schneider, Louvre Dialogues, trans. Patricia Southgate (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 175–90, and Agee, “Sam Francis,” 67, 74. 14. Held, OHP. 15. Vincent van Gogh, letter to Theo van Gogh, August 11, 1888, Vincent van Gogh Gallery, www.vggallery.com/letters/638_V-T_520.pdf. 16. “In Lovely Blue,” n.d., trans. George Kalogeris, https://www.poetryfoundation .org/poetrymagazine/poems/52408/in-lovely-blue. 17. Schneider, Louvre Dialogues, 180. 18. Schneider, 188; “I think I die” in Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 52; Rothko, in “Brief Manifesto: Mark Rothko with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman,” New York Times, June 13, 1943. 19. On Mitchell: Patricia Albers, Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); also Linda Nochlin, “Oral History Interview with Joan Mitchell,” April 16, 1986, AAA; and Plante, “Fashioning Nationality.” 20. In Nochlin, “Interview with Mitchell.” 21. Jaffe, OHP; Francis, letter to father, April 13, 1955, SFF. 22. Goodwin, OHP. 23. Rüdlinger, in “New Talent: Painter Francis and Million Franc Painting,” Time, January 16, 1956, 72. Rüdlinger originally purchased the painting Deep Orange and Black for an association of collectors, La Peau de l’Ours, for the Kunsthalle Basel. Two years later, it was purchased by the Kunstmuseum Basel.





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24. Pierre Schneider, “Summer Events,” Art News 54, no. 4 (1955): 74; Dorothy Seiberling, “The Most Talked-About Painters in the World,” Life (international edition), December 12, 1955, press files, Sam Francis Papers, GRI; “New Talent,” Time. 25. Francis, letter to parents, November 21, 1955, SFF. 26. On flu: Francis, letter to parents, February 29, 1956; also Francis, letter to Zoe Dusanne, ca. 1956, SFF. 27. Arts Magazine 30, no. 5 (February 1956): 50–51; Howard Devree, “Nature as Source: Three Artists Who Seek Total Effect Rather Than Detailed Realism,” arts section, New York Times, February 19, 1956; Caryle Burrows, “Art Constructions Have Gala Showing,” New York Herald Tribune, February 19, 1956. 28. Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 87. 29. Francis, letter to parents, February 29, 1956, SFF.

chapter 10. wanderlust 1. On Sam and Muriel’s breakup: various letters they each wrote to Sam’s parents in December 1956, SFF; also Goodwin, OHP, and Sam’s comments to Peter Selz on his marriage in undated note in Peter Howard Selz Papers, box 7, folder 23, AAA. 2. On Sam’s efforts to impregnate Muriel: author interview with Kornfeld, August 20, 2017. 3. Francis, letter to parents regarding plans, December 20, 1956, SFF. 4. Francis, letter to parents regarding joy and anguish, ca. 1956, SFF. 5. Francis, letter to Dusanne, ca. 1956, SFF. 6. On the influences on the Basel Mural, see Selz, Sam Francis, 56; Agee, “Sam Francis,” 76; Buck, “Sam Francis,” 20; Carl Beltz, “Fitting Sam Francis into History,” Art in America, January–February 1973, 40–45; and, referring to Tyler Green: Christopher Knight, “A Fine Introduction to Sam Francis’ Abstract Expressionism,” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2013, https://www.latimes.com /entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-sam-francis-review-20130814-story.html. 7. In Michaud, Entretiens, 45. 8. Francis, letter to parents, October 16, 1951, SFF. On the museum and curator in question, it is likely to be Imaizumi Atsuo, who was in Paris at this time for a half-year study trip in preparation for the opening of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 1952. See Bert Winther-Tamaki, “Japanese Views of the Void in Sam Francis’s Painting during the ‘Informel Whirlwind,’ ” In Focus: Around the Blues 1957, 1962–3 by Sam Francis, July 2019, https://www .tate.org.uk/research/publications/in-focus/around-the-blues/japanese-views-ofthe-void. 9. Francis, letter to Franz Meyer Sr., December 8, 1956, quoted in Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 21; Freeman, 87.

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10. Author interview with Kornfeld; also Eberhard Kornfeld, Sam Francis: 40 Years of Friendship, exh. cat. (Bern: Galerie Kornfeld, 1991). 11. Jackson Pollock, “My Painting,” Possibilities 1 (Winter 1947–48): 78–83; Francis, in Hultén, transcript of conversation, 11. 12. Clyfford Still, letter to Sam Francis, March 24, 1952, SFF; The New American Painting, photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, October 15, 1959; Sanka Knox, “Abstract Art Is Going to Europe to Represent American Culture,” New York Times, March 11, 1958. On the New American Painting show: author interview with Kornfeld; Kornfeld, 40 Years; and Museum of Modern Art International Program, The New American Painting: As Shown in Eight European Countries, 1958–59, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959). Two previous exhibitions of American art had toured Europe. The first, Twelve Modern American Painters and Sculptors (1953–54) included more representational artists like Edward Hopper alongside Arshile Gorky and Jackson Pollock. The second exhibition, Modern Art in the USA: A Selection from the Collections of the Museum of Modern Art (1955–56), showed fifty years of American art. 13. Muriel Goodwin, letter to Sam Francis’s parents, February 4, 1957, SFF. 14. On the trip to South Dakota and Mexico: author interview with Jerry Aistrup, February 22, 2017, Los Angeles; author phone interview with Mary Ann Sullivan, sister of Carol Haerer, August 28, 2018. 15. Agee, “Sam Francis,” 82; Lawrence Alloway, The Exploration of Paint, exh. cat. (London: Arthur Tooth, 1957), 3. See also Buhe, “Space without Place.” 16. “The more familiar” in Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 10; “Getting lost” in Blackwood, Sam Francis. 17. In Blackwood, Sam Francis; Toshimitsu Imai, “La belle équipe: Wandering in My Youth,” in Sam Francis: Tokyo Mural, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Sogetsu Art Museum, 1996), 9, trans. from the Japanese by Minoru Sato for SFF; and Sōfu Teshigahara, Sogetsu and Its Era, 1945–1970, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Sogetsu Art Museum, 1998), trans. from the Japanese by Noboru Ooka for SFF. Sam wrote Martha Jackson on October 30, 1957, telling her Tokyo was a “man’s paradise,” SFF. 18. Francis, letter to parents, ca. 1958, SFF. 19. On 1957 “Informel whirlwind” in Japan: Doryun Chong, Michio Hayashi, Kenji Kajiya, and Fumihiko Sumitomo, eds., Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945–1989, exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012); and Winther-Tamaki, “Japanese Views of the Void”; on Francis’s reciprocal relationship with Japan and Japanese artists, see Richard Speer, Sam Francis and Japan (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2020). 20. Winther-Tamaki, “Japanese Views of the Void.” 21. Teshigahara, in Sogetsu. 22. Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 6. 23. Sam Francis, “The Space Age and Artist,” Yomiuri Shimbun, December 10, 1957, evening edition, trans. from the Japanese by Miyuki Hinton for SFF.





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chapter 11. feverish intensity 1. On this party: Hagen, From Art to Life and Back, 201–2. 2. On Sam’s travels and exhibitions at this time: Burchett-Lere, “Biographical Timeline.” Jackson’s letter, January 8, 1958, in Sam Francis Papers, box 41, folder 1, GRI. 3. Francis, letter to Zoe Dusanne, April 1958, SFF. 4. Artist statements in Museum of Modern Art, New American Painting, 52, 68, 76, 28. 5. Robert Pincus-Witten, “Sam Francis: The Paris Years,” in Sam Francis: 1953–1959, exh. cat. (New York: L&M Arts, 2009), 21; Harold Rosenberg, “The American Action Painters,” Art News 55, no. 5 (September 1952): 48. Sam’s painting Whiteness of the Whale was painted in New York and Tokyo in 1957 and then touched up and retitled in Paris in 1958 as he explored themes relating to Moby Dick. 6. Pontus Hultén, “The Inside of Angels,” in Sam Francis: The Shadow of Colors—Aquarelle und Gouachen 1948–1984, ed. Ingrid Mössinger, exh. cat. (Ludwigsburg, Germany: Kunstverein Ludwigsburg, 1995), 18–19. Reproduced from a text written in 1993. 7. In Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 26. Sam’s conception of pulling an image from the depths may reflect the impact of Henri Bergson’s ideas. Bergson compares the act of bringing art into being to “a sounding of which one feels that it has more or less reached the bottom of the same ocean, even though it brings each time to the surface very different materials.” Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2007), 168. 8. John Russell, “The New American Painting Captures Europe,” Horizon 2, no. 2 (November 1959): 32; Yvonne Hagen, “U.S. Paintings Shown,” Herald Tribune (Paris), April 23, 1958. 9. Françoise Choay, “France Observateur,” in Paris/New York Arts Yearbook 3, ed. Hilton Kramer (New York: Art Digest, 1959), 164. 10. Francis, letter to Franz Meyer Sr., ca. 1958, SFF; Meyer’s letter to Francis cited in Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 26. 11. In Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 96. 12. Muriel Goodwin, letters to Haywood Rivers, ca. 1958, Haywood Bill Rivers Papers, 1946–70, AAA. 13. Here and below, information on Teruko Yokoi from author interview with Teruko Yokoi, August 22, 2017, Bern; and Teruko Yokoi, OHP. Also: Anuschka Roshani, “ ‘I’ve Always Been a Free Spirit’: Teruko Yokoi in Conversation with Anuschka Roshani,” in Roshani et al., Teruko Yokoi: Tokyo–New York–Paris– Bern (Bern: Hatje Cantz, 2020); and Teruko Yokoi, letters to Sam Francis and to his stepmother, Virginia Francis, n.d., SFF.

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14. Judy Klemesrud, “A Surgeon and Author Explains His Chauvinism,” New York Times, August 22, 1982. 15. Francis, letter to parents, November 17, 1958, SFF.

chapter 12. an internationalist in new york 1. On the birth of Kayo Andrea Francis: author interview with Kayo Francis Malik, January 10, 2017, Los Angeles; and Francis, letter to Eberhard Kornfeld, 1959, SFF. 2. Elaine de Kooning, quoted in David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998), 65. 3. Deborah Salomon, “Artful Survivor,” New York Times Magazine, May 14, 1989, 31. The difficulties in being a female artist, wife, and mother are only beginning to be written about. The nearly complete lack of famous female artists who were also mothers in the 1950s and 1960s sheds light on the inherent struggle faced by women during a time when their art was marginalized. 4. On Sam’s issues with the women in his life here and elsewhere, see author interviews with Vera Miller, Muriel Goodwin, Teruko Yokoi, and Mako Idemitsu as well as their OHP interviews. Although Sam called women “night blooming Jasmine” (undated letter to Bill Elliott, SFF), he could also come to a woman artist’s defense: see Cathy Curtis, Restless Ambition: Grace Hartigan, Painter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 166. 5. Hilton Kramer, “The End of Modern Painting,” Reporter, July 23, 1959, 41–42. 6. Francis, letter to Kornfeld, 1959, SFF; John Canaday, “In the Gloaming: Twilight Seems to Be Settling Rapidly for Abstract Expressionism,” New York Times, September 11, 1960. On the rise of art as an investment: Sophie Cras, “Art as an Investment and Artistic Shareholding Experiments in the 1960s,” American Art 27, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 6. 7. Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Business Buys American Art, exh. cat. (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1960); Breslin, Mark Rothko, 406. 8. Account of Sam’s commission for the Chase Mural draws on email exchanges between author and Debra Burchett-Lere. Burchett-Lere reports that Sam was paid in installments: $1,700 at acceptance, another payment upon completion, and a final payment upon installation. His dealer, Martha Jackson, took a percentage. Looking at photos of the Chase Mural in Larry Rivers’s studio in a nearly complete stage, it seems likely that Sam painted the mural in Rivers’s studio in the summer of 1959. On Sam’s influences for the Chase Mural: David Anfam, A Dance to the Music of Time: Sam Francis’s Chase Manhattan Mural Project, exh. cat. (New York: Manny Silverman Gallery, 1997).





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9. George McCue, “Visit with Painter Sam Francis: American Stylist, Now in New York, Made Reputation in France,” Music and the Arts, Sunday PostDispatch, November 23, 1958. 10. On Sam’s issues with New York, see his letter to Franz Meyer Sr. describing his unease with the city, in Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 27. 11. Held, OHP. 12. Sam’s comment on de Kooning in Hultén, transcript of conversation, 11. Al Held and Al Leslie recounted Sam’s discomfort with New York in OHP. On the definition of first- and second-generation artists: Mary Gabriel, Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 2017), 345. 13. In Michaud, Entretiens, 63. 14. Schimmel, OHP. 15. Michaud, Entretiens, 43. 16. Al Leslie, OHP. 17. On the split between Sam and Bluhm: Rachel Rubinstein, “Virtuosity in Crisis: Norman Bluhm, Sam Francis, and Joan Mitchell circa 1960,” in Blanton Museum of Art: American Art Since 1900, ed. Annette DiMeo Carlozzi and Kelly Baum (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 369–77; and James Schuyler, “Norman Bluhm,” Art News, October 1957, reprinted in Schuyler, Selected Art Writings, ed. Simon Pettet (Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1998), 199. 18. Leslie, OHP.

chapter 13. i am a seismograph 1. On the dinner with Mitchell and Riopelle and the disintegrating relationship between Sam and Teruko: author interviews with Yokoi, author interview with Kornfeld, and Alfred Jensen, letter to Francis, January 16, 1960, Sam Francis Papers, box 5, folder 2, GRI. 2. On Algerian conflict and Paris police: Jean-Luc Einaudi and Maurice Rajsfus, Les Silences de la police—16 juillet 1942, 17 octobre 1961 (Paris: L’Esprit frappeur, 2001), 73–74. 3. Tinguely performed Homage to New York at MoMA during the time when Peter Selz was the curator. On baby lamb: Al Leslie, email to author, February 25, 2019. 4. Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Violence,” Journal of International Affairs 23, no. 1 (1969): 7, accessed January 7, 2021, www.jstor.org/stable/24356590. On Tinguely, de Saint Phalle, and L’impasse Rosin: Adrian Dannat, ed., Impasse Rosin, exh. cat. (New York: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2016), 11–22; and Ariel Levy,

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“Letter from Italy: Beautiful Monsters,” New Yorker, April 11, 2016, https://www .newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/18/niki-de-saint-phalles-tarot-garden. 5. Author interview with Peter Selz, October 5, 2018, Berkeley. See also photographs of Sam and Teruko at Biennale in SFF. 6. On Kogelnik at Biennale: Billy Klüver and Julie Martin, “Interview with Kiki Kogelnik,” New York City, March 21, 1992, typewritten transcript, Klüver/ Martin Archive, transcript held by Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York. 7. On Teruko discovering Sam with Kogelnik: author interview with Kornfeld, September 20, 2017. 8. On Sam’s 1960 blue paintings: Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 146; Peter Selz, Sam Francis: Blue Balls, exh. cat. (New York: Gagosian Gallery, 1991), 7–14; and Peter Selz, notes on Francis and Blue Balls, Selz Papers, AAA. On Matisse’s inf luence: Agee, “Sam Francis,” 93–94. On Klein: Marco Franciolli, Fuyumi Namioka, and Tijs Visser, eds., Gutai: Painting with Time and Space (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2011). “If you paint the larger picture”: Mark Rothko, in “A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture,” Interiors 110, no. 10 (May 1951), cited in Ross, Abstract Expressionism, 172. “Art turns the personal fate”: Sam Francis, in Liga Pang: July 12–24, 1985, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Seibu Museum of Art, 1985). 9. Francis, in Michaud, Entretiens, 56; Francis, in Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 6. 10. Francis, letter to parents, August 18, 1960, SFF. 11. Quoted in Susan Einstein, “The Prints of Sam Francis,” in Selz, Sam Francis, 226–27. In 1959, Sam did some lithographs in New York. But his work in Matthieu’s workshop was his first prolonged experimentation. On his volcanic printing explosion: Manuel Gasser, “Sam Francis. Lithographs by an Action Painter,” in Graphis 18, no. 104 (November/December 1962): 570–75. On his printing process: Connie W. Lembark, The Prints of Sam Francis: A Catalogue Raisonné 1960–1990 (New York: Hudson Hills, 1992). 12. Teruko Yokoi, letter to Virginia Francis, 1960, SFF; Francis, letter to Kiki Kogelnik, February 19, 1962, Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York. 13. Francis, letter to Eberhard Kornfeld, January 19, 1961, SFF.

chapter 14. a dance with mr. death 1. Francis, letters to Kogelnik, February 9, February 19, March 1, and March 19, 1962, Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York. On Sam’s illness and treatment at Tiefenauspital: Silvio Barandun, letter to Peter Selz, November 16, 1990, SFF. 2. Yoshiaki Tōno, letter to Sam Francis, March 1961, SFF; Francis, letter to parents, August 1, 1961, SFF. During Sam’s stay in the hospital, Teruko commu-





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nicated with him through requests made by letter and telegram to Eberhard Kornfeld, April 1961, SFF. 3. Francis, letter to Franz Meyer [Sr.], ca. 1961, quoted in Freeman, Sam Francis, 31. On Sam’s convalescence: author interview with Kornfeld, who visited almost daily and photographed Sam painting, feeding birds from his hand, and visiting with Kogelnik. 4. Letter to Tōno, 1962, reproduced in Tōno, “Sam Francis,” Gendai Bijutsu, no. 20 (1964): 3. On the progress of his testicular recovery: Francis, letter to parents, ca. 1961, SFF. 5. Yoshiaki Tōno, “Malice in Blue (Fragment for Sam),” in Sam Francis Blue Balls Catalogue, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Minami Gallery, 1961). 6. On Jung’s influence on Fellini: Don Fredericksen, “Fellini’s 8 ½ and Jung: Narcissism and Creativity in Midlife,” International Journal of Jungian Studies 6, no. 2 (June 2014): 133–42. 7. C. G. Jung, The Red Book: Liber Novus, trans. Mark Kyburz (W. W. Norton, 2009), 8. 8. Francis, letter to father, August 24, 1961, SFF. 9. Michaud, transcript of conversation, in Entretiens, 1985, 10. 10. Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 141–45. In speaking to Freeman here, Sam also noted, “Blake said that all things are holy and that eternity is in love with the production of things,” but interestingly, he misquotes Blake. Blake actually wrote, “eternity is in love with the productions of time.” Obviously, for Francis, productions of time = things, paintings. 11. In Selz, Francis: Blue Balls, 82. On the Blue Balls series: Selz, 7–14; Selz, Sam Francis, 79–84; and Selz’s notes, in Selz Papers, AAA. 12. Francis, letter to Kogelnik, February 19, 1962, Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York. 13. C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 9, part 1, ed. and trans. Gerhard Adler and R. F. C. Hull (1959; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), para. 271. 14. Yvonne Rainer, Feelings Are Facts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 184; Francis, letter to Zoe Dusanne, 1961, SFF. 15. On deciding where to live: Francis, letters to parents, August 1 and 24, 1961, SFF; Joan Mitchell with Kimber Smith, Shirley Jaffe, and Jean Paul Riopelle, letter to Francis, n.d. (ca. 1961), SFF; also Francis, letter to Bill Elliott, 1961, SFF. 16. On Teruko’s return to Switzerland: Yokoi, letters to Eberhard Kornfeld, December 25, 1961, January 8 and 27, 1962, and March 9, 1962, SFF. On her struggle and illness: Yokoi, letter to Francis, February 9, 1962, SFF; Eberhard Kornfeld, summary sent to Francis about Yokoi, March 6, 1962, SFF. Also letters between Francis, Kornfeld, and Silvio Barandun during winter and spring of 1962, SFF. Quotations from Francis: letters to Eberhard Kornfeld,

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February 15 and 22, 1962, SFF; and Francis, letter to Silvio Barandun, April 23, 1962, SFF. 17. On his recovery in Santa Barbara: Francis, letters to Kogelnik, February 9 and February 19, 1962, Archives of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York.

