Executed during an epoque when Sam Francis had achieved the pictorial synthesis of influence that would define his late and most lyrical style, Untitled (SF87-259) illuminates his continuing global focus that peaked by its 1987 year of execution. Francis had then recently emerged newly inspired after a series of public projects abroad from his California studio. For instance, in 1986 he completed a ceiling mural for a total redesign of the Royal Theater of La Monnaie in Brussels. For the entryway of the opera and music hall, Francis was commissioned to paint a three-part surface above a floor that Sol LeWitt designed with rigorous, bold black geometry. While independent in ethics and form from LeWitt, Francis appears in SF87-259 to have been likely impacted by the mathematical rigor of LeWitt’s Monnaie construction, and by the opening of the theater, when Beethoven’s ninth symphony was played. The emotional intensity of Francis’s acrylic paint in this piece zips across the page with sparks equal to Beethoven’s blazing choral sequence Ode to Joy, while demonstrating dedication to Francis’s key literary, philosophical, and visual framework persistent since the 1960s.

Lyrics in Beethoven’s final movement, Wir betreten feuertrunken, describe sentiments of souls coated with fire and informed by divine power, an image that can outline the formal and conceptual elements of Francis’s composition. Francis in his lifetime was particularly linked to the British poet and painter William Blake, whose dates overlapped with Beethoven’s, and whose writing and printmaking especially correspond to SF87-259. Connections between Francis’s mind and Blake’s poem The Tyger have become public, and its final paragraph reading “Tyger Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night: What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” proves strikingly evident for Francis here on paper. Ferocious “symmetry” at first finds its place in his structural mirrors of dripping, action brushstrokes. Like LeWitt whose oblique black shapes built from one another in the Brussels La Monnaie, Francis applies a network of “L”-resembling lines in exceptionally deep and brilliant shades, ranging from one that seems black but in fact represents his characteristic dark mix of purple and green, to another that jumps with orange as vivid as the “Tyger” that Blake invokes.

Furthering this ingraining of German, British, and broadly American artistic consciousness into the chromatic makeup of SF87-259, Francis upon its tactile plane additionally recalls both the narrative and formalist strategies of Blake’s frontispiece The Ancient of Days, which Blake worked on until 1827, the year of Beethoven’s death. Francis’s ethereal and near mystical overlays of soft violet streaked upon crimson, ultramarine and cerulean blue, in addition to tangerine and yellow with cadmium-like richness in particular echoe the coloristic schema in Blake’s copy K variation for his Days design. Francis’s internal thought process that lingered into 1987 accordingly relates to Blake’s depicted subject, the myth of Urizen separating light from darkness with a compass. Francis during his life likewise explained his belief in darkness and light as constellations of one another that captured the movement of eternity, a phenomenon expressed here in the contrast between his white paper void, and the liquid movement of his textural drips and washes of acrylic. With a tone as joyously passionate as Beethoven’s music, and as poignantly intellectual as the gesture of Blake’s Urizen, Francis with concepts circulating the world, resultantly crafts a burning metaphor.

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