Untitled #8 (SF59-411), 1959

Christie’s, New York, auction, New York, May 9, 1997, lot 117 Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg Private Collection

Gabrielle Selz, “Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis”, Berkeley, 2021, pages 130 and 143

1959 was an important year in the art world of New York. The exhibition The New American Painting, which Sam Francis had a work in, returned to New York after an eight-country year-long tour. Reviews were mixed, but the city’s art scene heralded it as a success. Art appraiser and author Gabrielle Selz writes: “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.” “Untitled #8” is a compact work that still shows the deliberate spontaneity of the abstract expressionists. We also see the influence of the artist’s travels around the world, specifically his time in Japan. At this point in his career, Francis had completed his Tokyo Mural at the Sōgetsu auditorium. This large mural is dominated by large swirls of blue covering the entire canvas: “The colour blue, Sam said, represented himself. This is the one reason why it dominates his oeuvre. Blue was the colour, he said, that he used to incorporate himself into the works. ‘Blue spreads out, it’s a colour that is strongly expansive.’” Even though the dominant colour in this work is orange, yellow, dark purple, and black, small splatters of blue peek out from behind these larger forms.