chapter 15. resurrection 1. On Sam’s reunion with Kayo: author interview with Kayo Francis Malik. 2. Author interview with Mark Whitney, April 16, 2019, Oakland, CA. 3. Pierre Schneider, “From Heaven or Near It,” in Sam Francis: A Survey of Paintings 1965–1983, exh. cat. (Beverly Hills, CA: Gagosian Gallery, 1992), 28. On Sam’s exhibition schedule: Debra Burchett-Lere and Aneta Zebala, Sam Francis: The Artist’s Materials (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2019), 63. 4. Frank Stella quoted in David Bourdon, “A New Cut in Art,” Life, January 19, 1968, 58. 5. Francis, letter to Kogelnik, February 25, 1962, Archive of the Kiki Kogelnik Foundation, New York; Roberta Smith, “Review/Art; Sam Francis, at the Height of His Powers,” New York Times, June 7, 1991. The 1991 show of these paintings at the Gagosian Gallery, New York, was curated by Peter Selz, who wrote the catalogue. 6. Schneider and Duthuit, OHP. 7. Will Barnet, quoted in Clinton Adams, “An Informed Energy: Lithography and Tamarind,” Grapheion 1 (Spring 1997), adapted for Tamarind Institute of Lithography, https://tamarind.unm.edu/informed-energy/. 8. Francis, in Einstein, “Prints of Francis,” 225. 9. On Sam’s finances and pricing: Debra Burchett-Lere, email to author, May 4, 2019. 10. On the history and sale of Around the Blues, see Natalie Adamson, “The Painting: An International Journey,” in In Focus: Around the Blues 1957, 1962–3 by Sam Francis, July 2019, https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/infocus/around-the-blues/the-painting. 11. Walasse Ting, “Blue as Smoke White as Bone,” poem sent to Francis in 1972, Sam Francis Papers, box 7, GRI. 12. In John Seed, “DEAR Big SAM,” Arts of Asia: The Asian Art & Antique Magazine, vol. 48, no. 5, September–October 2018. 13. Francis, letter to Walasse Ting, February 7, 1963, SFF. 14. Klüver and Martin, “Interview with Kiki Kogelnik.” 15. Francis, letter to Kogelnik, February 25, 1962, SFF. 16. Ed Ruscha, OHP. On the LA art scene in 1962, see also William Hackman, Out of Sight: The Los Angeles Art Scene of the Sixties (New York: Other Press, 2015); Hopps with Treisman and Doran, Dream Colony; Richard Hertz,





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The Beat and the Buzz: Inside the L.A. Art World (Ojai, CA: Minneola Press, 2009); and Morgan Neville, dir., The Cool School (Los Angeles: Tremolo Productions, 2008), 85 min. documentary film. 17. In Hackman, Out of Sight. 18. Baldessari in Neville, Cool School; Irwin in Hackman, Out of Sight. 19. In Edward Kienholz, Sam Francis, exh. cat. (Hope, ID: The Faith and Charity in Hope Gallery, 1981). 20. In Hertz, Beat and the Buzz, 188. 21. Francis’s poem published in Lembark, Prints of Francis. On design and execution of the Pasadena Box: Yoshiaki Tōno, letters to Francis, ca. 1963, Sam Francis Papers, box 8, folder 2, GRI. Duchamp’s leather case containing sixtynine miniature replicas of Duchamp’s works was on view at the Pasadena Museum during the Duchamp retrospective in 1963. Not only did Sam view this exhibition, he also owned a number of books on Duchamp.

chapter 16. i love my desires 1. All cited correspondence between Francis and Jackson in Sam Francis Papers, box 41, folder 3, GRI. 2. Lawrence Campbell, review, Art News 62 (September 1963), 11; Donald Judd, review, Arts 37 (June 1963): 55. 3. Jan Butterfield, “The Other Side of Wonder,” Art International 23, no. 8 (December 1979): 45–54. 4. On Sazō Idemitsu: Sazō Idemitsu, The Eternal Japan: Conversations with Sazō Idemitsu (self-pub., 1975); IESE Business School case No SM-1609-E on Idemitsu/Kosan Inc., reproduced at https://link.springer.com/content/pdf /bbm%3A978–1-137–47233–5%2F1.pdf; Makoto Ooka, Yoshiaki Tōno, and Mamoru Yonekura, “The World of Sam Francis: A Panel Discussion,” in Sam Francis: From the Idemitsu Collection, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Ogawa Art Foundation and Yayoi Gallery, 1987). 5. Sazō Idemitsu, Je vivais retire, loin, dans les monts Karuisawa, quand j’ai quitté ce monde en 1981: J’vai alors quatre-vingt-quinze ans: mon nom est Sazō Idemitsu (Paris: Presses artistiques, 1986), trans. from the French for SFF by Susan Powers, July 6, 2019. 6. Idemitsu quoted in Ooka, Tōno, and Yonekura, “World of Sam Francis.” 7. Francis, letter to Bill Elliott, ca. 1964, SFF. On Tokyo and 1964 Olympic Games: Robert Whiting, “Olympic Construction Transformed Tokyo,” Japan Times, October 10, 2014. 8. In Barbara Rose Papers, 1962–ca. 1969, box 3, folder 40, GRI. 9. Francis, letter to Kornfeld, October 1965, SFF.

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10. Al Leslie took over the lease. In 1966, a fire destroyed the building and claimed the lives of twelve firefighters. 11. On Mako’s life: author interview with Mako Idemitsu, January 24, 2019, Tokyo. 12. On Mako and Sam’s early relationship: correspondence between Mako and Sam Francis in Sam Francis Papers, box 12, folders 3–4, GRI; also author interview with Arata Isozaki, January 14, 2019, Kyoto (Isozaki visited Sam while Mako was in Europe in 1965). 13. Francis, letter to Kornfeld, November 2, 1965, SFF. On Sam’s divorce from Teruko: correspondence between William Elliott (Sam’s lawyer) and Francis D. Murnaghan Jr. (Teruko’s lawyer), Sam Francis Papers, box 12, folder 2, GRI. 14. Francis, letter to Kornfeld, May–June 1966, SFF; on Idemitsu’s reaction to marriage, see also Francis, letter to Bill Elliott, August 12, 1966, SFF. 15. Francis, letter to Sazō Idemitsu, Sam Francis Papers, box 12, folder 4, GRI. 16. Francis, letter to Elliott, ca. 1966, SFF.

chapter 17. the space at the center is reserved for you 1. In Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 63. 2. The description of the Channel Road compound is based on my memories of a visit there in 1970 and again in 2017, as well as on Selz, Sam Francis, 15–16; photographs of the house and studio, SFF; and my interviews with Shingo Francis, Osamu Francis, Jerry Aistrup, Dan Cytron, Krauth Brand, Nancy Mozur, Mark Whitney, and Ed Ruscha. See also Francis’s letters to Spike and Doc Groupp during construction, Sam Francis Papers, box 2, folder 4, GRI; and Bolhoven, “Sam Francis: The Artist in His Studio,” in SFCR, DVD 2. 3. On Diebenkorn: Jori Finkel, “Richard Diebenkorn and Ocean Park: A Special Light,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 2012. 4. James Turrell in Michael Govan and Christine Y. Kim, James Turrell: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; New York: Prestel, 2013), 43. On Turrell and the LA art scene, see also James Turrell, OHP; Sam Francis, letter to Betty Freeman, February 14, 1968, Betty Freeman Papers, box 43, folder 6, UC San Diego Library; and Susan C. Larsen, “A Tradition in Transition,” in Maurice Tuchman, Art in Los Angeles: Seventeen Artists in the Sixties, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2009). 5. Francis, letter to Betty Freeman, February 14, 1968, Betty Freeman Papers, box 43, UC San Diego Library. 6. Turrell, OHP. (Subsequent quotations also from this source.)





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7. In Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 24. The description of Sam’s painting process for the Edge series is based on author interviews with his assistants Aistrup, Cytron, and Brand, as well as photographs of him painting; also March 21, 1972, conversation between Francis and Peter Selz, cited in Love and Abstraction: Works from the Collection of Peter Selz (London: Christie’s, 2018), https://www.christies.com/zmags?ZmagsPublishID=0fc6b02c. 8. In Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 13. 9. Georges Duthuit, “Sam Francis, Animator of Silence,” NIMBUS 2, no. 1 (June–August 1953): 43. 10. On ma: author interview with Arata Isozaki. “Space is filled . . . ” in Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 25; “saved me” in Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 13. 11. “A monumental form” in Sweeney, Sam Francis, 21; “What appears to be unpainted” in Tōno, “Sam Francis,” 14; “a whole incomplete world” in Francis, letter to father, January 18, 1952, SFF. 12. On Sam and Mako’s relationship: author interview with Mako Idemitsu; filmed footage taken by Mako Idemitsu and incorporated into Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis; and Elaine Anderson, OHP. 13. In Blackwood, Sam Francis. 14. On Bill Elliott’s death: author interview with Wendy Elliott (daughter of Bill Elliott), April 16, 2017, Mill Valley, CA. 15. Francis, eulogy for Bill Elliott, Sam Francis Papers, box 1, folder 9, GRI. 16. The idea of life-in-death preoccupied Sam, who used the phrase several times, including in a letter to Kogelnik, March 1, 1962, and one to Kornfeld, November 2, 1965, both SFF. 17. On birth of Osamu Francis: Anderson, OHP. 18. Francis, letter to Betty Freeman, undated, Betty Freeman Papers, box 43, UC San Diego Library. 19. In Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 24. Freeman first described Sam cutting up the mural panel (“Sam Francis,” 77), and she provided financial assistance to have one of the sections restored. Later, Sam gifted her with two of the canvas remnants. 20. In Britta Gustafson, “Then Again,” Snowmass Sun–Aspen Times, August 10, 2016. 21. Opening statement, New Arts project meeting, February 16, 1967, Sam Francis Papers, box 108, folder 5, GRI. On NAS, also see Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 43–46, and Elizabeth Buhe, “New Arts Society: Failed Radicals,” Getty Research Journal 11 (2019): 81–106. 22. “Plan for the New Group,” 1966, Sam Francis Papers, box 108, folder 5, GRI. 23. Sam Francis, “Talk before the Arts Foundation Group, March 15, 1967,” Sam Francis Papers, box 50, folder 1, GRI. 24. In Freeman, “Sam Francis,” 115.

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chapter 18. the artist is his work and no longer human 1. Discussion of Francis’s working method with his assistants based on author interviews with Krauth Brand, Nancy Mozur, Dan Cytron, Jerry Aistrup, Mark Whitney, Doug Shields, and John Bennett as well as their OHP interviews. Aistrup was particularly helpful in remembering the circle of people who regularly visited the compound in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 2. Cytron, in Burchett-Lere and Zebala, Francis: Artist’s Materials, 83; Cytron, in Aneta Zebala, Tom Learner, and Rachel Rivenc, “Notes on Sam Francis’s Painting Methods and Materials in Two Grid Paintings,” SFCR, DVD 2. 3. On political art at the end of the 1960s: Peter Selz, Art of Engagement: Visual Politics in California and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 4. Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 7, 1966–1974 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), 19. 5. “Artists’ Tower to Be Dedicated Feb. 26,” Los Angeles Free Press 3, no. 7 (February 18, 1966): 1. On Peace Tower, see also Jon Wiener, “When Art and Politics Collided in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles Times, January 25, 2012, and Jeffrey Kastner, “Peace Tower: Irving Petlin, Mark di Suvero, and Rirkrit Tiravanija Revisit The Artists’ Tower of Protest, 1966,” Artforum 44, no. 7 (March 2006): 252–57. 6. On Easter Sunday Love-In: author email interview with Judy Chicago, April 28, 2019. 7. Francis, letter to Hideo Kaido, Minami Gallery, June 4, 1989, Sam Francis Papers, box 45, folder 1, GRI. 8. On LACMA program: Catherine Wagley, “Closed Circuits: A Look Back at LACMA’s First Art and Technology Initiative,” East of Borneo, March 11, 2015; Max Kozloff, “The Multimillion Dollar Art Boondoggle,” Artforum 10, no. 2 (October 1971): 72; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, A Report on the Art and Technology Program of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1967–1971 (New York: Viking Press, 1971). 9. Gene Youngblood, “Single Wing Turquoise Bird New Cosmic Consciousness,” Los Angeles Free Press, November 22, 1968, 40–41. On Sam’s involvement with Turquoise Bird: Jeffrey Perkins, OHP; David E. James, “Expanded Cinema in Los Angeles: The Single Wing Turquoise Bird,” Millennium Film Journal 43/44 (Summer/Fall 2005): 9–31; and transcript from Single Wing Turquoise Bird Panel Discussion, Alternative Projects Symposium, November 13, 2010, in SFF. 10. Nin, Diary, vol. 7, 74. 11. Paula Kirkeby, OHP. On painting of Berlin Red, see Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis.





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12. Nancy Mozur, OHP; and author interviews and emails with Mozur. Also on Litho Shop: Martin Sosin, OHP. Though the Litho Shop opened in 1970, it was not incorporated until 1974. 13. Author interview with Marcia Goodwin, March 14, 2018, Los Angeles. 14. Mako Idemitsu, White Elephant, trans. Juliet Winters Carpenter (Seattle: Chin Music Press, 2016), 106. Though it was published as a novel, Mako has admitted that the book, about a young Japanese student who marries an older American artist and has children with him in California, is highly autobiographical. In Japanese culture, a white elephant is something whose maintenance is out of proportion to its usefulness. 15. Nin, Diary, vol. 7, 51. 16. See Saito Ayako, “Visual Artist: Idemitsu Mako,” in Idemitsu Mako Exhibition: I Create—I Create Myself, exh. cat. (Kobe, Japan: Kobe Art Village Center, 2000), 38.

chapter 19. my consciousness is an image 1. C. G. Jung, “Psychology and Religion” (1938), in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 11 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 131. On Sam’s tales of the Shadow Man and his sons’ memories: author interview with Osamu Francis, January 27, 2019, Fukuoka, Japan; also author interview with Shingo Francis, September 9, 2016, Pasadena, CA. 2. On James and Hilde Kirsch: Thomas B. Kirsch, A Jungian Life (Carmel, CA: Fisher King Press, 2014); also Thomas Kirsch, OHP; author interview with Thomas Kirsch, March 2, 2017, Palo Alto, CA; author interview with Ann McCoy, May 4, 2017, Brooklyn, NY; and author phone interview with Meibao Nee, December 5, 2019. 3. In Blackwood, Sam Francis. 4. In Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 5. In Ayako, “Visual Artist: Idemitsu Mako,” 38. 6. On Womanhouse: Gail Levin, Becoming Judy: A Biography of the Artist (New York: Crown, 2007). 7. Correspondence between Sam and Mako during this period of domestic unease in Sam Francis Papers, box 12, folder 3, GRI. 8. Robert Hughes, “Back from the Rim,” Time, November 13, 1972, 84; Paul Richards, “A New Look at Sam Francis,” Washington Post, November 4, 1972; Hilton Kramer, “Sam Francis: Focus of Whitney Display,” New York Times, December 16, 1972; Hilton Kramer, “Francis: ‘The Mallarmé of Painters’?,” New York Times, December 24, 1972; Robert T. Buck, “A ‘Bias’ against Francis?,” New York Times, January 14, 1973. See also Carl Belz, “Fitting Sam Francis into History,” Art in America 61, no. 1 (January–February 1973): 40–45.

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notes on sources

9. George Page, OHP. 10. Donald Kuspit, “Sam Francis’s Changing Face,” in Michael Zakian and Sam Francis, Sam Francis: Elements and Archetypes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 208. 11. Francis, in Selz, Sam Francis, 122, 101; Francis in “Clouds of Beauty: A Quadrant Interview with Sam Francis,” Quadrant: Journal of the C. G. Jung Foundation 23, no. 1 (1990): 15.

chapter 20. art is the heart of the matter 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all accounts of Sam’s relationship with his sons Osamu and Shingo Francis based on the author’s interviews with them and their OHP interviews. 2. Shingo Francis, “Beginning from End,” in Sam Francis: Tokyo Mural, exh. cat. (Tokyo: Sogetsu Art Museum, 1996), 10–11. 3. Here and elsewhere, all accounts of Sam’s relationship with Nee are based on author’s phone interview with Meibao Nee, December 5, 2019; as well as Meibao Nee, OHP. 4. Author interview with Kayo Francis Malik; see also her OHP interview. 5. On the varied treatments: author interviews with Ed Moses, September 18, 2016, Venice, CA; Tom Nagaser, November 28, 2018, Los Angeles, CA; Chakrapani, January 12, 2017, Los Angeles, CA; Stefan Kirkeby, February 17, 2017, San Anselmo, CA; Peter Kirkeby, July 3, 2018, San Francisco, CA. 6. In Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 7. Agee, “Sam Francis,” 104. 8. See Selz, notes on Sam Francis, Selz Papers, AAA. 9. In Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 24. 10. Author interview with Mark Whitney. Subsequent quotations also from this interview. 11. In “Clouds of Beauty,” 16. 12. On Wind Harvest: Bob and Roslyn Thomas and George and Susan Wagner, OHP interviews; also George Wagner, email to Debra Burchett-Lere, July 29, 2014, Sam Francis Papers, box 117, folder 1, GRI. My father, Peter Selz, was an early investor in Wind Harvest. Regrettably, we have yet to see any profit from that investment, but we cherish our small contribution. 13. Albers, Joan Mitchell, 351.

chapter 21. a new era for los angeles 1. Hultén, in Calvin Tomkins, “The Art World: A Camel in the Tent,” New Yorker, March 2, 1981, 98. The following account of the formation of MOCA draws on Tomkins and author interviews with Robert Irwin, December 2, 2019,





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San Diego, CA; Arata Isozaki; and Marcia Goodwin. Also: material in Sam Francis Papers, box 23, GRI; John Dreyfuss, “Artists Given a Say in Art Museum Design,” Los Angeles Times, January 12, 1981; Tia Gindick, “Gala by Starlight,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1981; Manuela Hoelterhoff, “MOCA’S New Digs on Bunker Hill,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 1986; and Jo-Anne Berelowitz, “The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles: An Account of Collaboration between Artists, Trustees and an Architect,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology across England and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 267–84. 2. Weisman quoted in Tomkins, “Art World,” 89. 3. In 1974, for the Museum of Modern Art, Gunma, Isozaki used reflective marble and a recurring cubic framework to denote open, evolving, yet repetitive space. In 2018, he designed the extremely narrow, 202-foot-tall Allianz Tower in Milan, based on Constantin Brancusi’s 1934 sculpture Endless Column. 4. Barbara Isenberg, “A Museum at Home Away from Home,” calendar, Los Angeles Times, September 25, 1983; Tomkins, “Art World.” 5. Wilson, quoted in Carolina A. Miranda, “Now That Arata Isozaki Won the Pritzker, Let’s Take a Fresh Look at MOCA Building,” arts section, Los Angeles Times, March 14, 2019; Broad quoted in Joseph Giovannini, “A New Museum Has an Instant Impact,” New York Times, November 27, 1983. 6. “I decided then . . .” in Michaud, Entretiens, 2; talking to Michaud, Sam described Carl Jung’s concept of synchronicity as “an a-causal principal because anyone who is at all sensitive to what’s going on has synchronistical experiences, but if he ignores them he is in a little bit of danger” (8–9). “It’s like when you go to buy . . .” in Suzanne Muchnic, “It’s Never Too Much: Abstract Expressionist Sam Francis Devotes Everything to His Art, His Medical Foundation and His Publishing House,” arts section, Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1991, 2. On Lapis Press, in addition to these two sources, see Robert Shapazian, OHP, and archives of Lapis Press, Sam Francis Papers, boxes 65–105, GRI. 7. Sam Francis, “Nature Aphoristic,” in A Testament to the Wilderness: Ten Essays on an Address by C. A. Meier (Santa Monica, CA: Lapis Press, 1985), 138; William Blake, Proverbs of Hell, in Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793; Oxford: Benediction Classics, 2010), 4.

chapter 22. my virtue is to be myself 1. On Crossroads: Frank Digiacomo, “School for Cool,” Vanity Fair, June 8, 2009, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2005/03/crossroads-school200503. 2. On Liga Pang: author interview with Liga Pang, January 13, 2017, Los Angeles, and Pang, OHP. Also, on this period: author interview with Luchita Hurtado, February 24, 2017, Santa Monica, CA.

