Sam Francis at LACMA: a California original goes global 1

Visual arts
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Though his last productive years were spent in a Santa Monica studio, art fanciers with a taste for the color-laden Sam Francis (1923-1994) paintings had to search out isolated canvases at a couple of local museum installations. With “Sam Francis and Japan: Emptiness Overflowing” (through July 16 at LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of ...

‘United States of Abstraction’: a nice way of putting it

Visual arts
Shirley Jaffe, The Red Diamond (detail), 1964 So that is what we have going on here … abstraction! Life certainly feels abstract lately. When you untether from science, reason, and truth, and when the ravings of a mad man are considered worthy of the public square, never mind that children hear his rants, things are ...

Best of the West: Sam Francis retrospective @ Pasadena Museum

Visual arts
The exhibition celebrates internationally acclaimed California abstract painter Sam Francis (1923–1994). A highly coherent survey approach to his career has been organized by curators Peter Selz and Debra Burchett-Lere around key periods of the artist’s ouevre, starting from early works made in the Bay Area in the 1940s, and leading through works made in the ...