Homage to Sam Francis
Museum JAN
February 3, 2023 – June 18, 2023
As a tribute to the centenary of the birth of Sam Francis (1923-1994) Museum Jan pays tribute to one of America’s greatest Abstract-Expressionists. The exhibition brings together works from the museum’s own collection, together with a loaned works from the private collection of Nico Delaive to give a cohesive overview of the career of the Post-War painter.
The exhibition aims to give far-reaching insight into the oeuvre of Sam Francis, who was very much related to but similarly diverted from the Abstract-Expressionist movement. In the 1940s, Francis was bed-ridden for several years due to a bone tuberculosis and picked up the brush as a therapeutic pastime. He befriended an art historian and lecturer who have him private lessons and introduced him to Modern European painters and to the work of contemporary painters such as Pollock, Still and Rothko. Soon Francis moved to Paris to get further acquainted with European art. This is where he started to develop his own purely abstract style focusing on a string use of light and color.
Not much later he went to Japan where his now gradually developing and changing style got influenced by Chinese and Japanese Art. Sam Francis became deeply aware of the currents and traditions in Western and Eastern Art and managed to combine them into explosively colorful works that included Japanese elements of negative space and openness. Throughout the years his style kept continuously mutating but his own expressionist autograph of colorful, organic forms full of light are recognizable in every piece he created. This made Francis a world-famous artist, which he remains to this day, with works in many major private and public collections all over the world.
The founder of Museum JAN, Jan van der Togt (1905-1995), deeply admired Sam Francis’ work and assembled one of the continent’s largest collections of his work. He saw a great interplay between these pieces and his large collection of glass art. For that reason the exhibition includes sculptures by artist and co-founder Jan Verschoor (1943) who engage in a powerful dialogue with Francis’ paintings.
The exhibition will be on view from February 3, 2023 – June 18, 2023