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3. Author interview with Jerry Sohn, January 19, 2017, Los Angeles, and Sohn, OHP. 4. Garner Tullis, “The Way to Perfection,” in The Monotypes of Sam Francis (Stuttgart: Daco-Verlag, 1996), 17. See also texts by Pontus Hultén and Karl Gunnar Vought in Monotypes of Sam Francis. 5. In Jan Butterfield, “Time Has an Infinite Number of Faces,” in Sam Francis, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980), 12. 6. On the art market boom: Paul Ardenne and Michel Vale, “The Art Market in the 1980s,” International Journal of Political Economy 25, no. 2 (1995): 100– 28; Christophe Spaenjers, William N. Goetzmann, and Elena Mamonova, “A History of the Art Market in 35 Record-Breaking Sales,” 2016, Yale School of Management, https://som.yale.edu/news/2016/06/history-art-market-in-35record-breaking-sales; Michael Shnayerson, Boom: Mad Money, Mega Dealers, and the Rise of Contemporary Art (New York: Public Affairs, 2019); and Michael Findlay, The Value of Art: Money, Power, Beauty (New York: Prestel, 2012). 7. On Sam’s prices: Debra Burchett-Lere, emails to author, May 4 and August 22, 2019. 8. Agee, “Sam Francis,” 113. 9. Perkins, OHP—although Perkins disagreed with Agee’s assessment that the work of this period was uneven. 10. In Michaud, Entretiens, 62. 11. In Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 12. Francesca Pollock, in Margaret Francis: Natural Light, exh. cat. (SaintLouis, France: Fondation Fernet-Branca, 2013), 17. Also on Margaret Francis: author interview with Margaret Francis, September 27, 2017, Manchester, England; Margaret Francis, OHP; and Vivienne Kenrick, “Personality Profile,” Japan Times, July 6, 1985. 13. In Kenrick, “Personality Profile.” 14. On the two proposals: author interview with Margaret Francis; author interview with Lora Sharnoff, January 7, 2019, Tokyo.

chapter 23. don’ t be sorry for nothing 1. In Michaud, Entretiens, 49. Also on Sam’s painting after the birth of Augustus: Agee, “Sam Francis,” 115–27; André Emmerich, OHP; author interview with Kornfeld; author interview with Nico Delaive, August 25, 2017, Amsterdam; Delaive, OHP. 2. Hopps, in Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis. 3. The following account of the expansion of Sam’s lifestyle and multiple home purchases draws on author interviews with his assistants and with Stefan Kirkeby (February 17, 2017), Peter Kirkeby (July 3, 2018), and Fred Nicholas (February 13,





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2017, Los Angeles) as well as Sam Francis’s estate records, SFF, and miscellaneous papers belonging to Margaret Francis in Sam Francis Papers, box 58, folder 5, GRI. 4. On Sam’s health: author interview with Tom Nagaser and Nagaser, OHP; also correspondence between Sam Francis and Dr. Silvio Barandun, SFF. 5. Kevin Allman, “Profitable ‘Evening with Sam Francis’ Aids Medical Research Foundation,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1989. 6. On Jacobs: correspondence between Sam Francis and Robert Jacobs; Jacobs’s project proposal of May 10, 1986; article by Leslie Kenton, “What the Microscope Can Reveal,” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10, no. 1 (January 1992)—all in Sam Francis Papers, box 52, GRI. 7. On backdating paintings: Ferdinand Protzman, “Steering by the Torch of Chaos and Doubt,” Art News 101, no. 11 (December 2002): 110. On Malevich: Sam Unietis, “The End of Painting? Kazimir Malevich’s Return to Figurative Painting” (thesis, University of Florida, 2017), https://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00057993/00001. Numerous studio assistants acknowledged that they suspected Sam’s backdating, but none would go on record. When it was established, one of the first jobs of the Sam Francis Foundation was to address the backdating of canvases from the mid-1980s.

chapter 24. death is a curve in harmony with life 1. On Sam’s prostate cancer: Sam Francis’s medical records, SFF, which include correspondence between Dr. Silvio Barandun and Francis, Robert Shapazian, and Dr. Kenneth M. Tokita. Indeed, Barandun felt himself to be the medical chronicler of Sam Francis and that these records would be crucial art historical documents. Additional information on this period from author interviews with Tom Nagaser, Shingo Francis, Doug Shields, Krauth Brand, Nancy Mozur, and Laura Reichek, June 13, 2017, Petaluma, CA, as well as Bruce Conner, OHP. 2. Conner, OHP. 3. In Hultén, transcript of conversation, 6–7. 4. On Sam’s brief remission and new mural commission: author interview with Debra Burchett-Lere, April 3, 2019, Berkeley, CA. Because Sam was unable to complete the commission, an alternative work was selected by the German committee; Sam Francis Papers, box 16, folder 1, GRI. 5. Author interview with Delavie. 6. In 1906, the redwood and Douglas fir forests had been cut down all along the coast of Northern California to rebuild San Francisco after the great quake and fire. Without getting permission, Sam airlifted and planted trees on his Marshall property. Additionally, he acquired 1,800 acres in Hawaii, intending to reforest the area. The land in Hawaii is now part of Haleakalā National Park.

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7. On the treatment in Mexico: author interviews with Shingo Francis and Krauth Brand, March 14, 2017, Point Reyes, CA. Margaret Francis did not want to talk about it, although she did confirm that Sam received treatments from Chachoua. Chachoua is a controversial figure. He was on The Dr. Oz Show and in the news in 2016 after claiming to have cured Charlie Sheen’s HIV. 8. Burchett-Lere, “Biographical Timeline,” 277; comment to Shingo in Kristine McKenna, “The Lion’s Last Roar,” arts section, Los Angeles Times, May 28, 1995; author interview with Stefan Kirkeby. 9. Goodwin, OHP. 10. Author interview with Doug Shields, March 23, 2019, Point Reyes Station, CA.

epilogue 1. Author interview with Shingo Francis. 2. Author interview with Jacob Samuel, September 16, 2016, Los Angeles. On viewing: author interviews with Sam Francis’s assistants, his children, and Margaret Francis, as well as Ed Moses, September 18, 2016, Los Angeles. 3. In McKenna, “Lion’s Last Roar.” 4. Francis, in Butterfield, “Interview with Francis,” 23; Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. Ian C. Johnston (1872; Blackmast Online, 2003), www.russoeconomics.altervista.org/Nietzsche .pdf, 57. 5. George Francis, eulogy, November 11, 1994, Sam Francis Papers, box 13, folder 2, GRI. 6. Author interview with Shingo Francis. On the chaotic state of affairs after Sam’s death, see Protzman, “Steering by the Torch of Chaos,” 107–11. On Sam’s will and the estate settlement: author interview with Fred Nicholas. Nicholas provided a copy of the settlement agreement, listing all the properties and value of the estate; Sam’s will, codicil, and revocation at SFF. The lawsuits and countersuits are available to the public through the Superior Court of California, County of Los Angeles. 7. Walter Hopps, OHP. 8. Dave Hickey, “Enter the Dragon: On the Vernacular of Beauty,” in The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art Issues Press, 1993), 151, Kindle. 9. Selz, Sam Francis, 128; Hultén, transcript of conversation, 8. 10. Adamson, in The Painting: An International Itinerary, n.p. 11. Guilbaut, How New York Stole Idea, 6. 12. In Butterfield, “Other Side of Wonder,” 46.

Illustration Credits

All Sam Francis artworks and archival photographs of the artist are © 2021 Sam Francis Foundation, California/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, unless otherwise noted.

photographs 1.

Sam Francis painting the Basel Mural in Arcueil studio, Paris, 1958. Photo by Georges Boisgontier.

2.

Sam Francis (center) with brother, George, and cousins Kathy and Julia Hendrikson in Newfoundland, Canada, summer 1936. Photographer unknown.

13

3.

Sam Francis with Vera Miller, San Mateo, California, ca. 1941. Photographer unknown.

28

4.

Sam Francis in the Bradford frame hoisted above his bed at Fort Miley Veterans Hospital, San Francisco, April 16, 1946. The San Francisco News-Call Bulletin newspaper photograph archive, BANC PIC 1959.010-NEG Pt. 2, Box 0082:66725, 4:1. © The Regents of the University of California, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

44

7

335

336

illustration credits

5.

Sam Francis and Muriel Goodwin in rue Tiphaine studio, Paris, 1955. Photo by Dean Spille.

111

6.

Artists in the 1958–59 exhibition The New American Painting, as photographed by Irving Penn for Vogue, October 15, 1959. Front row, from left: Jack Tworkov, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis. Middle row, from left: Theodoros Stamos, James Brooks, Franz Kline. Back row, from left: Philip Guston, William Baziotes. Photo by Irving Penn, Vogue © Condé Nast.

123

7.

Sam Francis working on the Tokyo Mural in temporary Tokyo studio, fall 1957. Photo by François René-Roland, Paris.

129

8.

Sam Francis and Teruko Yokoi, wedding day, Baltimore, Maryland, 1959. Photographer unknown.

139

9.

Sam Francis and Kayo Francis Malik, Paris, 1960. Photo by Charles Gimpel; courtesy of René Gimpel, London.

152

10. Sam Francis and Ida Chagall at the Venice Biennale, 1960. © Maria Netter, SIK-ISEA, courtesy of Fotostiftung Schweiz.

156

11. Sam Francis blowing bubbles while at Tiefenauspital, Bern, summer 1961. Photo by Eberhard Kornfeld.

167

12. Eberhard Kornfeld and Sam Francis at Galerie Kornfeld preparing for Sam’s solo exhibition, Bern, August 1966. Photograph © Kurt Blum / Fotostiftung Schweiz, Winterthur.

176

13. Osamu (standing) and Shingo Francis with their mother, Mako Idemitsu, in front of the Edge painting Untitled (1966–67) in Tokyo, ca. 1970. Photographer unknown.

207

14. Sam Francis with Judy Chicago at Easter happening, Brookside Park, Pasadena, California, 1969. Photographer unknown.

220

15. Sam Francis painting Berlin Red in Ashland Avenue studio, Santa Monica, California, 1970. Film still from Jeffrey Perkins, The Painter Sam Francis (Body and Soul Productions, 2008). [Film] music by Charles Curtis; edited by Marc Vives. 85 minutes.

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16. Mako Idemitsu, still from Inner Man, 1972. © Mako Idemitsu.

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17. Sam Francis, Mako Idemitsu, and their two sons, Osamu (standing) and Shingo Francis, Tokyo studio, ca. 1970. Photographer unknown.

236

18. Sam Francis holding self-portrait in Tokyo studio, 1974. Photographer unknown.

237

19. Sam Francis painting Dynamic Symmetry in Ashland Avenue studio, Santa Monica, California, 1978. Photo © Meibao D. Nee.

245





illustration credits

337

20. Sam Francis and Pontus Hultén, Venice studio, California, 1989. Photo by Jerry Sohn.

257

21. Sam Francis and Margaret Smith, Shinto marriage ceremony, Tokyo, 1985. Photographer unknown.

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22. Sam and Augustus Francis in Santa Monica, California, 1993. Photo by Brian Forrest.

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color plates following page 180 1.

Sam Francis, For Fred, dated as 1949, oil on canvas, 149.86 × 101.6 cm (59 × 40 in.). Private collection, New York. Photo courtesy of Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Japan.

2.

Sam Francis, Upper Air, dated as 1951, oil on canvas, 145.42 × 116.84 cm (57 ¼ × 46 in.) Private collection, New York. Photo by Jordan Tinker, New York.

3.

Sam Francis, Deep Orange and Black, dated as 1954–55, oil on canvas, 370.99 × 311.99 cm (146 ¹ /₁₆ × 122 ¹³ /₁₆ in.). Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel, Switzerland. Photo courtesy of Kunstmuseum Basel.

4.

Sam Francis, Big Orange, undated, 1954, oil on canvas, 300.99 × 193.04 cm (118 ½ × 76 in.). The Eli and Edythe L. Broad Collection (B-FRAN-2P03.05). Photo by Brian Forrest.

5.

Sam Francis, In Lovely Blueness (No. 1), undated, 1955–57, oil on canvas, 302.26 × 701.04 cm (119 × 276 in.). Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne-Centre de création industrielle, Paris (AM 1977–207). © CNAC/MNAM/Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

6.

Sam Francis, Moby Dick, undated, 1957–58, oil on canvas, 236.22 × 372.75 cm (93 × 146 ¾ in.). The Museum of Modern Art, New York; fractional and promised gift of Celeste and Armand P. Bartos, 1984 (497.1984). Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

7.

Sam Francis, Blue Balls, dated as 1961, oil on canvas, 183.01 × 151.99 cm (72 ¹ /₁₆ × 59 ¹³ /₁₆ in.). Collection E. W. K., Bern/Bollingen, Switzerland. Image courtesy of E. W. K., Bern/Bollingen, Switzerland.

8.

Sam Francis, Sky Painting, performance piece over Tokyo Bay, sponsored by the newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun, 1966. Photo by Toshio Yoshida; courtesy of Yomiuri Shimbun, Tokyo. Image courtesy of Getty Research Institute, Sam Francis Papers, 2004.M.8.

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9.

illustration credits

A man walks in front of the giant painting Berlin Red (1969–70) by artist Sam Francis during a press preview of the exhibition Pacific Standard Time in Berlin, March 14, 2012. AP Images / Markus Schreiber.

10. Sam Francis, Untitled, dated as 1980, acrylic on canvas, 61.6 × 45.72 cm (24 ¼ × 18 in.). Private collection. Photo courtesy Hollis Taggart Galleries, New York. 11. View of The Last Works in progress in Sam Francis’s West Channel Road studio, Santa Monica, 1994. Photo by Brian Forrest.

Index

Sam Francis is referred to as SF in this index. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Able Day Eclipse (1946), 49 abstract art: Art Informel and embrace of, 88, 89; fading commitment to, and evolution of participatory art in 1960s, 153; as universal language, 89 Abstract Expressionism: and American nationalism, 89–90, 101; Art Informel as broader than, 88; decline of, 144, 177; disdain for the graphic medium, 179; duration of SF in contrast to the alienated individual of, 96; French critics’ animosity toward American artists, 90; internationalization of by SF, 87–88, 106, 147; The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition) as institutionalizing, 143–44; Parisian avant-garde and awareness of, 79; SF as bridging the 1960s diversification of styles with, 178; SF as embodying romantic ideals of, 2; Peter Voulkos’s ceramics, 218. See also New York School Adamson, Natalie, 300 After Death (1974), 238 Agee, William: on Bergson, 96; on For Fred, 60; on influences, 51, 105; on the matrix paintings, 244–45; on unevenness of SF’s work in the 1980s, 265, 332n9

Ahab (1958), 133 AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (Niki de Saint Phalle), 259, 288 AIDS, nonconventional treatment claims for, 279, 290, 334n7 Aistrup, Jerry, 216, 218–19, 225 Aix-en-Provence, 94–95, 96 Alabama divorce from Muriel, 138 Albers, Patricia, 249 Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo, New York), 117; Sam Francis Paintings: 1946–1972 (1972), 234–35 Algeria: French atomic bomb test in (Berboise Bleue), 151, 158; war for independence from France, 151, 153, 168–69 allover compositions, 83–84, 87, 103, 122 Alloway, Lawrence, 125 alternative medicine. See holistic practitioners and practices; Sam Francis Medical Research Center ambition of SF: the artist as Übermensch, 227, 250; and desire, 187; in Fort Miley Veterans hospital, 49; as heroic, 2; and money, 79; and mythologized story of a plane crash that caused his TB, 85–86; and Paris, 78–79; as reaching far beyond

339

340

index

ambition of SF (continued) painting, 3; seeking recognition for the works of others, 79 American-Type Painting, 90 Anderson, Elaine, 206, 209, 219 Anfam, David, 145 aphorisms: overview, 84–85, 304; as a literary form, 85; of William Blake, as influence, 84, 259; dates not possible to ascertain, 304; as italicized in the text, 1n; “Nature Aphoristic” (essay), 259–60; as visual, 85 —listing of: An increase in light gives an increase in darkness, 208; The Artist is his work and no longer human, 215; Artists are great liars, 262; Artists are thieves of their experience, 84; (blue as) his mother liquid, matrix, 158; Color is light on fire, 9; Death is a Curve in Harmony with Life, 283; Go as far as you can as fast as you can, 113; I am a natural liar for I am an artist + naturally, 84–85; I am a Seismograph, 150; I am steering by the torch of chaos and doubt, 271; I am your change-bearer, I am your instrument of expansion, 173; I love my desires, 187; I Paint Time, 87; My Consciousness is an Image, 228; My Virtue is to be Myself, 261; Not Knowing the not known, 85; Paris was the psychic Mother of Me, 65; Perfection means the most possible relationships (an infinity of relationships) made all at once without regard to order. Order is always invisible, 260; She bites as she kisses, 84; The Space at the Center is reserved for you, 200; Space needs duration. Duration needs space, 96; Telling a lie is telling a truth about yourself, 85; To consciously live in chaos is to live within perfection, 260; What’s the Matter, 85 Appel, Karel, 220, 275; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181 Arendt, Hannah, “Reflections on Violence,” 154 Arnold, General Henry H., 37–38 Around the Blues (1957–62), 125 Art and Technology program (1967), 221–22 Un Art Autre as term for Art Informel, 90, 314n4. See also Art Informel Art brut, 90–91 art collection of SF: artists SF collected, 201; artists SF traded with, 201; displayed at

West Channel Road compound, 201; Kornfeld as advising on, 168; SF’s artwork donated to MOCA, 256; SF’s own artwork, 297; size of, 297. See also estate of SF; Sam Francis Foundation Art Informel: Un Art Autre as alternate term for, 90, 314n4; as broader than Abstract Expressionism, 88; and the characteristics of abstraction, improvisation, and gestural approaches, 88; as cultural rebuttal to the Cold War and nationalist movements, 89–90, 96; international group show (Studio Paul Facchetti, 1952), 89, 91; in Japan, 119, 127, 148, 314n4; and the primary position of the artist, 88; Michel Tapié as founder and promoter of, 88–89; ultimate formlessness of, 90. See also Tapié, Michel artists: Art Informel and the primary position of, 88; dedication to art as more important than style, 181; international, in the global art market, 3; Jungian view of, as “higher man,” 165–66; marriages between, generally, 141–43, 320n3; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and focus on, 252–53, 256; respect for endeavors of, as European émigré idea, 68; schools of art as arbitrary, 90–91; and self-determination, 74; as sounding the bottom of the sea, 319n7; statement by SF on the characteristics of, 130; subversive acts of, as lauded in New York, 101–2, 122; superstars, 3, 108–9; as Übermensch, 227, 250. See also European émigré artists; GI Bill of Rights; hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist; veterans Artists’ Protest Committee, 219–220 ArtNews, 90, 110, 112, 147, 188 Art of the World Today (1956 exhibition), 127 Arts Magazine, 112 art superstars, 3, 108–9 Ashland Avenue studio (Santa Monica), 224 assistants: Jerry Aistrup, 216, 218–19, 225; autonomy granted to, 217, 218; backdating canvases suspected by, 333n7; John Bennett, 216; canvas loom located for giant canvases (Jerry Sohn), 263; capricious and manipulative treatment by SF, 216; as “charmed Channel Road circle,” 216; choosing, 215–16, 262; Dan Cytron, 215, 216, 217–18, 258; furniture design





and crafting by (Jerry Airstrup), 218; generosity of SF with, 216; guesthouse at West Channel Road shared by, 215, 218; and The Last Works, 294, 295–96; length of time working for SF, 216; paint making (Dan Cytron), 217–18; patriarchal management by SF, 217; relocating to Point Reyes, 280; reorganizing SF’s studio (Jerry Sohn), 265; secretaries, 216; Doug Shields, 280, 284, 285, 289, 293; as strong, young, and male, 216; tasks required of, 217–18, 258; trial period in the garden for, 215; and “unavailability” of SF when overwhelmed, 225; and visitors and studio tours, 218–19, 258. See also Brand, Krauth; Sohn, Jerry Atelier 17, 93 Atelier Fernand Léger, 70 atomic bomb: Able Day Eclipse titled after Bikini Atoll tests of, 49; Hannah Arendt on the ethos of the new generation in light of, 154; and end of WWII, 46; Gutai group in response to (Japan), 128, 148; proliferation of, 151; Teruko and, 151; and transformation of SF to vocal opponent of war, 46; and the U.S. as superpower, 89; vision of SF as uncanny reference to, 47 Atsuo, Imaizumi, 317n8 Augustus Image and Word (1987), 274 backdating works, 281, 333n7 Bacon, Francis, 109 Baldessari, John, 184 Baltimore Museum of Art, 132 Barandun, Dr. Silvio: on board of directors for Sam Francis Medical Research Center, 279; in entourage escorting SF to Santa Barbara, 169; as medical advisor for Lapis Press’s AIDS book, 259, 288; as medical chronicler of SF, 333n1; recommending conventional, supervised care for SF’s cancer treatment, 284, 285, 286– 87, 291; SF requests medical help for Teruko, 170; and tuberculosis relapse (Bern), 161, 162, 163, 164 Barnes, Edward Larrabee, 253 Barnes, Joe, 132, 315n20 Barr, Alfred, 104, 106 Basel Mural triptych: overview, 1; accident toppling off the wall, 2, 134, 137; Basel I, 118, 299; Basel II, 211, 299; Basel III fragments, 211, 299, 327, 327n19; and

index

341

breaking free from his European sojourn, 118; commission for, 117; completion of, 132, 133; critical reception of, 133, 134; damage to panels and destruction of Basel III, 211, 299, 327n19; and the desire to lift the veil between heaven and earth, 132–33, 299; flight as subject of, 118; Kunsthalle Basel as setting for, 117; Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam compared to Basel I, 118; premier in The New American Painting (1958–59), 132–33, 134; suspension of work on, 119–20; Giambattista Tiepolo’s ceilings compared to, 118; words of SF about, 1, 2, 117, 118, 299; working method and, 2, 7, 133–34 Basquiat, Jean-Michel, 264 Beaudet, Maurice, 181 beauty: as a curtain of fire in front of truth, 22; as a force in SF’s work, 300; as always in movement, 22, 300; of chaos, 286; lack of attention to SF and American Puritan tradition of discomfort with, 300; as source of ecstasy and tranquility, 219 Beauvoir, Simone de, 68, 73, 74 Beckett, Samuel, 73, 84; Waiting for Godot, 73 Being and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art (Robert Irwin), 259 Bell, Larry, 184, 213 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 155 Bengston, Billy Al, 291 Bennett, John (Paris assistant), 216 Bergson, Henri, 95–96, 319n7 Berkeley Art Museum, 210 Berkeley home (former residence of David Park), 276 Berlin Red (1969–70), 215, 223, Color Plate 9; commission for, 223; as the largest single canvas in the world, 44, 215, 224; as political statement, 223–24; working method, 223, 224, 237 Berlin Wall, 153 Berman, Dr. Edgar: background of, 137–38; and hernia operation, 137–38; pressuring Sam to divorce Muriel and marry Teruko, 138 Berman, Wallace, 184 Bierce, Ambrose, 48 Big Orange (1954–55), 109, Color Plate 4 Big Red (1953), 147–48 Blackfeet people, 17, 21 Black in Red (1953), 109

