Before Sam Francis found his artistic calling, he studied botany, medicine, and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1940s. He enrolled in the US Air Force for the last two years of the war. He suffered serious injuries in a crash, but during extended stays in military hospitals and clinics, he discovered painting. After his recovery, he returned to Berkeley, where he studied fine arts from 1948 to 1950. During this time, he came into contact with the art of the Abstract Expressionists, including Mark Rothko, Arshile Gorky, and Clifford Still. After completing his studies, Francis moved to Paris, where he established contacts with several other artists. During this Parisian phase, he developed his distinctive technique: colors stream onto the canvas in rivulets of varying thickness and blend into large, expressive color fields. In 1957, Francis embarked on a trip around the world that took him to Japan—a stay that had a lasting impact on him and his art. He was inspired by traditional painting techniques, particularly by the use of thin layers of paint and the deliberate integration of large empty spaces to create a sense of openness. These elements became a central component of his artistic expression.
While in Japan, he also created his first large-format murals, and, in 1959, he produced the present work, “Fragment of Pure Land”. Using overlapping patches of color—some glazed, some opaque, sometimes densely packed, sometimes generously distributed—Francis composed a complex color architecture. Various shades of blue meet red and yellow accents, while yellow and green areas fan out and take up the dominant blue. The empty spaces also gain an independent meaning, and the composition unfolds its tension through the interplay between symmetrical order and dynamic color distribution. The aesthetic quality of this multi-layered work is extraordinary: it offers the viewer both meditative calm and lively vibrancy. This corresponds to Francis' lyrical variation on Abstract Expressionism, in which the focus is less on the impulsive act of Action Painting than on the poetic effect of color composition—an approach that “Fragment of Pure Land” impressively illustrates. [AW]