342

index

Blackwood, Michael, Sam Francis (1975 documentary film), 304 Blake, William: as influence, 84, 242; Proverbs of Hell, 84, 259; SF as misquoting, 259–60, 323n10; SF as quoting, 216 Bloomsbury group, 84 Blue Balls (1961), 158, 164, Color Plate 7 Blue Balls (1961 Minami Gallery exhibition), 164 Blue Balls series (1960–63), 157–58, 163– 64, 166, 178–79, 192, 324n5, Color Plate 7 Blue Black (1952), 117 blue color: blue as his mother liquid, matrix, 158; darkness of, 158; and the death of SF’s mother, 19; and In Lovely Blueness (1955–57), 99, 106, 158; of Ravenna (Italy), 96–97, 99; as representation of the artist, 130; and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, 106 Blue Cross (1960), 157 Blue d’Arcueil (1960), 157 Blue Figure (1960), 157 Blue in Motion (1960), 157 Blue Out of White (1958), 133 Bluhm, Norman, 70, 85, 124, 147; Bleeding Rain (1956), 147–48; fractious relationship with, 147–48 Blum, Irving, 185. See also Ferus Gallery Boardman, Elaine, 82 Boardman, Seymour “Sy,” 81–82, 85 Boas, Nancy, 50, 309n12 Bollinger, Hans, 169 Bonnard, Pierre: French comparisons of SF to, 87; as influence, 72; Large Yellow Nude (1931), 95 Bradbury, Ray, 213 Bradley, Tom, 252, 255 Brancusi, Constantin, 73, 154; Endless Column, 331n3 Brand, Krauth (assistant/nanny): attempting to intervene to allow conventional treatment for SF’s cancer, 290–91; as driver, 277; as facilitating SF’s wishes to complete the real estate renovations, 289; as nanny to the boys, 241, 262, 280; relocating to Point Reyes with wife Theresa, 280 Braque, Georges, 73 Broad, Eli: and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)252, 254– 55; opening the Broad museum, 256–57 Brown, Jerry, 248 Buck, Robert T., Jr., 75, 234, 235

Buhe, Elizabeth, 300 Burchett-Lere, Debra: on Chase Mural commission, 320n8; proposal of SF biography to author, 5–6; and reexamination of SF’s oeuvre, 300 Burns, Ken, 246 Burrows, Carlyle, 112 Butterfield, Jan: conversations with SF, 82, 245, 263–264, 296, 301; as executive director of Lapis Press, 259; relationship with SF, 268, 269; on SF’s need for travel, 189 Café de Flore, 73, 80 Calder, Alexander, 144, 309n8 California: as destination after the urogenital tuberculosis, 168–69; holistic healers and health resorts, 243–44; Muriel stuck in, 99–100, 101, 104, 107, 109, 140; postwar transformation of, 47–48. See also Los Angeles; Point Reyes properties; real estate buying spree; Santa Monica California Grey Coast (1947), 55–56, 60, 72 California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute): influence of, SF drifting between UC Berkeley and, 62; David Park as teacher at, 50, 52; and returning WWII vets, 48; Rothko as teacher at, 58, 59–60; Still as teacher at, 58, 59–60, 62 Campbell, Lawrence, 188 Camus, Albert, 74 Canaday, John, 144 Cap d’Antibes, 168 Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art (Pittsburgh, PA), Fresh Air School: Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and Walasse Ting (1972–73), 234 cars, 207–8, 216, 297 cartographic imagery, 125 Cedar Tavern (Greenwich Village), 102–3, 147 Centre Pompidou: Marcel Duchamp retrospective (1977), 249; founding of, 249; matrix painting exhibition (1978), 248– 49; Paris: New York (1977), 249 ceramics: collection of Japanese, 201; SF producing, 201; of Peter Voulkos, 218 Chachoua, Sam, 290, 291, 334n7 Chagall, Ida, 109, 156, 163 Chagall, Marc: as European émigré, 68; painting by, hung by daughter in SF’s hospital room, 163 Chakrapani, 243





Chandler, Raymond, The Big Sleep, 181 chaos: desire to retreat from, 266; as embraced by SF, 6, 141, 154–55, 189, 242, 260; of estate of SF, 297; as perfection, 286; as propelling SF into painting retreat, 244, 246; SF as fostering divisions to maintain control, 189, 216, 275; SF belief in illness as necessary chaos, 286 Chaplin, Charlie, 181, 201 Chase Manhattan Bank Mural (1959), 134, 144–45, 146, 320n8 Chelsea Hotel live-work space, 135–36, 141, 143, 146 Chicago, Judy, 219, 220, 220, 232–33; Feminist Art Program (Cal Arts), 231–32; Red Flag (1971), 233; Womanhouse, 232, 233 childhood: art classes and, 29; birth, 15; birth of brother George, 15; building forts, 15; camping and fishing, 16–17, 21, 99, 280; and color, sensitivity to, 16, 22; the Depression and, 17; Hermosa Beach/ Santa Monica/Venice visit, 17–18; and love of nature, 16–17; and museums “as tombs,” 16; physical appearance, 12, 13, 15; piano lessons with Nanny (maternal grandmother), 16, 25; pretending to be a Blackfoot, 17; and school as “suspension from life,” 16; and school, excelling in, 24, 26; and school routine as providing stability, 19; as setting fire to George’s carriage in sibling rivalry, 15; singing in the family, 17. See also Francis, Katharine (mother)— death of; Powers, Roy—death of —adolescence: engagement with nature, 28; music and poetry and, 29; Ouspensky, influence of, 29–31, 76, 307n4; physical appearance, 27, 28; reading material, 29–31; and Vera, pursuit of, 23–24, 26–29, 28; writing career considered, 29. See also Miller, Vera Mae; University of California, Berkeley; World War II children of SF. See Francis, Augustus James Joseph (son); Francis, Osamu William (son); Francis, Shingo Jules (son); Malik, Kayo Andrea (née Francis) (daughter) Chinese characters, SF and study of, 42, 119 Choay, Françoise, 134 Christo, 221–22 cinema verité, 153 Close, Chuck, Big Self-Portrait (1967–68), 238 Club Saint-Germain, 82

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Cocteau, Jean, 82 Cold War, 89, 101, 153. See also atomic bomb; nationalist movements Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 209 collision, 76 commodity, art as, 144–45, 320n8 Communism, anticommunist era, 90, 183 Conceptual art, the grid and, 245, 247 Conner, Bruce, 201, 231, 285 contemporary art market: art as commodity, rise of, 144; the multiplicity of styles in, 264; 1980s boom in, 264; and quality of SF’s work, 265, 332n9 Cooder, Ry, 219 Cool School, 184, 232, 252 Corbett, Edward: and art education of SF, 58, 59, 60, 76; in San Francisco Museum of Art 1946 group show, 49–50 Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Sam Francis Paintings: 1946–1972 (1972), 234–35 corporate art commissions and purchases, 144–45, 320n8 critical reception: accolades for 1972 retrospective, 234; of Basel Mural (1958), 133, 134; and despair/elation of SF, 91; dismissal of 1963 Martha Jackson exhibition, 188; dismissal of 1972 retrospective, 234–35; dismissal of first New York exhibition (1956), 112, 117; fickleness of, 144; first solo show (Paris 1952), 87; French animosity toward American painters, 90; and messianic feelings of SF, 92; of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), 256; of The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition), 143–44; noting the East Coast bias against SF, 234, 235; recent analyses and reexaminations, 300; White paintings, 75, 76, 87 Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, 261, 289 Cubism: as influence, 51; prewar Paris and birth of, 67 Cytron, Dan, 215, 216, 217–18, 258 Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (Dallas, Texas), Sam Francis Paintings: 1946–1972 (1973), 234–35 Dausset, Nina, 88. See also Galerie Nina Dausset d’Avino, Carmen, 312n4

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Davis, Miles, 82 death: of Bill Elliott, 208–9, 211, 297; of Ed Janns, 281, 282; of James Kirsch, 281, 282; life-in-death, 209, 327n16; as muse, 209; of Arnold Rüdlinger, 211; SF approaching, and pushing people away, 282. See also Katharine Francis (mother)— death of; Powers, Roy—death of death of SF: burial at Olema Cemetery, 297; Catholic mass held for, 295; cremation denied by Margaret, 297; date of death, 295; The Last Works arrayed around the body, 295, 296; security detail at viewing, 296; viewing of body at Point Reyes home, 297; viewing of body in the West Channel Road studio, 295, 296. See also estate of SF; health—metastatic prostate cancer de Chirico, Giorgio, 49 Decker, Jean, 23 Deep Blue and Black (1955), 121 Deep Orange and Black (1953–55), 110, 117, 316n23, Color Plate 3 DeFeo, Jay, 58, 87–88; and Walter Hopps’s Santa Monica Pier shows (1955), 184 de Kooning, Elaine, 142, 220 de Kooning, Lisa (daughter), 142 de Kooning, Willem: Art Informel international show (1952), 89; at the Cedar Tavern, 147; as collected by Marcia Weisman, 252; and Charles Egan, 103; and fickleness of critics, 144; financial success of, 101; marriage to Elaine, 142; The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition), 120–21, 122, 132; SF as generation younger than, 2–3, 147; SF compared to, 112; story about Pollock breaking a window, 101–2 Delaive, Nico, 275, 281, 288, 291 Delaunay, Robert, 281 Denver, Colorado, Fitzsimons General Hospital, 41–44 Denver, John, “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” 242–243 Depression: effects on childhood of SF, 17, 24; effects on Newfoundland, 13; and fear of losing work, 18; heatwave of 1936, 11, 305–6n1 Derain, André, 72 de Saint Phalle, Niki, 154, 177, 275; AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (Lapis Press), 259, 288; in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256

desire and SF: overview, 187; current of desire causing him to reach beyond his own creations, 301; loss of libido as unacceptable side effect in cancer treatment, 284–85; and risking Idemitsu’s patronage in affair with his daughter, 193; as SF’s favorite trait in himself, 193; Vera as blank canvas onto which SF projected his own, 32 Les Deux Magots, 80, 102, 155 Devree, Howard, 112 diamond of melancholia, 46–47 Diebenkorn, Richard: in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256; and Walter Hopps’ shows on the Santa Monica Pier (1955), 184; and the Light and Space movement, 203–4; Ocean Park series, 202; in SF’s Ocean Park studio, 202, 203, 215 Dilexi Gallery (San Francisco), 135 Dill, Laddie John, 276 dislocation, 125 di Suvero, Mark, 219 dreams: lack of involvement with, as SF’s explanation for conflict, 241; wind energy company arising from, 247–48 dreams and dream journal of SF: of being a bird, 20, 35; of being on a seesaw, 35; of his mother, 19, 28; Jungian analysis of, 165, 229, 230; painting as like writing a dream, 19; and perception via the mind’s eye, 31 Dubuffet, Jean: and Art brut, 90–91; Art Informel international show (1952), 89; rejection of Art Informel label, 90; trading works with SF, 201 Duchamp, Marcel: Bôte-en-valise, 186, 325n21; Centre Pompidou retrospective (1977), 249; as European émigré, 68; as influence on SF, 325n21; Pasadena Art Museum retrospective of (1963), 185, 325n21 duration, 95–96 Dusanne, Zoe, 111–12, 118, 132, 168; solo show (1956), 111, 117, 313n14 Duthuit, Claude, 86, 315n20 Duthuit, Georges: as advocating American art as long as it followed Matisse, 90; in Aix-en-Provence, SF visit to, 94–95; background of, 71; as guide for SF, 72, 90, 91; and Mary Hutchinson, 84; and Les Trois Marronniers, 71; and office on the rue de l’Université, 71–72, 76,





311n9; SF’s paintings hung in office of, 79; on the whiteness of SF’s palette, 178; on the White paintings, 75, 205–6 Duthuit, Marguerite (née Matisse), scissoring paper cutouts for her father’s final works, 72, 145 Dynamic Symmetry (1978), 245 Eastern philosophy and culture, SF’s interest in: and the “Oriental void” in abstract painting, 127; and relationship with Teruko, 136–37; and success in Japan, 127. See also Zen Buddhism l’École du Pacifique (School of the Pacific), 90 Ecstasy (1988), 274 Edge paintings: Blue Balls series as predecessor to, 192; exhibition at Minami Gallery, 210; Japan as site of inception of, 192– 93, 195; and the Light and Space movement, 203–4; and light/darkness, 208; light show projections onto, 223; Mako as muse for, 195, 203, 206; matrix paintings as splintering the center of, 244; selfportraits as commentary on, 238; spiritual quality of, 207, 209; transition from, 223; James Turrell on, 204; Untitled (1966–67), 207; the viewer given preeminence in, 214, 238; white space of, 205– 6; working method, 204–5 Egan, Charles, 103, 104 Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary (portfolio of limitededition prints), 256 Einstein, Albert, 95 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 38, 44 Eisner, Michael, 254 El Greco, St. Peter, 51 Elliott, Bill (childhood friend): correspondence of SF with, 192, 199; death of, 208– 9, 211, 297; friendship with SF, 208–9; as lawyer for SF, 169, 208; and Mako/SF relationship, 195; and the New Arts Society (NAS), 211, 213, 214; Osamu’s middle name in honor of, 210; SF moving to Los Angeles to be near, 176–77, 182, 208 Elliott, Maureen, 209 Emmerich, André: at birthday celebration (SF’s 71st), 291; and the later works, 275 Endo, Raku, 233 Ernst, Max, 154; as European émigré, 68 Erotic Arabesque (1987), 274 estate of SF: overview of holdings, 297; artworks and bulk of estate designated for

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345

SF’s foundation, 297, 298; artworks designated for the children, 297, 298; challenge to second will, filing of lawsuits, and settlement of, 298; in chaos, 297; estimated value of, 297; family trust for his children, 297, 298; Margaret producing revocation of original will favoring herself, 297; Muriel Goodwin requesting/denied widow’s allowance, 298; original will and codicils, 297 European émigré artists: bringing ideas about community and serious respect for the artist, 68; fleeing Nazi persecution, 48, 68, 89; San Francisco Museum of Art and commitment to exhibitions by, 48 Existentialism, 73–74, 82 L’Express, 87 Factor, Monte, 251 Falkenstein, Claire, 49, 90, 132 Fauves, 72 Fellini, Federico, 8 ½, 165 feminism: Feminist Art Program (Cal Arts), 231–32; Mako and, 227, 230, 232, 236; Womanhouse, 232, 233 Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles), 177; and Irving Blum as director, 185; and the Cool School, 184; founded by Walter Hopps and Edward Keinholz, 184, 185; and the New Arts Society, 213; SF’s generosity to, 185; Warhol exhibition of Campbell’s soup can paintings (1962), 177 Feynman, Dr. Richard, 222 Le Figaro, 143 figurative art: Un Art Autre as term of inclusion of in Art Informel, 314n4; as culturally specific, 89. See also self-portraits of SF film production by SF: Matter of Heart (film about Carl Jung), 246–47; other Mark Whitney projects, 246 finances: art investments, 168; dealer commissions, 103, 180, 188, 320n8; GI Bill, 63, 70, 79; hemorrhaging funds during years of last illness with Margaret, 288– 289; lithographs and, 158–59, 180–81, 266; money management, 119, 180, 265–66; monthly stipend from both Kornfeld and Martha Jackson, 180; multifaceted banking practice, 180, 186; Muriel stuck in California due to lack of funds, 99–100, 101, 104, 107, 109, 140; Paris struggles, 75, 77, 79–80, 91, 117;

346

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finances (continued) resentment of his wealth, 112, 147; SF on poverty as the source of great art, 265. See also estate of SF; generosity of SF; prices for SF’s work fire destroys SF’s work, 61–62, 103 First Congregational Church, 23–24, 26, 28, 49, 53 fishing: as a child, 16–17, 21, 99, 280; grandfather of SF as fisherman/whaler, 13, 14, 29; with his children and brother George, 240–41; with Pontus Hultén, 255; plans to go with Augustus, 279–80; SF’s children and their friends in Santa Monica, 241 the fist, as symbol, 158, 178 Fitzsimons General Hospital (Denver), 41–44. See also hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist Flash Art, 245 Flavin, Dan, 247 flight: as Basel Mural subject, 118; fantasy of being a bird, 35; fantasy of buying a flying platform, 110; first transatlantic flight of SF, 105; and the flatness of the Tokyo built environment, 126; In Lovely Blueness inspired by, 105; lifting off into the black night, 99; and map reading, 125; motorcycle travel emulating, 97; myth of SF threatening to crash a plane into the compound of Idemitsu, 5, 206–7; mythologized story of a plane crash that caused his TB, 85–86; SF joins the Army Air Corps in WWII, 33–34, 35–39, 85–86; sky drawing (1969 Easter happening, Pasadena), 220–221, 220; Sky Painting (1966), 207, 221, Color Plate 8; with James Turrell, 203 Fluxus/Allan Kaprow, 148 For Fred (1949), 60, 201, Color Plate 1 Forrest, Bernard, 219 Fort Miley Veterans Hospital (San Francisco), 45, 46–47, 48–53. See also hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist Fortune magazine, 144 Fournier, Jean, 249, 274 Four Seasons restaurant, Rothko backing out of commission for, 144 France: atomic bomb tests of (Gerboise Bleue), 151, 158; awarding the Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres to SF (1983), 264; oral contraceptive pill,

153; postwar call to foreign students and scholars, 69; and war for Algerian independence, 151, 153, 168–69. See also Paris Francis, Augustus James Joseph (son): birth of, 273, 274, 278; education of, 289; and entourages, 278, 290; nanny of (Randy), 278, 290; as painter, 299; parented by SF, 278, 279–80, 287, 292 Francis, George (brother): attending church with SF, 23–24; building forts, 16; camping and fishing, 16–17; and death of SF, 297; eulogy for SF, 298; and final illness of SF, 291; fishing trips with Sam and the boys, 240–41; and his mother’s death, 18; and Newfoundland trip after their mother’s death, 12, 13, 21; rebellion against stepmother Virginia, 25; on SF reading Ouspensky, 307n4; stay in SF’s modernist home in, 276; at UC Berkeley, 56–57; visiting Santa Barbara, 170–71, 176; and World War II, 36, 40, 56–57 Francis, George (grandfather): as fisherman/ whaler, 13, 14, 29; as lay preacher, 13–14 Francis, Katharine Ann (née Lewis) (mother): courtship and wedding of, 12; as Francophile, 16, 27, 55, 76; origins of, 12, 25; and sense of color of SF, 16 —death of: age of, 306n9; and the blue art deco Georgian Hotel, 18, 19, 182; desire of SF to follow her, 18, 28; dreams of SF about, 19, 28; family trip to Newfoundland following, 11–12, 13, 13, 21; guilt feelings of SF about, 19, 170; and SF’s awareness of a darkness at the edges of life, 20; SF’s awareness of the absence of his mother as lifelong, 19; spiritual seeking of SF to deal with, 19, 24; and yearning to replace her love, 26, 234 Francis, Kayo. See Malik, Kayo Andrea (née Francis) (daughter) Francis, Margaret (née Smith): artwork of, 267, 275, 299; background of, 266–67; Catholicism of, and death of SF, 295, 297; chasing SF’s disappearances, 277– 78; and Nico Delaive, 281; dog of, funeral for (Joy Boy), 267; dogs of (Lhasa apso puppies), 269–70, 277; entourage of, 278; family farm in England, SF paying off mortgage for, 288; isolation of SF from visitors and friends, 270, 281; and landscaping, 280; late works of SF, 274, 275; material aspirations of, 277, 288–





89; meeting SF and proposals from, 267, 268; pregnancy and childbirth of, 267, 273, 274, 278; real estate buying, 275– 77, 279, 288; redecorating West Channel Road, 269; return to England after death of SF, 298–99; and sexual freedom of SF, 278; SF asking his friends to be welcoming to, 269; wedding in Japan (1985 Shinto ceremony), 266, 267–69, 268; wedding in Reno (U.S. marriage), 267. See also death of SF; estate of SF; Francis, Augustus James Joseph (son); health— metastatic prostate cancer Francis, Nancy (George’s wife), 56, 57, 276 Francis, Osamu William (son), 207, 236; birth of, 209–10; car accident and recovery from, 280; at college (UC Berkeley), 269, 276, 280; at cooking school in Paris, 276, 280; difficulty adjusting to Crossroads school, 261–62; drug experimentation, 243; and estate of SF, 298; and the family relocation to Japan (1973), 235; and final illness of SF, 289, 291, 293; fishing trips with Uncle George, 240–41; high school in California, 261–62; as horticulturalist/orchardist, 299; on The Last Works, 296; and Margaret, 269, 277; meeting his grandfather, 210; naming of, 210; nanny (Krauth Brand), 241, 262, 280; order and familiarity craved by, 242–43, 261; as parent, 299; playing in the pool with SF, 228; spending summers at the Santa Monica compound, 240–42, 244; and storytelling by SF, 228; on the visitors to the compound, 244 Francis, Sam: as cook, 83, 132; “dark side” of, 6, 208, 237–39; determination of, 296; discomfort at his own openings, 111; “don’t be sorry for nothing,” 281–82; and drug experimentation, attitudes toward, 243, 284; first group show (San Francisco Museum of Art, 1946), 49–50; first painting to enter a public collection (Black in Red), 109; first solo show (Galerie Nina Dausset, 1952), 75, 87–88, 91; and food/ diet, 207, 244, 278–79; as fostering creative relationships, 121; as fostering divisions to maintain control, 189, 216, 275; full name of (Samuel Lewis Francis), 295; as hedonist, 207–8, 296; on the hero, 200, 213–14; imagination of, as most real and vivid thing, 259–60; independence of, 3, 57–58, 300; jealousy of his Euro-

index

347

pean achievements, 111–12; lack of a mentor, 58; library of, 297; “lyrical hand” of, 102, 134, 235, 238, 281, 293, 296; as megalomaniacal, 187, 189; messianic feelings of, 92, 187; music enjoyed by, 29, 216, 217, 242–43, 285; overwhelmed by attention he courted, 225; pet names bestowed upon, 6, 36–37, 181; physical appearance of, 4, 12, 13, 27, 28, 79, 111, 175, 287; and planning for The New American Painting exhibition, 120–21, 122; and rebirth/regeneration, 4, 8, 24, 77, 281, 286; Shadow Man children’s stories by, 228; sleeping habits of, 54; titling of works, 106–7; total number of works by, 3; and trickster archetype (Jung), 6, 239; as visual poet, 29; and wordplay, 85, 245. See also ambition; beauty; chaos; childhood; children of SF; death; desire and SF; dreams and dream journal; estate of SF; finances; flight; health; hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist; infinity; Jung, Carl; Kirsch, Dr. James; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); nomadic lifestyle; relationships with women; sexual freedom; spirituality and SF; suffering and pain; wives; working methods; World War II —periods of: Blue Balls series (1960–63), 157–158, 163–164, 166, 178–179, 192, 324n5, Color Plate 7; The Last Works (1994), 293, 295–296, Color Plate 11; monster paintings, 94–95, 96, 133, 157– 158; White paintings, 75–77, 84, 87, 99, 205–206, 209, 265, 312nn19,21. See also Edge paintings; later works; matrix paintings; self-portraits —whole oeuvre of: meaning of the work, 301. See also aphorisms; film production; Lapis Press; Litho Shop; Sam Francis Medical Research Center; Wind Harvest Francis, Sam, Sr. (father): camping and fishing with the boys, 16–17, 99; childhood of, 13–14; courtship and wedding of, 12; death of, 230; fire in Palo Alto home destroys SF’s artwork through 1949, 61–62; and infinity, turn of SF to, 20–21; and Methodist upbringing, 13–15, 21; origins in Newfoundland, 11–15; as professor of mathematics and engineering, 12–13, 14, 17, 230; on SF’s TB diagnosis, 313n14; singing, 17; and spiritual

348

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Francis, Sam, Sr. (father) (continued) yearnings of SF, reaction to, 24, 30; Teruko’s letters to, seeking information about SF, 159; in World War I, 12, 14, 31; and World War II, 40 Francis, Shingo Jules (son), 207, 236; at birthday celebration (SF’s 71st), 291; birth of, 225–26; at college, 280, 290; drug experimentation, 243; and estate of SF, 298; and the family relocation to Japan (1973), 235; and final illness and death of SF, 289–91, 293, 295; fishing trips with Uncle George, 240–41; on The Last Works, 296; and Margaret, 269, 270, 277; as mischievous, 262; nanny (Krauth Brand), 241, 262, 280; as painter, 299; as parent, 299; playing in the pool with SF, 228; relocation back to the Santa Monica compound (1982), 261, 262, 280; spending summers at the Santa Monica compound, 240–42, 244; and storytelling by SF, 228 Francis, Virginia Petersen (née Walker) (stepmother): George’s relationship with, 25; origins of, 25; preference to send the children off to school, 25; sending art materials and other supplies to Paris, 74–75, 80; and SF’s entreaties to help him place his paintings, 78–79; SF’s relationship with, after his father’s death, 230; and SF’s yearning for maternal love, 26; Teruko’s correspondence with, 160; visiting SF in hospital for spinal tuberculosis, 42–43. See also Francis, Sam Sr. (father) Frankenthaler, Helen, 142 Frank, Robert, 146 Freeman, Betty: at birthday celebration (SF’s 71st), 291; conversations with SF, 29, 39, 135, 166, 200, 323n10; correspondence of SF with, 204, 210; and destruction/ restoration of Basel Mural panel, 327n19; and Walter Hopps, 185, 251; and the New Arts Society (NAS), 211, 212–13; on the remoteness of SF while working, 77; “Sam Francis: Ideas and Painting” (unpublished manuscript, 1969), 200, 305n1 Fresh Air School: Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and Walasse Ting (1972–73 exhibition), 234 Freud, Sigmund, 165 Fullton, Buzz, 62

Fulton, Cheri, 310n3 Funk, Joe, 222 Gagosian Gallery (New York), 1991 exhibition, 324n5 La Galerie du Haut Pavé, Muriel’s first solo exhibition (1953), 110–11 Galerie Huit (collective), 79, 213n4 Galerie Jean Fournier, 274 Galerie Katia Granoff, 72 Galerie Kornfeld (Bern), 131–132 Galerie Nina Dausset, 88; exhibition of White paintings (1952), 75, 87–88, 91; Riopelle exhibition (1949), 88 Galerie Rive Droite: and art superstars, 109; solo show (1955), 104, 108–10, 112, 316n23 Gaulle, Charles de, 69 Gehry, Frank, 219, 253, 255 Geist, Sidney, 312n4 generosity of SF: overview, 168; with assistants, 216; eulogy for SF mentioning, 298; Ferus Gallery, 185; with light show artists, 223; and money management, 119; and relationships with women, 27, 126, 298; and visitors to West Channel Road compound, 270. See also finances Georgian Hotel, blue art deco: death of SF’s mother while staying at, 18, 19, 182; in proximity to West Channel Road property, 19, 182 Germany: Berlin Wall, 153; commission for new parliament building in Bonn (unrealized), 288, 333n4 Giacometti, Alberto, 73, 82–83 GI Bill of Rights: artists subsidized by, 48; expatriate artists living in Paris on, 69, 70, 79, 103, 147; housing and automobile boom of California and, 47; return of artists from Paris, 124; SF as bankrolled by, 63, 70, 79 Gibon, Sengai, 191, 232 Gimpel, Charles, 158 Gimpel Fils (gallery), 117, 131–32 Gollin, Norm and Pat, 70 Goode, Joe, 276 Goodwin, Muriel, 111; in Aix-en-Provence, 95; background of, 61; conception of children not possible, 110, 116, 137, 138; divorce, 138; exhibitions of, 110– 11, 135; and final illness of SF, 293; giving SF time alone, 80; in Italy, 96–97; learning about Teruko, 138; making art





in Paris, 74, 99, 135; meeting SF, 61; in Paris, 63, 70, 73, 74, 93, 94; proposal of marriage to, 94; rejection of New York by, 124; separately living due to job locations, 80, 93; separately living in California, 99–100, 101, 104, 107, 109, 140; separation of marriage, 115–16, 135; and sexual freedom of SF, tolerance for, 82–83, 93, 100, 115–16, 137, 142; on SF’s work, 108, 109, 116, 117; Teruko accused by SF of breaking up marriage with, 151; using Calahan as surname, 310n11; wedding, 100–101; widow’s allowance requested/denied from estate, 298; and working methods of SF, 77; and Zen Buddhism, 61, 83. See also Hôtel de Seine, SF and Muriel living in Gorky, Arshile: San Francisco Museum of Art giving first solo museum shows to, 48; SF studying, 58, 60 Goya, Francisco: in art collection of SF, 168; Naked Maja, 43 Grant, Alexandra, 258 Graves, Morris, 90 gravity, 135 Great Britain, and the atomic bomb, 151 Gréco, Juliette, 82 Green (1953), 91 Greenberg, Clement: American-Type Painting, 90; on march toward purified modern art, 300; on superiority of American abstract painting, 101 Green, Tyler, 118 grid works, as influence on SF, 245, 247 Groupp, “Doc” and Juliann “Spike,” 183 Guggenheim Museum (New York): architecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, 210, 253; buying Red and Black (1954), 117; response to SF, 92, 104, 210 Guggenheim, Peggy, 96, 155 Guilbaut, Serge, 101 Guston, Philip, 110 Gutai group, 128, 148; International Sky Festival (1960), 153 Gutterman, Dr. Jordan, 279 Haerer, Carol, 115–16, 117, 119, 124, 126, 135, 218 Hagen, Yvonne, 91, 134 Hallmark art collection, 144 Hamrol, Lloyd, 219 Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts, 136 happenings, 148, 177, 220–21, 220

index

349

Hard-Edge Abstraction, 103 Harris, Bud and Ruth, 100 Hartigan, Grace, 147, 233; The New American Painting (1958–59), 143 Hasen, Burt, 312n4 Hawaii property, 333n6; building in Maui, 297 health: and accident of Basel Mural toppling off the wall, 2, 134, 137–38; as achieved via the consolidation of the whole being, 165; in the air corps, prior to TB, 36, 308n6; belief that art saved his life, 4–5, 7–8, 47, 86, 164–66, 285–86, 305n5; contact with Teruko and fears for, 182; hernia operation, 137–38; hernia operation needed late in life and long delayed, 278, 284; high blood pressure, 278; and the Hôtel de Seine, 80; mind-body connection in healing, 164–66, 279, 285– 86; pain and discomfort as vanishing while painting, 4, 46, 217; pain as constant in SF’s life, 4, 57, 209, 278; separation from Muriel and deterioration of, 93; and skipping the opening of his first New York solo show, 111–12; tuberculosis as life sentence, 209. See also holistic practitioners and practices; suffering and pain —metastatic prostate cancer: Dr. Barandun’s recommendations for conventional, supervised care, 284, 285, 286– 87, 291; birthday celebration (71st), 291–92; bone cancer, 290–91; broken right arm, untreated, 290, 291, 293; death as approaching, and pushing people away, 282; diagnosis of, 283, 284, 333n1; entourage necessary for changing houses or travel, 289; family and friends’ attempts to intervene to get conventional treatment, 289–91; finances of SF during, 288–89; hospitalization to stabilize, 290–91; Margaret’s support for unconventional treatments, 285, 287, 290, 291, 293, 334n7; Tom Nagaser’s attempts to aid intervention in, 289–90; Tom Nagaser’s holistic treatments bringing back SF’s strength, 283–84, 287; oncologist’s care, 291; pain medicine denied to SF, 290, 291, 295, 298; and running away to Point Reyes, 283, 287; secrecy about, 284; SF’s belief in the mind-body connection of healing, 285– 86; testosterone injections and supplements indulged in, 285, 286, 291; testo

350

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health (continued) sterone-suppressing drugs as producing remission but causing loss of libido, 284– 85, 286; travel to the 1993 retrospective (Bonn), 289; unconventional treatments indulged in and refusal to allow medical supervision, 285, 286, 287, 289–90, 291, 292–93; visitors saying goodbye, 292, 293; working and painting during, 285– 86, 287–88, 293. See also death of SF —spinal tuberculosis: overview, 4; antibiotics development and recovery from, 43; belief that art saved his life, 4–5, 47, 86; cause of, and the air corps, 39–40, 41, 308nn6–7; cause of, mythologized story of plane crash as, 85–86, 313n14; diagnosis of, 41; discharge from hospital, 53; hallucinations and fever dreams and, 42; infertility as possible outcome of, 116; and internalization of the gunshot wound of Roy Powers, 40–41; and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, 43; length of time for recovery, 45, 53; and nomadic lifestyle, turn to, 62–63; severity of SF’s illness, 46; surgery on his back and recovery in the Bradford frame, 41–44, 44; vision of the orb of light and recovery from, 46–47; visited by stepmother, 42–43. See also hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist —urogenital tuberculosis, 167; aftermath of, and inability to create new canvases, 192–93; appearing as relapse in Japan and Bern, 160–62; and art world mystique, 177; and generosity of SF, 168; infertility as possible outcome of, 163; and life as existing within the embrace of death, 209; and the mind-body connection in healing, 164–66; in multiple exhibitions during illness and convalescence, 177; as my dance with Mr. Death, 171; painting practice in hospital, 163–64; permanent studio home in warm climate near the sea as recommended for ongoing health, 167–69, 170–71; Teruko’s communication with SF through Kornfeld, 162–63, 322–23n2; treatment for, 162, 168; visitors in the hospital, 163. See also Santa Barbara property Held, Al: destruction of SF’s paintings stored by, 103; in Galerie Huit, 312n4; on the “great lyrical hand” of SF, 102, 134, 235; and Hard-Edge Abstraction, 103; on

Monet’s influence, 105; in New York, 124, 141, 146, 147; and Paris, 70, 71, 73, 83, 147 Henderson, Dr. Joseph, 165 Hendrikson, Julia (cousin), 12, 13, 17 Hendrikson, Kathy (cousin), 12, 13, 17 Hendrikson, Lucy (maternal aunt), 17, 25, 31, 36 Hermosa beach, 17 Herms, George, 184 Herschman, Lynn, 238 Hesse, Eva, 220 Hickey, Dave, 300 l’himpasse Ronsin, 154, 157 Hockney, David, 252; in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256 Hoffman, Dustin, 261 Hofmann, Hans: influence at UC Berkeley, 57, 59, 60; “push-pull” in art, 57 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 133; “In Lovely Blue,” 106–7 Holiday, Billie, 124 holistic practitioners and practices: as daily presence at West Channel Road compound, 243–44; diet, 278–79, 287; slant boards and chairs, 278; and toxicity of paints, 278; and travel, 244. See also health—metastatic prostate cancer; Sam Francis Medical Research Center Holly, Hazel, 313n14 Holzer, Jenny, 264 Hong Kong travel, 131 Hopper, Dennis, 184 Hopps, Walter: background of, 184; on the Basel Mural, 299; comparing SF and Pollock, 274; and the Ferus Gallery, 184; and the New Arts Society (NAS), 211, 212–13; ongoing show on the Santa Monica Pier (1955), 184; as Pasadena Art Museum curator, 185, 186, 254; SF and, 185, 186, 207; as teacher of Looking at Modern Painting class, 184–85, 251 Horizon magazine, 134 hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist: Able Day Eclipse (1946), 49; and ambition of SF to be taken seriously, 49; and art as saving SF’s life, 4, 47, 86; and art history books, 43, 51, 309n12; and blocks of primary color stacked up like vertebrae, 133; emergence back into the world, 51–52; field trip to his group show (1946), 49–50; field trip





to Legion of Honor/El Greco influence, 51; Fitzsimons General Hospital (Denver), 41–44; Fort Miley Veterans Hospital (San Francisco), 45, 46–47, 48–53; horizontal working method and, 44, 44; and the idea that color is embodied light, 72; painting practice of SF in, 4, 43–44, 44, 48–49; David Park as SF’s teacher during, 50–51, 52, 309n12; Park bringing three small paintings for study, 51; Portrait (of a Lady) (1946–47), 51, 309n12; portraits of candy stripers, 48; Red Cross Arts and Skills Service classes, 49, 50–51; San Francisco Museum of Art group show (1946), 49; San Mateo public library show of landscapes, 52; The Secret Room (1946), 49; suffering and pain as alleviated by painting, 45–46; surrealistic landscapes, development of, 49; Vera Miller visits, 52–53; vision of the orb of light, 46–47, 49. See also health—spinal tuberculosis; University of California, Berkeley Hôtel de Seine, SF and Muriel living in: artmaking by Muriel, 74; color of the light in, 74; as cramped quarters, 80; description of, 69, 80, 83; as expat hotel, 69–70; seasonal rent increases, 80–81; sink used as easel, 69; working methods in, 74–75, 76, 80–81 Hultén, Pontus: conversations with SF, 41, 286, 300, 305n5; curating the 1993 retrospective (Bonn), 286, 289; as director of Centre Pompidou, 249, 251; as director of MOCA, 251, 253, 254, 255–56; friendship with SF, 163, 255–56, 286; and the New Arts Society, 213; as originator of the interdisciplinary exhibition, 251; on the quiet of SF while working, 77; on SF as “the first international artist,” 3, 299; on SF as the most expensive living artist in the world, 3, 305n3. See also Moderna Museet (Stockholm) Hundertwasser, Friedensreich, 155 Hurtado, Luchita, 219, 269 Hutchinson, Mary, 84, 91 Ibiza, 92 IBM art collection, 144 Idemitsu, Mako: adoration of SF for, 206; background of, 93–94, 227; on cover of Horace Silver’s Tokyo Blues album, 194; dating other people, 242, 248, 249;

index

351

desire to be a writer, 194, 226–27; disinvited by SF from Centre Pompidou opening (1978), 248; divorce, 249, 261; father’s wrath about her marriage to SF, 193, 196–97; father’s wrath, SF’s letter changing his mind, 197–99, 207; and feminism, 227, 230, 232, 236; as filmmaker, 227, 228, 230–31, 231, 232, 233; and final illness of SF, 293; first solo exhibition (Nirenoki Gallery, Tokyo, 1973), 236; friendship with Anaïs Nin, 226; informing Osamu of SF’s marriage to Margaret, 269; Inner Man (film, 1972), 230, 231; Jungian analysis of, 229; and the language barrier, 226, 227, 233; meeting and being pursued by SF, 194–95; as muse, 195, 203, 206, 239; on the “myth” of SF’s spiritual qualities, 207–8; and the myth of SF threatening to crash a plane into the compound of her father, 206–7; and Osamu’s recovery from car accident, 280; pet name for SF, 194; physical appearance of, 206, 207; pregnancies and childbirths, 196, 198, 209–10, 225–26; as property owner (home in Japan), 233; return to Japan (1973–74), 235–36, 236; return to Japan and sharing custody of the children (1974 onwards), 240, 241, 242–43, 261; return to Japan in one year’s time as condition of father’s acceptance, 198–99, 210; secrecy of affair with SF, 193, 195; and sexual freedom of SF, intolerance for, 233; as student in New York, 194, 195; tensions with SF, 206–8, 225–27, 233– 34; in Tokyo-New York Video Express exhibition (1973), 236; wedding in Japan, planned, 196; wedding in Santa Monica, 195–96; at West Channel Road compound, 194, 195, 242, 270; What a Woman Made (video), 236; White Elephant (autobiographical novel), 226, 329n14; Womanhouse documentation by, 232, 233. See also Francis, Osamu William (son); Francis, Shingo Jules (son) Idemitsu Museum of Arts, with floor dedicated to SF: overview, 188, 189; delay of one year on building, 198–99; design of, 189, 199; as first single space dedicated to an American artist, 188; purchase of works from SF (1991), 288; wrath of Idemitsu about SF’s marriage to daughter Mako and cancellation of, 196–99

352

index

Idemitsu, Sazō: background of, 189–90; business philosophy of, 190, 191, 197, 198–199, 217; as collector of Japanese art, 191; as collector of SF art, 191, 210; death of, 261; meeting his first grandchild, 210; myth of SF threatening to crash a plane into the compound of, 5, 206–7; and the Nisshō Maru affair, 190, 191; as patron of SF, 189, 192; as patron of SF, fury over affair with his daughter Mako as endangering, 193, 196–99; and SF as stranger in a strange land, 236; studio built for SF, 191, 199, 201, 210, 225 Idemitsu, Takako, 128, 194 Imai, Toshimitsu, 119, 127–28, 148; Sam Francis/Toshimitsu Imai Exhibition (1957), 148 Impressionist art: as “blue-chip” commodity, 144; as influence, 105; prices soaring in the 1980s art market, 264 India travel, 131 infinity: childhood turn to concept of, 20–21, 22; and James Jeans’s steady-state cosmology, 92; The Last Works and matter as blocking out, 296; “light is the evidence of the movement of eternity,” 22; the matrix paintings and, 245; and Ouspensky’s influence on SF, 30–31, 76; paintings as meant to “stop-frame eternity,” 7; and the space inside the mind, 46–47; and white color, 98–99; and the White paintings, 75–76 “In Lovely Blue,” Friedrich Hölderlin poem, 106–7 In Lovely Blueness (1955–57), 98–100, 105–7, 117, Color Plate 5; title of, 106–7 In Lovely Blueness No. 2 (1955–56), 105 Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), 93 International Institute of Experimental Printmaking, 263 Inuit people, 21 Inverness (California) property: Dream Studio at, 276–77, 279, 288; the estate, 297 Ionesco, Eugène, 73 Iran, and Japan, 190 Irwin, Robert, 184, 213; Being and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art (Lapis Press), 259; and MOCA, 252–53, 254 Isherwood, Christopher, 218–19 Isozaki, Arata: Allianz Tower (Milan), 331n3; as architect for MOCA, 253, 254, 255, 256, 331n3; on Blue Balls series, 166;

Dream Studio at Inverness, California, 276–77; on the Edge paintings, 205; Fukuoka Mutual Bank headquarters, 254; house in Venice Beach (owned by Jerry Sohn), 262; invited to wedding to Margaret, 269; Palladium nightclub (New York), 255 Italy travel, 96–97, 116, 118, 131, 247 Jackson, Martha: business practices of, 104; desire to bridge the Atlantic, 104, 121; displeasure of SF with representation of, 188–89; and finances of SF, 180, 188; on Idemitsu’s museum for SF collection, 188; offer of a show to SF, 103–4; percentage taken on Chase Mural, 320n8; renting extra space at 300 Broadway studio, 146, 193; on success of sales, 131. See also Martha Jackson Gallery Jacob’s Ladder (club), 82 Jacobs, Rachel: and Henri Bergson, 95; fistfight with Joan Mitchell, 150–51; friendship with SF, 112, 132, 315n20; helping write SF’s response to New York critics, 112; on the monster paintings in SF catalogue essay, 96; relationship with SF, 134, 315n20 Jacobs, Robert (Bob), unconventional health practices promoted by, 279, 285 Jaffe, Shirley: in Cap d’Antibes, 168; correspondence of SF with, 83, 91; friendship with SF, 70, 73, 80, 107, 116, 132; in Galerie Huit, 312n4; SF advocating for work of, 79; on SF’s work, 108 Janss, Ed, 185–86, 201, 251; death of, 281, 282; and the New Arts Society, 212, 214; and Snowmass consultation with SF, 212 Japan: and the Art Informel movement, 119, 127, 148, 314n4; Art of the World Today (1956 exhibition), 127; atomic bombings of, 46; and ceramics, collection and production of, 201; and contemporary art market boom of the 1980s, 264; cultural ease of SF in, 126–28; erotic pleasures of, 127–28, 142, 192; flatness of the built environment, 126; gift giving etiquette and ritual, 197–98; “happening” with Imai, 148; home built on Mako’s property, 233; and Iran, 190; living in Japan (1973–74) and SF as the ignored stranger in a strange land, 236, 236; Olympics (summer 1964), 191–92; Pasadena Box as crafted in, 186; postwar boom in, 126; protesting France’s





atomic bomb testing, 151; Sam Francis/ Toshimitsu Imai Exhibition (1957), 148; shunga (woodblock print erotica), 166; as site of Edge series inception, 192–93, 195; status of SF in, 183; student protests of security treaty with the U.S., 153; studio Idemitsu built, 191, 199, 201, 210, 225; as symbolic of SF’s inability to create new canvases, 192; wedding to Margaret (1985 Shinto ceremony), 266, 267–69, 268. See also Idemitsu, Mako; Idemitsu, Sazō; Yokoi, Teruko Japanese internment camps (WWII), 33 jazz: as Los Angeles soundtrack, 184; Mako and, 194; as New York soundtrack, 124; as Paris soundtrack, 82, 131; David Park and, 50 Jeans, Sir James, 92 Jenkins, Paul, 85, 108 Jeu de Paume gallery, 68 Jews, and the holocaust, 68 Johns, Jasper, 109, 218–19, 236, 247 Judd, Donald, 188 Jung, Carl: the anima and the animus/masculine-feminine, 166, 230, 239; Answer to Job, 229; on the artist as a “higher man,” 165–66; depression and collapse following the split with Freud, 165; diamond imagery, 47; dream analysis, 19, 165, 166, 229, 230; and individuation, 165–66, 229; Institute for, Los Angeles, 229; Matter of Heart (documentary film about), funded by SF, 246–47; and the mind-body connection in health care, 164, 165, 279; Mysterium Coniunctionis, 229; private retreat of, 277; The Red Book, 165; and sexual freedom, 167; shadow work, 228–29, 239; study of by SF, 164, 308n5; synchronicity, 258, 259, 331n6; translations of by Dr. James Kirsch, 229; trickster archetype, 6, 239. See also Kirsch, Dr. James, Jungian analyst Jung, Emma, 167 Kafka, Franz, Metamorphosis, 43 Kahlo, Frida, 4, 48 Kandinsky, Nina, 73 Kandinsky, Wassily, 73, 281 Kapoor, Sir Anish, 3 Kaprow, Allan: banning SF from happenings, 148; 18 happenings in 6 Parts, 148; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181 Katzman, Herbert, 312n4

index

353

Keene, Paul, 312n4 Keller, Lilly, 163 Kelly, Ellsworth, 103, 249; in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256 Kennedy, John F., 153, 181–82 Kerouac, Jack, 55 Kesey, Ken, 55, 220 Khrushchev, Nikita, 153 Kienholz, Edward, and the Ferus Gallery, 184, 185 Kim-san, housekeeper, 241, 255, 262 Kirkeby, Paula: children of, playing with SF’s boys, 241, 244; conversations with SF, 223; funding Matter of Heart (film on Jung), 247; Margaret as isolating SF from, 281. See also Smith Andersen Gallery Kirkeby, Peter, 293 Kirkeby, Phillip, 241, 273 Kirkeby, Stefan, 281–82, 293 Kirsch, Dr. James, Jungian analyst: analysis with Mako, 229; analysis with SF, 229, 230, 239, 242; background of, 229; C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles, 229, 246; death of, 281, 282; and the documentary Matter of Heart, 246; as father figure to SF, 229–30; Shakespeare’s Royal Self, 229; as translator of Jung’s works, 229; and Wind Harvest company, 248 Kirsch, Hilde (née Silbe), 229 Kirsch, Thomas, 229 Klee, Paul, 51, 68 Klein, Yves, 109, 154; and “the living brush,” 157 Kligman, Ruth, 122 Kline, Franz, 102–3, 110, 144, 147, 247; The New American Painting exhibition, 120–21, 122, 123 Klipstein, August, 120 Knox, Seymour H., II, 117 Kogelnik, Kiki: in Bern during SF’s illness, 161–62, 167, 168, 169, 323n3; bragging her father was a Nazi, 155; and end of the marriage with Teruko, 156–57, 159, 160, 169; end of the relationship, 194; and joy of SF in confronting the past, 170–71; meeting and hooking up with SF, 155– 56; as muse, 178; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181; pursued by SF, 170; in SF’s New York studio, 167, 177, 179, 182, 193; West Channel Road property and distancing from, 182–183

354

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Koons, Jeff, 3, 264 Korean War, 89, 126 Kornfeld, Eberhard: advising on art investments of SF, 168; background of, 120; as benefactor of One Cent Life (Walasse Ting), 180, 181; buying Deep Blue and Black (1955), 121; and cancer treatment of SF, 287; at Centre Pompidou show (1978), 249; on the “charmed circle” at West Channel Road compound, 216; correspondence of SF with, 191, 193, 195, 196, 203; and finances of SF, 180, 188; funding Matter of Heart (film on Jung), 247; and the Houston retrospective (1967), 210; and impromptu visits from SF, 175, 176; interest in promoting modernists, 120; and Kogelnik, 168; on The Last Works, 296; later works not as pleasing to, 275; learning of backdating works, 281; as lithograph publisher, 158–59; and planning for The New American Painting exhibition, 120–21, 122, 144; on SF as the last great painter of the 20th century, 299; studio for SF in carriage house next to gallery, 135, 152, 225; and Teruko’s art, 169, 170; Teruko’s requests sent to SF via letters to, 159, 162–63, 322–23n2; and tuberculosis relapse of SF, 160, 161, 162, 163, 323n3. See also Galerie Kornfeld (Bern) Kornfeld, Elizabeth, 175 Koshalek, Richard: as director of MOCA, 253, 255, 256; 9 Spaces/9 Artists (popup exhibitions), 255 Kramer, Hilton, 143, 234–35 Krasner, Lee, 142 Kruger, Barbara, 264 Kunsthalle Basel, 110, 210, 316n23; The New American Painting, 120–21, 122, 123; retrospective of 1967 traveling to, 210, 211. See also Basel Mural Kunstmuseum Basel, 316n23 Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle (Bonn, Germany), 1993 retrospective, 286, 289 Kuspit, Donald, 238 Lady Day, 124 Langsner, Jules, 212 Lapérouse restaurant, 94 Lapis Press: overview, 258–59; AIDS: You Can’t Catch It Holding Hands (Niki de Saint Phalle), 259, 288; apartment for visiting authors and artists, 276; Being

and Circumstance: Notes toward a Conditional Art (Robert Irwin), 259; partnerships with MOCA and other museums, 258; as subsidiary of the Litho Shop, 258; synchronicity and impetus for, 258– 59, 331n6; A Testament to the Wilderness (homage to Jungian analyst C. A. Meier), 259–60 Large Yellow (1952–53), 94–95 The Last Works (1994), 293, 295–96, Color Plate 11 later works: backdating and dual-dating works as issue, 281, 333n7; as bringing it all in, 274; and change of representation, 275; lack of organizing form in, 265; prices as lower compared to earlier works, 275, 281; quality issues, 265, 275, 332n9; working methods, 265, 274, 275. See also Last Works Léger, Fernand: Atelier of, 70; as European émigré, 68; Nazi destruction of paintings of, 68 Legion of Honor museum, 51, 58; Clyfford Still exhibition (1947), 59 Lennon, John, 219 Lenoir, Henri, 61 Leo Castelli gallery (New York): Norman Bluhm and, 147; and cross-Atlantic shows, 121; Roy Lichtenstein exhibition, 177; and the Print Committee for MOCA fundraiser, 256 Leslie, Al, 147, 148, 149, 154; Pull My Daisy, 146; and the studio at 300 Broadway, 146, 193, 326n10 Lewis, Katherine “Nanny” (maternal grandmother), 16, 25, 36, 41, 53 LeWitt, Sol, as influence, 245, 247 Lichtenstein, Roy, 177, 182, 220, 263; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181 Life magazine, 110, 112 Light and Space Movement, 203–4 light show artists, SF support for (Turquoise Bird), 222–23, 233 lithography and lithographs: Abstract Expressionists and disdain for, 179; collaboration and, 159, 179, 186; exhibition at Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 1960), 158, 159; finances and, 158–59, 179– 80; One Cent Life (Walasse Ting, with SF and Kornfeld as benefactors), 180, 181; Pasadena Box (1963), 186, 325n21; as passion, 179; work in Emil Matthieu’s workshop, 159, 322n11; working





method and, 159, 179, 263–64; work in Los Angeles (Tamarind Lithography Workshop), 179; work in New York, 322. See also prints and printmaking Litho Shop: overview, 224–25; book signing of catalogue raisonné of SF’s prints, 287– 88; Broadway painting studio nearby, 258; expansion of, 258; garbage cans raided for scraps by SF, 266; master printers hired for, 224, 258, 263, 295– 96; Nancy Mozur’s role in, 225, 281; selfportraits sent to, 237–38; visitors to, 225; work by SF during his last illness, 285, 287–88, 295–96. See also Lapis Press London, Jack, 38 Loran, Erle, 49–50, 57, 59, 61 Los Angeles: anticommunist era and, 183; Community Redevelopment Agency, 252; decentralization of, 183–84; isolation of artists in the 1950s, as advantage, 183– 84; status of SF in, 183, 188; WWII and population boom in, 47. See also Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); New Arts Society (NAS); West Channel Road compound Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Art and Technology program (1967), 221–22 Los Angeles Peace Center, 220 Los Angeles Times, 256 Louvre, unrealized ceiling project for, 276 Lucien Labaudt Art Gallery (San Francisco), 56 MacAgy, Douglas, 59 McCarthyism (anticommunist Red Scare), 90, 183 McCoy, Ann, 230 McCray, James, 57 Mack, Charlotte, 51 Malevich, Kazimir: as backdating works, 281; as early influence, 274; Suprematist compositions of, 244–45; White on White (1918), 76, 106 Malibu hideaway (rental), 276, 278 Malik, Kayo Andrea (née Francis) (daughter): as acupuncturist, 299; at birthday celebration (SF’s 71st), 291; California home of SF and hopes for part-time custody of, 182; and the Chelsea Hotel live-work space, 146; as divorced single mother living near Point Reyes, 280; and the Douanier-Rousseau apartment, 151–52, 152; and drug experimentation, 243; and

index

355

the estate of SF, 298; and final illness of SF, 289, 291; and holistic healers, 243– 44, 299; impromptu visits from SF, 175– 76, 243; In Lovely Blueness held in trust for, 195; in Japan, 159–60, 162, 163; joy of SF at birth of, 140; lawsuit against Margaret for alleged “cruelty and torture,” 298; marriage and move to Jamaica, 261; name symbolism, 140; as parent, 299; remarriage and move to Hawaii, 289; and separation of her parents, 169, 170; and Switzerland, 243; as translator for film production Matter of Heart, 247; at West Channel Road compound, 242–43 Malraux, André, 236, 249 Manet, Édouard, Olympia, 43 Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, 158 Mao Zedong, 221 Marshall (California) ranch property, 276, 277, 288–89, 297, 333n6 Martha Jackson Gallery: fourth solo show (1958), 134, 137; Gutai exhibition (1958), 128; solo show (1956), 111–12, 117. See also Jackson, Martha Martin, Fred: attempts by SF to get exhibitions for, 79; at UC Berkeley, 58, 60, 61 Martin, Steve, 254 Mathieu, Georges, 119, 127 Matisse, Amélie, 91, 94 Matisse, Henri: in art collection of SF, 168; Blue Nude (1952), 157, 166; comparisons of SF to, 87, 102; Duthuit’s advocacy of American art as long as it followed the trail blazed by, 90; Feme en robe, 311n9; as influence on SF, 72, 76, 95, 145, 157, 166, 274, 293, 311n9; Le bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life), 296; Nazis allowing his work to continue, 68; Nu au tapis espagnol, 72, 311n9; paper cutouts, 72, 145, 157; SF exhibiting in group show with, 78; SF-owned work of, 201; The Swimming Pool, 145 matrix paintings: and the center of the Edge paintings, 244; Centre Pompidou exhibition (1978), 248–49; divorce from Mako and darkening of palette, 249; Dynamic Symmetry (1978), 245; and infinity, 245; influences on, 244–45; as marrying feeling to structure, 244, 245; matrix vs. “grid” as descriptor for, 245; working method, 246 Matter of Heart (film about Carl Jung), funded by SF, 246–47

356

index

Matthieu, Emil, 159, 322n11 Mausoleum of Galla Placidia (Ravenna), 99 Ma, Yo-Yo, 261 Meier, C. A., 246; A Testament to the Wilderness, Lapis Press book paying homage to, 259–60 Meier, Richard, 253 Melville, Herman, Moby-Dick, 29, 133 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 74 Merry Pranksters, 220 Metzger, Edith, 122 Mexico (1957), 125 Mexico travel, 124–25, 126 Meyer, Franz, 75, 109 Meyer, Franz, Sr.: advising SF to keep his Paris studio, 135–36; background of, 109; buying Big Orange, 109, 189; correspondence of SF with, 1, 163; death of, 189; funding SF’s first trip around the world, 119–20, 189; as patron of SF, 109, 119–20, 189; Round the World (1958–60) painted in honor of, 189 Michaud, Yves, 30, 85, 86, 90, 95, 265–66, 305n5 Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, 118 Miller, Dorothy, 109–10, 117; and The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition), 122, 132 Miller, Henry, 55, 62, 182, 218–19, 223 Miller, Vera Mae: as blank canvas on which SF projected his desires, 32; bracelet given to, 33, 53; dating other people, 36, 62; Fort Miley hospital visits, 52–53; gardenias given to, 27; meeting and being pursued by SF, 23, 26–27; pressured to transfer to UC Berkeley, 32, 36; Sam joining First Congregational Church to be close to, 23–24, 26, 28; separation after high school, 31; studies with David Park, 52–53; and World War II, 33, 36, 37; yearning for by SF, 31–32 —marriage to SF: conception of children not possible with SF, 116, 137; correspondence of SF with, following separation, 78; divorce, 93; in Monterey, 54–55; rage of SF and severing of connection with, 62; separation at UC Berkeley, 60–61, 62; sexual troubles and, 56, 310n3; wedding, 53 Miloradovitch, Hazelle, 81, 82 Minami Gallery (Tokyo): Edge paintings exhibition, 210; representing SF in Tokyo,

128, 160, 164, 191; solo exhibition of Teruko’s work (1961), 159, 160, 162 Mingus, Charles, 124 Minimalism, 177–78 Miró, Joan, 51, 159 Mitchell, Joan: in Cap d’Antibes, 168; fight with Ellsworth Kelley at SF’s Centre Pompidou show (1978), 249; fistfight with Rachel Jacobs, 150–51; Fresh Air School: Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and Walasse Ting (1972–73 exhibition), 234; friendship with SF, 70, 116, 123–24, 132, 249; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181; painting style of, 107; party in New York reuniting SF with returned expat artists, 123–24; party in Paris at Arcueil studio (1958), 132; physical appearance of, 107; relationship with SF, 107–8; and Jean Paul Riopelle relationship, 108, 132, 150–51; on SF’s late-1980s work, 274; success in the French art market, 108; support of SF for art of, 233; temperament of, 132; trading works with SF, 201; at West Channel Road compound, 218–19 Moby Dick, 137, Color Plate 6; studies for (1958), 133, 319n5 Moderna Museet (Stockholm), exhibition of lithographs (1960), 158, 159 Modern Institute of Art (Beverly Hills), 183 Mondrian, Piet, as influence, 245 Monet, Claude: as a jumping-off point, 73; French comparisons of SF to, 87; as influence on SF, 72, 73, 95, 105–6, 274; nymphéas (1914–27), 105; Water Lilies, 72 Monroe, Marilyn, 159, 181–82 monster paintings, 94–95, 96, 133, 157–58 Montecito. See Santa Barbara property Monterey: bohemian scene of (New Paris), 55; married life of SF and Vera in, 54–55 Montparnasse (Paris), 92, 154 Morley, Grace McCann, 48 Morocco, protests of French atomic bomb test, 151 Moses, Ed, 184, 213, 243, 291, 296 Mother Blue (1974), 19 Motherwell, Robert: and art education of SF, 58; and the Artists’ Protest Committee, 220; Elegy for the Spanish Republic XXXV, 143; marriage to Helen Frankenthaler, 142; and Melville’s Moby-Dick, 133; in The New American Painting (1958–59), Spain censoring, 143; San





Francisco Museum of Art giving first solo museum shows to, 48 motorcycle travel, 71, 96–97, 107–8, 116 Mozur, Nancy, 216, 235, 258; and final illness of SF, 284; and the Litho Shop, 225, 281 Muktananda, 243 Mullican, Lee, 219 Musée d’art moderne, Salon de l’art libre (1950), 78 Musée de l’Orangerie in the Jardin des Tuileries: postwar exhibition of “degenerate artists,” 69; reopening of (1953), 72; seeing Monet’s Water Lilies in, 105 Museo Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo (Madrid), 143 Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA): overview of SF’s instrumentality in founding of, 3; architect (Arata Isozaki), 253–54, 331n3; Artists’ Advisory Council, 252–53, 256; as artists’ beacon and inspiration, 257–58; Broad museum competition with, 256–57; building fund, 242; collections of, 256; critical reception of, 256; Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary (portfolio of limited-edition prints) as fundraiser for, 256; endowment of, 252, 254–55, 256; founding of, 3, 251–52; Pontus Hultén as founding director of, 251, 253, 254, 255–56; Richard Koshalek as director of, 253, 255, 256; New Arts Society as predecessor of, 214, 251–52; site for, 252; studio party of SF as fundraiser for, 254– 55; Temporary Contemporary pop-up space, 255, 256, 258; works of SF donated to, 256 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, retrospective (1967), 210–11 Museum of Modern Art (New York): interest in SF, 104, 106; and Kazimir Malevich as influence on SF, 76, 106; The New American Painting (1958–59), 121, 122–23, 123, 143–44; proposed exhibition of SF and abrupt cancellation of (1964), 187– 88, 193, 210; purchase of Black in Red (1953), 109; Rothko retrospective (1961), 210; Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 153–54, 321n3; 12 Americans (1956 exhibition), 109–10, 117; and Van Gogh’s Starry Night as influence, 106 mythologized narratives: myth of SF threatening to crash a plane into the compound

index

357

of Sazō Idemitsu, 5, 206–7; tuberculosis caused by plane crash, 85–86, 313n14 Nagaser, Tom, 243, 278, 283, 289, 289–90 nationalist movements: Art Informel as cultural rebuttal to, 89–90, 96; artists becoming unwilling messengers of, 89, 101; Jackson Pollock’s statement against, 89–90 National Museum of Modern Art (Tokyo), 317n8 nature and SF: childhood love of, 16–17; the cyclical process of night giving way to day, 209–10; feeding birds in the hospital, 163, 323n3; flight training of SF and, 38–39; fly-fishing, 17; garden at West Channel Road, 299; landscape of Newfoundland, 11–12, 21; and Monterey, 54; the night sky and aurora borealis, 21; teenage engagement with, 28; yearning for, at Fort Miley Veterans hospital, 43, 53. See also fishing “Nature Aphoristic” (essay), 259–60 Neel, Alice, 220 Nee, Meibao, 242, 278 Neue Nationalgalerie (West Berlin), 223–24 The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition), 121, 122–23, 123, 143–44 New Arts Society (NAS): collapse of, 214; development of art infrastructure as mission of, 211–13; impassioned plea for support by SF, 213–14; as predecessor of MOCA, 214, 251–52; publishing as goal of, 258 Newfoundland (Broad Cove village): family trip following the death of SF’s mother, 11–12, 13, 13, 21; and Methodism and lay clergy, 13–15, 21 Newman, Barnett, 106, 147 Newmann, Sister Gisela (nurse), 169 New York: Chelsea Hotel live-work space, 135–36, 141, 143, 146; Muriel as rejecting, 124; overtaking Paris as the center of the art world, 89, 101–2, 121; postwar boom of, 101; SF as upset by, 145–49; Clyfford Still’s advice to bypass, 62; subleasing studio space, 146; subversive acts of artists as lauded in, 101–2, 122; WWII resettling of European intelligentsia in, 89. See also Abstract Expressionism; New York School

358

index

New York (continued) —studio at 300 Broadway: description of, 146; and expectation of SF that New York would be his American home base, 149; Kiki Kogelnik working in, 167, 177, 179, 193; relinquishing of, Al Leslie taking over, 193, 326n10; subleased extra rooms to Al Leslie and Martha Jackson, 146, 193 New Yorker, 256 New York Herald Tribune, 87, 112, 134 New York School: difficulty of SF in fitting in with, 102–4, 106, 111–12, 134, 146–49, 183, 300; difficulty of veteran expat artists fitting in with, 103; SF as bringing to Europe, 147; titling of works, 106; younger age of SF than fellow painters, 2–3, 147. See also Abstract Expressionism New York Times, 112, 122–23, 144, 234–35 Nicholas, Fred, 298 Nicholas Wilder Gallery (Los Angeles), 246 Nietzsche, Friedrich: “raging desire for existence,” 296; SF’s conception of the artist as Übermensch, 227, 250; Zarathustra, 229 Nin, Anaïs, 55, 182, 218–19, 226; on Japanese women married to Americans, 226; on SF’s form of beauty, 219; on Turquoise Bird performances, 223 Nirenoki Gallery, solo Mako show (1973), 236 nomadic lifestyle: overview, 3, 63; aging and traveling shorter distances, 277; and alienation in New York, 148; and distance from commitment of relationships, 141, 167, 168; as ingrained in SF’s creative process, 189; and leave-taking in the face of hardship, 22; multiple simultaneous exhibitions and, 141; and need for the thrill of discovery, 116, 126; as no hindrance to SF’s career, 131–32; and the paradox of the web of connections SF wove in each new place, 130; planning and changes of plans in, 141; as seeking equilibrium between soaring and gravity, 135; and studios established all over the world, 134–35, 277; as “suspension” for SF, 3; tracked down by Margaret, 277– 78; tracked down by Teruko, 277; visions sought through, 22; years of confinement as motivation for, 62–63. See also sexual freedom Nordman, Maria, 242, 247

North Beach, 61 Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena), 251–52; Basel I in, 299; Basel Mural III fragments given to, 299 Nouveaux réalistes, 155 Oakland Museum (Oakland, California), Sam Francis Paintings: 1946–1972 (1973), 234–35 Obata, Chiura, 33 Ocean Park: as neighborhood, 202; James Turrell’s Mendota Hotel studio in, 203, 204 Ocean Park studio: the clean, white artist’s studio as invented at, 203; Richard Diebenkorn using, 202, 203, 215; neighborhood of, 202; sailmaker’s loft next door, 202–3 Oldenburg, Claes, 182; Giant Ice Bag, 221; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181 Olitski, Jules, 312n4 One Cent Life (Walasse Ting, with SF and Kornfeld as benefactors), 180, 181 Ono, Yoko, 219 Ooka, Makoto, 197 Ophuls, Marcel, The Sorrow and the Pity (1972), 246 Opposing Forces (1953 group exhibition), 93–94 Opposites (1950), 81 Orozco, José Clemente, 125 Osaka travel, 131 Ossario, Alfonso, 88–89, 121–22 Other White (1952), 75 Ouspensky, P. D., 29–31, 76; Tertium Organum: A Key to the Enigmas of the World, 30, 307n4 Pacific Standard Time (2012 exhibition, Berlin), Color Plate 9 Page, George, 224, 238, 258, 263 Palevsky, Max, 252, 253, 255, 256 Palo Alto home, 273, 277, 297 Palo Alto studio, 218, 273–74, 288, 297 Palo Alto Victorian house, 276 Pang, Liga, 248, 255, 262, 266, 267, 268–69 Panza, Count Giuseppe, 256; art collection of, 247, 256 Paris: Atelier Fernand Léger, 70; café society as school for artists, 70–71; Centre Pompidou, 249; cost of living, 69; and depiction of “the substance of which light is made,” 72; desire of SF to maintain a base





in, 276; Douanier-Rousseau apartment, 150, 151–52, 152; and Existentialism, 73–74, 82; expatriate artists living on GI Bill in, 69, 70, 79, 103, 147; and financing struggles, 75, 77, 79–80, 91, 117; and mingling with great artists, 73; Montparnasse studio, 92; Nazi occupation of, 67–69; New York overtaking as the center of the art world, 89, 101–2, 121; postwar condition of, 67, 68–69; prewar “laboratory of the twentieth-century” and “magical island,” 67, 73, 87; rue George Braque modernist home/atelier, 276, 297; sawmill studio, 92; seed of the idea to go to, 55; Sèvres house, 83–84, 92; status of SF in, 148, 149; Clyfford Still’s advice to go to, 62; and studios, difficulty of finding, 74, 92; sudden decision to visit, 226; Tiphaine apartment, 94; Tiphaine studio, 98, 111. See also Hôtel de Seine, SF and Muriel living in —Arcueil studio, 7; assistants in, 216; continued use of, 225; description of, 117; homecoming party thrown by SF (1958), 131, 132; razing of, 276; retained after leaving Paris (1958), 134– 35; retreat to (1960), and the blue paintings, 157; working conditions in, 1 Park, David: about, 50; loan of paintings to SF to study, 51; purchase of former home of, 276; in San Francisco Museum of Art 1946 group show, 49–50; and Clyfford Still, 59; and Studio 13 Jazz Band, 50; Vera Miller studies with, 52–53; as volunteer art teacher for SF at Fort Miley Veterans hospital, 50–51, 52, 309n12 Parsons, Betty, 91 participatory art, rise of, 153–54, 157, 177 Pasadena Art Museum: Marcel Duchamp retrospective (1963), 185; Walter Hopps as curator of, 185, 254; Kazimir Malevich (1974), 244–45; Pasadena Box (1963) as fundraiser for, 186, 325n21; redesign of building (1966), 254; Norton Simon as rescuing from bankruptcy and loss of focus on contemporary art, 252 Pasadena Box (1963), 186, 325n21 Penn, Irving, 122, 123 People’s Park (Berkeley), 221 People’s Republic of China, 89 performance art: discomfort of SF with spectacle of, 157; sky drawing (1969 Easter happening, Pasadena), 220–221, 220;

index

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Sky Painting (1966), 207, 221, Color Plate 8; of Tinguely and de Saint Phalle, 154, 177 Perkins, Jeffrey, 222–23, 265, 266, 332n9; The Painter Sam Francis (2008 film), 304 Peterson, Margaret, 49–50, 58 Petlin, Irving, 219 Peuchmaurd, Jacques, 87 phenomenology, 74 Phillips Collection exhibition (1958), 134, 137 Phillips, Gifford, 212 Piano, Renzo, 249 Picasso, Pablo: in art collection of SF, 168; and Cézanne, 73; Demoiselles d’Avignon, prior work as subset of, 133; Girl before a Mirror, 51; Guernica, 68; Nazi destruction of paintings of, 68; Nazis allowing his work to continue, 68; painting loaned to SF to study, 51; and prints, 159; San Francisco Museum of Art retrospective (1940), 48; self-portraits, 238–39; SF desiring status of, 187–88; SF exhibiting in group show with, 78 picture plane, transformation of, 55–56 Pierre Loeb Gallery, 92 Pincus-Witten, Robert, 133 Poe, Edgar Allan, 29 Point Reyes properties, 276, 277, 279–80; Dream Studio, 276–77, 279, 288; the estate, 297; housing for assistants and staff, 280; Kayo as living near, with grandchildren, 280; landscaping, 280; last viewing of SF’s body at, 297; modern house, 279; Shingo nearby at Sonoma State University, 280; studio in colonial building, 280 politics: and experiments in forms and materials, 153–55, 219–22. See also atomic bomb; Cold War; nationalist movements Pollock, Jackson: and art education of SF, 58; Art Informel international show (1952), 89; Blue Poles (1952), 164; Cathedral (1947), 58; death of, 121–22; expressing appreciation for SF’s work, 112; financial success of, 101; as influence on SF’s late 1980s work, 265, 274; and Jungian dream analysis, 165; the late Monets as prologues to, 73; low price paid for (1963), 188; marriage to Lee Krasner, 142; and Melville’s Moby-Dick, 133; and MoMA’s American shows, 110; The New

360

index

Pollock, Jackson (continued) American Painting (1958–59), 120–21, 143; Number 31 (1950), 94; Opposing Forces (1953 group exhibition), 93–94; rejection of style returning expat veteran artists, 103; San Francisco Museum of Art giving first solo museum shows to, 48; SF as generation younger than, 2–3; SF compared to, 112, 185–86, 274; SF desiring status of, 187–88; statement against nationalism, 89–90; story about breaking a window, 101–2; Studio Paul Facchetti (1952 French premiere), 87, 88–89; temperament of, 102, 121–22, 136; titling of works, 106 Pompidou, Georges, 249 Pop art, 177–78, 182, 185, 188, 212 Portrait (of a Lady) (1946–47), 51, 309n12 Post-Impressionism, prewar Paris and birth of, 67 Poussin, Nicolas, 73 Powers, Roy—death of: family injunction not to discuss, 28–29; guilt feelings of SF for, 29, 170; internalization of the gunshot wound of, 40–41; shooting by SF, 19–20; Jack Stauffacher as present at, 258–59; struggle of SF to deal with, 24 prices: Jackson Pollock’s death and rise of, 121; as soaring in the 1980s contemporary art market, 264 prices for SF’s work: Around the Blue (1958), 180; Chase Mural (1959), 144–45, 320n8; commission for new German parliament building in Bonn (uncompleted), 288; Deep Orange and Black (1953–55), 110, 111–12, 117; in the early 1950s, 91; in the early 1960s, 180; fear of abstract art prices falling, 188; for lithographs, 158–59, 179; for older works, 180; paint-stained boxer shorts, 225, 266; period of highest prices of any living painter, 3; sale of works to the Idemitsu Museum (1991), 288; set by using the French point system, 180; as soaring in the 1980s contemporary art market, 264. See also finances Price, Vincent: and the Modern Institute of Art (Beverly Hills), 183; and the New Arts Society, 213 prints and printmaking: Abstract Expressionists and disdain for, 179; American renaissance in, 159, 179; Big Bertha enormous printing press, 263–64; book

signing of catalogue raisonné of SF’s prints, 287–88; Eight by Eight to Celebrate the Temporary Contemporary (portfolio of limited-edition prints to benefit MOCA), 256; the Kirkebys’ large monotype press in Palo Alto, 273; sale of, to benefit Sam Francis Medical Research Center, 279; work at International Institute of Experimental Printmaking, 263– 64. See also lithography and lithographs; Litho Shop Proust, Marcel, 95 Puryear, Martin, 258 “push-pull,” 57, 60 Rainer, Arnulf, 156 Rainer, Yvonne, 124, 168 Rauschenberg, Robert, 153–54, 247; and the Artists’ Protest Committee, 220; in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181 Ravenna, Italy, 96–97, 99 Read, Sir Herbert, 197 Reagan, Ronald, 221, 248, 264 real estate buying spree, 275–77, 297; financing of, 288; as turning on the dream machine, 276–77, 279 Red and Pink (1950), 75, 81 Redon, Odilon, 154 Reed, Lou, The Velvet Underground and Nico, 223 reforestation projects, 277, 288, 333n6 Reichek, Laura, 289 Reinhardt, Ad, 106, 220 Reinhardt, Django, 82 relationships with women: bouquets of paintbrushes as gifts, 262; commitments and the need to create distance, 141, 167, 168, 242; female pliability needed, 108, 126, 142; generosity and, 27, 126, 298; misogyny, 233; pattern of, 125–26, 267; seesawing between women, 62; support for her hopes and dreams, 126, 141–43, 170, 232–33, 320n4; and yearning for maternal love, 26, 234. See also sexual freedom; wives Rembrandt’s self-portraits, 238 Renoir, Pierre Auguste, 91 retrospectives: of 1967, 210–11; of 1972– 73, 234–35; of 1993, 286, 289; artists and difficulties with, 210 Reuben Gallery, 148





Rexroth, Kenneth, 55 Richard, Paul, 234 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 99–100 Riopelle, Jean Paul: and Art Informel, 88, 89, 90; in Cap d’Antibes, 168; at Centre Pompidou (1977), 249; as expat artist in Paris, 71; and French critics’ animosity toward American artists, 90; and friendship with SF, 71, 80, 83; at Galerie Nina Dausset (1949), 88; and Joan Mitchell relationship, 108, 132, 150–51; motorcycle purchase with SF, 71, 96; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181; Opposing Forces (1953 group exhibition), 93; temperament of, 132; trading works with SF, 201 Rivera, Diego, 48, 125 Rivers, Betty, 83 Rivers, Haywood “Bill”: Galerie Huit (collective), 79, 213n4; in the Hôtel de Seine, 69–70; and the Sèvres house, 83 Rivers, Larry, 110, 146; Chase Mural painted in studio of, 146, 320n8 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 101 Rogers, Richard, 249 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 31, 35 Rose, Barbara, 192 Rosenberg, Harold: on the influence of Melville’s Moby-Dick, 133; on Paris as “a magical island,” 67, 73 Rosenwald, Robert, 312n4 Rosicrucian Order, 24, 30 Rothko, Mark: adolescent response to music and poetry of, 29; and art education of SF, 58, 59–60; and the Artists’ Protest Committee, 220; backing out of a corporate commission, 144; on the benefits of large canvases, 157; critics comparing SF to, 91; financial success of, 101; grid works, 247; as influence on SF, 274; Ed Janss as buying, 185; MoMA retrospective (1961), 210; and MoMA’s American shows, 110; The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition), 120–21, 132, 134; and the New Arts Society, 213; on painting as adventure, 107; refusing to participate in a Whitney Museum Show, 102; refusing to participate in group shows, 102, 122; SF as generation younger than, 2–3, 29; SF desiring status of, 187–88; teaching at California School of Fine Arts, 58; temperament of, 102, 210; titling of works, 106; and Walter Hopps’s Santa Monica Pier shows (1955), 184

index

361

Rouch, Jean, Chronique d’un été (1961), 153 Round the World (1958), 145, 189 Rüdlinger, Arnold: buying Deep Orange and Black, 110, 117, 316n23; commission for Basel Mural, 117; death of, 211, 214; and The New American Painting exhibition, 120–21, 122, 132, 143; and the New Arts Society (NAS), 211, 213, 214; proposing SF exhibition at MoMA (1966), 187–88; and retrospective of SF (1967), 210, 211; and Teruko’s artworks, 143, 170, 211 Ruscha, Ed, 183, 184, 201, 203, 212, 213, 276 Ryman, Robert, 247 Sainte-Chapelle, Gothic windows, 84 Salle, David, 264 Salon de l’art libre (1950), 67 Salon de mai (1951), 78 Sam Francis Foundation: addressing issues of backdating canvases, 333n7; artworks bequeathed by estate, 297, 298; giving Basel III fragments to Norton Simon Museum, 299; grantmaking for educational programming in the arts and sciences, 298, 299; proposal of SF biography to the author, 5–6 Sam Francis Medical Research Center: fundraiser for (sale of prints), 279; and mindbody connection in health care, 279; naturopathic research as mission of, 279; physicians on board of directors out of deference to Sam, 279; and SF’s belief he could find a cure for the cancer, 285 Sam Francis/Toshimitsu Imai Exhibition (1957), 148 Samuel, Jacob, 258, 263, 295–96 Sandler, Irving, 101, 103 San Francisco Airport, 17, 277; mural commissioned from SF, 258 San Francisco Art Association: entreaties to SF’s parents to take his paintings to, 78; first SF exhibition (1946), 49–50 San Francisco Art Institute. See California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) San Francisco Bay Area: Montgomery Block building, 48; postwar population boom, 47–48; postwar rise as vital art center, 48. See also California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute); hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and

362

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San Francisco Bay Area (continued) becoming an artist; San Francisco Museum of Art; University of California, Berkeley San Francisco Examiner, 49, 85, 313n14 San Francisco Museum of Art: addition of “Modern” to name of, 48; first SF exhibition (1946), 49–50; mural commissioned from SF, 258; opening of, and dedication to modern art, 48; painting rental program of, 58; Picasso retrospective (1940), 48 San Leandro studio, 218, 258 San Mateo: overview, 16; and the Depression, 17; public library exhibition of SF’s landscapes, 52. See also childhood San Mateo Times, 20 Santa Barbara property, and convalescence of SF, 169, 170–71, 176–77 Santa Monica: bohemian culture of, 181–82; childhood visit to, 17–18; in the early 1960s, 181–82; fishing barge anchored offshore, 241. See also Ashland Avenue studio; Lapis Press; Litho Shop; Ocean Park studio; West Channel Road compound Santa Monica Pier, Walter Hopps shows (1955), 184 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 73–74, 82 Schapiro, Miriam, 232 Schimmel, Paul, 147 Schnabel, Julian, 264 Schneider, Pierre, 90, 107, 110, 177, 178, 313n14 Schueler, Jon, 146 Schultze, Bernard, 73 Schuyler, James, 147 Sea Ranch home, 276 The Secret Room (1946), 49 self-portraits of SF, 237; After Death (1974), 238; anima archetype and, 239; the dark side of SF and, 237–39; the Edge series as predecessor of, 238; sent to Litho Shop to become print editions, 237–38; and the sublime, 238; working method, 237, 239 Selz, Gabrielle: acquaintance with SF, 4, 5; undertaking this biography, 5–6; Unstill Life, 5 Selz, Peter: on American discomfort with beauty and lack of attention to SF, 300; on the Basel Mural, 118; and Berkeley Art Museum, 210; on the Blue Balls series, 158, 166, 178; on the contrast between SF and Teruko, 155; curating

1991 Gagosian exhibition, 324n5; monograph on SF, 4, 5; and proposed SF exhibition at MoMA, 187–88, 193; and selfportraits of SF, 239; and Tinguely’s Homage to New York at MoMA, 321n3 Serra, Friar Junípero, 16 Sèvres house, 83–84, 92 sexual freedom: as common in bohemian Paris, 82–83; as expression of zest for life, 83; and incapability of committing to one person, 167; in Japan, 127–28, 142, 192; Carl Jung and, 167; Mako’s intolerance for, 233; Margaret and, 278; and Mitchell/Riopelle relationship, 151; Muriel’s tolerance for, 82–83, 93, 100, 115–16, 137, 142; and need for the thrill of discovery, 116, 126; oral contraceptive pill, 153; and refusal to be compartmentalized, 108; release from Fort Miley Veterans hospital and need for, 56; Teruko’s intolerance for, 142, 151, 156–157, 169– 170; and Tinguely/de Saint Phalle relationship, 154. See also nomadic lifestyle; relationships with women Shadow Man stories by SF, 228–29 Shakespeare, as SF influence, 29, 216, 242 Shapazian, Robert: concerns about SF’s money spending, 288; and Lapis Press, 259, 288 Sharnoff, Lora, 267 Sherman, Cindy, 238 Shields, Doug, 280, 284, 285, 289; final illness of SF, and painting again, 293 Shimizu, Kusuo, 128, 160, 192, 265. See also Minami Gallery (Tokyo) Shining Black (1958), 210 shunga (woodblock print erotica), 166 Sidney Janis gallery, 121 Silver, Horace, Tokyo Blues, 194 Single Wing Turquoise Bird (light artists’ collective), 222–23, 233 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 125 Skrovan, Steve, 291 sky drawing (1969 Easter happening, Pasadena), 220–221, 220 Sky Painting (1966), 207, 221, Color Plate 8 Smith Andersen Gallery (Palo Alto), 241, 273 Smith, Hassel, 49, 220 Smith, Helen (Margaret’s sister), 290 Smith, Kimber, 70, 132, 155, 168 Smith, Roberta, 178 Smith, Sam, 52 Smith, Tony, 164





Snowmass (Colorado), SF consulting on, 212 Sōgetsu school: Georges Mathieu painting mural for, 127, 128; SF painting mural for (Tokyo Mural, 1957), 119, 128–30, 129 Sohn, Jerry: as facilitator, 262–63; filming SF’s painting sessions, 266; giant canvas loom located by, 263; reorganizing SF’s studio, 265 Sontag, Susan, 213, 220 Sosin, Martin, 275, 297, 298 Soviet Union. See USSR space: and the matrix paintings, 254; as subject and object, 107; without place, 125. See also Light and Space movement; white color Spain, The New American Painting (1958– 59), 143 Speer, Richard, 300 Spero, Nancy, 220 spinal tuberculosis. See under health of SF; hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist spirituality and SF: and the artist as the eye of God, 15, 86, 105, 107; desire for paintings to lift the veil between heaven and earth, 132–33; the Edge series and, 207, 209; and his death, 295, 297; joining the First Congregational Church, 23–24, 26, 28, 53; Mako’s view of, 207– 8; and the meaning of his work, 301; and Ouspensky, 29–31, 76, 307n4; and Rosicrucian Order, 24, 30; seeking to come to terms with the death of his mother and his best friend, 19, 24; the White series and, 209. See also Jung, Carl; visions Sports Illustrated, 185–86 Stable Gallery, 121 Staub, Gabrielle, 132 Stauffacher, Jack, 258–59 Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Basel II in, 211, 299 Stein, Sarah, 78–79 Stella, Frank, 177, 220, 252 Still, Clyfford: and art education of SF, 58–59, 60; critics comparing SF to, 91; as influence on SF, 274; the late Monets as prologues to, 73; Legion of Honor exhibition (1947), 59; and MoMA’s American shows, 110; The New American Painting (1958–59 exhibition), 120–21, 132, 134; refusing to allow retrospectives, 210; refusing to participate in group shows, 122; teaching at California

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363

School of Fine Arts, 58, 59–60, 62; and Walter Hopps’s Santa Monica Pier shows (1955), 184 Stirling, James, 253 Studio Paul Facchetti: Art Informel group show (1952), 89, 91; Pollock (1952 French premiere), 87, 88–89 suffering and pain: as informing the work of artists, 4; pain as constant in SF’s life, 4, 57, 209, 278; painting as relief from, 4, 45–46, 217; and SF becoming a vocal opponent of war, 45–46; SF denied pain medication in final illness, 290, 291, 295, 298; SF’s belief that art saved his life, 4–5, 7–8, 47, 86, 164–166, 285–286, 305n5. See also health Sugarman, George, 124 sumi-e ink studies, 81–82, 128 Sunday Post-Dispatch, 145–46 Suprematists, 244–45 Surrealism: art of returning WWII vets and, 48; prewar Paris and birth of, 67; San Francisco Museum of Art and commitment to, 48 Swatch design commission (1991), 288 Sweeney, James Johnson, 91–92, 104; buying Shining Black (1958), 210; as curator of 1967 retrospective, 210 Le Tabou, 82 tachisme, 134 Takatsuki, Hitoshi, 224 Takemitsu, Toru, 219 Takiguchi, Shūzō, 127 Tamarind Lithography Workshop (Los Angeles), 179 Tapié, Michel: curating international group show at Facchetti (1952), 89, 91; curating Opposing Forces (1953 group exhibition), 93–94; curating Pollock exhibition at Facchetti (1952), 88–89, 122; curating the Galerie Rive Droite show (1955), 104; and the Gutai group, 128; at homecoming party (Paris 1958), 132; introduction to Martha Jackson, 104; and the Japanese art scene, 119, 127; naming l’École du Pacifique (School of the Pacific), 90; and the New Arts Society, 213; in New York, 124; as polymath, 88. See also Art Informel Tate (London): Around the Blue (1958), 180; The New American Painting (1958–59), 143

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Teshigahara, Sōfu, 119, 128. See also Sōgetsu school A Testament to the Wilderness (homage to Jungian analyst C. A. Meier), 259–60 Thailand travel, 131, 132 Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie (Brussels), ceiling project, 276 Thiem, Ellen, as secretary, 216 Thomas, Bob, and wind energy, 247–48 Tiefenauspital (hospital in Bern), 161, 167. See also health—urogenital tuberculosis Tiepolo, Giambattista, 118 Tijuana, Mexico, SF’s unconventional cancer treatments in, 289–90, 291 Time magazine, 110, 112, 192, 234 Times (London), 143 Tinguely, Jean: death of, 287; in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256; and the Galerie Rive Droite, 109; Homage to New York, 153–54, 321n23; and the Nouveaux réalistes, 155; Study for the End of the World, No. 2, 177; visiting SF during tuberculosis relapse, 163 Ting, Walasse: and Nico Delaive, 275; Fresh Air School: Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell and Walasse Ting (1972–73 exhibition), 234; friendship with SF, 180–81, 183, 218–19; One Cent Life, 180, 181; trading works with SF, 201 titling of works, 106–7 Tobey, Mark, 58, 76, 90 Tokita, Dr. Kenneth, 291 Tokyo Mural (1957), 128–30, 129 Tokyo. See Japan Tomales Bay, 17, 279–80, 281–82 Tomkins, Calvin, 256 Tōno, Yoshiaki: correspondence of SF with, 105, 164, 206; friendship with SF, 128, 192, 236; gathering paintings in Japan for the Minami Gallery show, 164; introducing SF to Arata Isozaki, 254; married to Idemisu’s daughter Takako, 191, 194; Teruko’s letter to, complaining of heart trouble, 162; on the White paintings, 76, 312n19 Towards Disappearances (1958), 133 Towne, Robert, 261 Les Trois Marronniers, 71 Troubetzkoy, Igor, 92 Truman, Harry S, 89 tuberculosis. See health; hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist

Tullis, Barclay, 263 Tullis, Garner, 263–64 Turrell, James: as blockbuster artist, 3; commission from Giuseppe Panze for sitespecific installation, 247; friendship with SF, 203, 204; and the Light and Space movement, 203–4; Mendota Hotel studio, 203, 204; Mendota Stoppages, 203; Roden Crater, 203; and sky drawing collaboration with SF (1969), 220–221 Twain, Mark, 48 12 Americans (1956 exhibition), 109–10, 117 undifferentiated matter, 84 United States: Abstract Expressionism and nationalist movements, 89–90, 101; civil rights movement, 153; JFK election, 153; oral contraceptive pill, 153; as superpower, 89. See also atomic bomb; GI Bill of Rights; veterans University of California, Berkeley: fight song, 36; and job as orderly in hospital, 33; McCarthyism, 62; Vera Miller transfer to, 52; Osamu attending, 269; People’s Park, 221; premed chosen as major, 32–33; ROTC program and SF, 31; struggle to choose a major, 32; and study of Jung, 308n5; yearning for Vera, 31–34. See also hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist —art degrees: dates of degrees received, 310n4; Hans Hofmann’s influence on, 57, 59, 60; independence of SF in, 57–58; influence of, SF drifting between the California School of Fine Arts and, 62; intellectual rigor of program, 57; off-campus painting studio, 58; professors, 49–50, 57, 59, 60. See also Paris Untitled (1966–67), 207 Untitled (1980), 265, Color Plate 10 Upper Air (1951), Color Plate 2 USSR: and the atomic bomb, 151; Berlin Wall, 153; and the Korean War, 89 Valentine, De Wain, 252 van der Post, Laurens, 246 van der Rohe, Mies, 223 Van Gogh, Vincent: Le jardin du poète, Arles (Public Garden at Arles), 264; Portrait de Dr. Gachet, 264; prices, 264; The Starry Night, 106





Venice Biennale (1960), 155–57, 156 Venice, California: childhood visit to, 18; lease of studio building, 276 Venice, Italy, 97, 118, 195, 247 Vesuvio Café, 61 veterans: as artists, 48; art programs for the wounded, 49, 50–51, 309n8; Henry Miller books smuggled back home with, 55; SF sensitivity to the fact he had not experienced battle, 85. See also GI Bill of Rights; hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist Vietnam War, 219, 221 Vikings, 21 visions: of the orb of light, as dispelling the darkness and as source of painting ideas, 46–47, 49, 86; sought through SF’s nomadic lifestyle, 22 Vogue, 122, 123 Voulkos, Peter, 218 Wagner, George, 248 Wagner, Suzanne, Matter of Heart (documentary about Jung), 246, 248 Ward, Joan, 142 Warhol, Andy: in the Eight by Eight print portfolio as MOCA fundraiser, 256; the Factory, 203; Ferus Gallery exhibit of Campbell’s soup cans (1962), 177, 185; Kiki Kogelnik and, 182; in One Cent Life (Ting), 181; and the Palladium nightclub, 255; portraits of Marcia and Frederick Weisman, 252; and prints, 159; self-portrait of (1966), 238; SF suggesting commercial work be done by, 212; and the Velvet Underground, 223 Washington, Denzel, 261 Washington Post, 234 Washington state property, 297 Watanabe, Urato, 127–28 watercolor as medium, 55 Watson, Peter, 93 Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 4; Pilgrimage to Cythera (1717), 4 Wayfarers Chapel (Rancho Palos Verdes), 100–101 Wayne, June, 179 Weisman, Frederick, 185, 214, 251–52 Weisman, Marcia: and Walter Hopps’s classes in art collecting, 185, 251; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), 251–52, 256; and the New Arts Society, 214, 251–52; as taking per-

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sonally the loss of the Pasadena Art Museum’s focus on contemporary art, 252 Wessels, Glenn, 57 West Channel Road compound (Santa Monica): assistants sharing guesthouse, 215, 218; Augustus’s education and return of family to, 289; birthday celebration (71st), 291–92; and the blue Georgian Hotel, proximity to, 19, 182; the children relocating from Japan (1982), 261–62, 280; the children spending summers at (1974 onward), 240–42, 244; commuting to Northern California, 273, 277, 279; description of, 195, 201–2, 228; and distancing from Kogelnik, 182–83; “Doc” and Juliann “Spike” Groupp as helping to build, 183; garden of, 215, 299; holistic healers at, 243–44; and hopes of part-time custody of Kayo, 182; and inability to create new canvases, 192; Kayo at, 242–43; Kim-San (housekeeper), 241, 255, 262, 270; leaving to live in Japan (1973), 235; Mako at, 194, 195, 242, 270; Margaret as making major changes in, 269–70; nanny for the boys (Krauth Brand), 241, 262, 280; pets at, 201, 243, 262, 269–70, 277, 290; rented and then purchased by SF, 181, 183; studio art tours bringing the public, 258; studio at, 201–2, 241; studio party fundraiser for MOCA, 254–55; swimming pool at, 228; viewing of SF’s body at, 295, 296; visitors to, 218–19, 233, 244, 270; Mark Whitney living in guesthouse, 246, 249–50. See also assistants; Ocean Park studio West Coast painters, SF’s opinion as “the best in the U.S.,” 79 Wheelwright, Joseph and Jane, 246 white color: as a space of reflection/projection, 205; as both a hole and a whole, 206; and the individual as the center of space, 206, 238; and the late Blue Balls series, 178–79; as ma (gap of nonempty space between objects), 205–6; white paint as cost-cutting measure, 75, 77, 265; White series as “beautiful white dirt,” 99, 205; “white’s ringing silence,” 99 White Green Earth (1950–51), 75 White Line (1958–59), 191 The Whiteness of the Whale (1957–58), 133, 319n5 White Painting (1950–52), 75

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White paintings, 75–77, 84, 87, 99, 205–6, 209, 265, 312nn19,21 Whitney, Mark: autonomy granted by Sam as producer, 247; conversations with SF, 177, 250; ego of SF, worries about, 248, 250, 285; living in Santa Monica guesthouse, 246, 249–50; Matter of Heart (film about Carl Jung), 246–47, 249–50; on order and chaos in SF’s life, 246; Sam underwriting films of, 246, 247; spontaneous trip with SF to Italy, 247, 256 Whitney Museum of American Art: Business Buys American Art (1960), 144; group exhibition including SF during his first trip around the world, 132; Rothko refusing to participate in New Decade: 35 American Painters and Sculptors (1955), 102; Sam Francis Paintings: 1946–1972 (1972–73), 234–35 a whole incomplete world, creation of, 92, 96, 206 Wilder, Billy, 213 Williams, Tennessee, 97 Wilson, William, 256 Wind Harvest (wind energy company), SF’s investment in, 247–48, 288, 297 Winkler, Henry “the Fonz,” 254 Winther-Tamaki, Bert, 127, 300 wives. See Francis, Margaret; Goodwin, Muriel; Idemitsu, Mako; Miller, Vera Mae; Yokoi, Teruko Wolff, Toni, 167 Womanhouse, 232, 233 women artists: defended and supported by SF, 79, 168, 232–33, 233, 320n4; excluded from the Art and Technology program, 221; marginalization of, 320n3; and marriages to artists, generally, 141–43, 320n3; and motherhood, 320n3; in The New American Painting (1958–59), 143; self-portraits and, 238– 39; and technology/tools, 231–32 Wood, Grant, 309n8 Woolf, Virginia, 95 working methods: acrylic emulsions (plastic medium) added to oils, 145; assistants and, 217; Basel Mural, 2, 7, 133–34; Berlin Red, 223, 224, 237; canvas loom for giant canvases, 263; canvas preparation, 75, 98, 204, 217; closeness to the canvas, 1–2; cold plunge pool to enhance, 274; Edge paintings, 204–5; ego expan-

sion, 215, 273–74; exercise, 202, 273; horizontal, 159, 163, 204; horizontal, in hospitals, 44, 44, 163; at the Hôtel de Seine (incrementally unrolling a canvas), 74–75, 76, 80–81; In Lovely Blueness, 98–99; and lack of organizing form (1980s), 265; The Last Works, 293, 295– 96; later works, 265, 274, 275; lithography, 159, 179, 263–64; matrix paintings, 246; meditative thinking, 99; monster paintings, 94–95; multiple canvases at once, 133; natural light used for finishing touches, 2; need to be alone/have isolation and privacy, 77, 80, 128; paint making by assistant, 217–18; Pollock’s influence on, 122; self-portraits, 237, 239; in Sèvres house, 83–84; shoe removal, 204; showing the children, 241; Sōgetsu mural, 128; Jerry Sohn as reorganizing the studio, 265; West Channel Road studio, 202; White paintings, 75; withdrawing into a deep, focused calm, 77, 217 World War I: importance of aerial reconnaissance in, 38; Sam Sr. and, 12, 14, 31 World War II: atomic bomb attacks, 45–46; book burning, 68; collaboration of Vichy France, 68–69, 246; “degenerate art,” destruction of, 68; education of SF as interrupted by, 4, 33–34; European émigré artists fleeing Nazi persecution, 48, 68, 89; European intelligentsia fleeing Hitler, 89, 229; fear of washing out of the air corps, 37–38; health issues of SF prior to TB, 36, 308n6; Hitler youth, Hundertwasser surviving by joining, 155; holocaust of Jews and other “undesirables,” 68; Japanese internment camps, 33; Nazi occupation of Paris, 67–69; postwar Allied control of Japan’s oil industry, 190; ROTC program and SF, 31; SF becoming a vocal opponent of war, 45–46; SF joins the Army Air Corps, 33–34, 35–39, 85–86; training accidents, 37–38; United States involvement in, 31, 33; Vera and, 33, 36, 37; visual role in, SF desire for, 38–39, 307–8n5. See also atomic bomb; GI Bill of Rights; health—spinal tuberculosis; hospitalization for spinal tuberculosis and becoming an artist; veterans Wright, Frank Lloyd, 233; Guggenheim building, 210, 253 Wright, Lloyd, 100–101





Yokoi, Teruko: accused of breaking up marriage with Muriel, 151; as artist, 136, 141–43, 160, 169, 170, 176; and the atomic bomb, 151; background of, 136, 142, 151, 154; in Bern, 169–70; in the Chelsea Hotel live-work space, 141, 143, 146; and divorce, 176, 193, 195, 196; and Eastern philosophies and culture, SF’s love for, 136–37; exhibition at Minami Gallery (Tokyo, 1961), 159, 160, 162; funding Matter of Heart (film on Jung), 247; guilt of SF about the need to end the marriage/abandoning Kayo, 160, 162, 170; health breakdowns of SF in contact with, 182; health of, 162; and health of SF, 138; In Lovely Blueness held in trust for Kayo, 195; jumps into a Venetian canal, 157, 158; Kornfeld as intercessor for, 159, 162–63, 176, 322–23n2; and language barrier, 137, 142; medical treatment of, 169–70, 176; meeting SF, 136; and order, need for, 141, 151–52, 154–55, 176; pregnancy of, 137, 140, 141; return to Japan

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(1960) with Kayo to live with her parents, 159–60; return to Paris (1960), 148, 150; and Mark Rothko, infatuation with, 137; separate time of SF away at Bern studio, 152; separation due to SF’s touring/exhibition schedule, 140–41; separation due to SF’s tuberculosis relapse, 162–63; separation of the marriage, 169–70, 182; and sexual freedom of SF, lack of tolerance for, 142, 151, 156–57, 169–70; temperament of, 137, 142–43, 151–52, 157, 169–70, 277; tensions with SF, 150–52, 156–57; wedding, 138, 139. See also Malik, Kayo Andrea (née Francis) (daughter) Yomiuri Shimbun (newspaper), 207 Yoshihara, Jiro, 128 Young, La Monte, 219 Zazeela, Marian, 219 Zebala, Aneta, 300 Zen Buddhism: interest of Muriel in, 61, 83; interest of SF in, 42, 119; sumi-e ink studies, 81–82

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