Sunny side up

SIMULTANEOUS HOME-TURF RETROSPECTIVES FOR CALIFORNIA NATIVE SAM FRANCIS AND WEST COAST ADOPTEE BAS JAN ADER PROVIDE THE OCCASION FOR A PAIR OF ARTFORUM CONTRIBUTING EDITORS TO REASSESS THE RESPECTIVE LEGACIES OF TWO CENTRAL PROTAGONISTS IN THE PREHISTORY OF LA'S CURRENT ARTISTIC FLOWERING.

A lot of people still wonder whether or not Sam Francis was a bona fide Abstract Expressionist. Of course he was. His paintings are abstract, aren't they? And they're "expressionist" - at least in the evident sense that he applied paint in a loose, vigorous manner and left a lot of the details to chance. But if expressionism also implies some special access to raw emotion, particularly of the angsty, heart-of-darkness variety, then Francis's sea-and-spray lyricism strains the notion pretty much to the breaking point (though the brooding side of the story ain't exactly a tight fit when it comes to a lot of the core Tenth Streeters either). And then there's the related question of locale. Did living in New York confer on its painters an authenticity inconceivable when it comes to a California sybarite? But the real question is this: Can a painter make significant work in a style born in and of a radical aesthetic impulse when that impulse no longer has much forward momentum or urgency? Could Francis - or, for that matter, anyone of his generation - have made a difference within the "triumphal" American tradition by means of an unencumbered pure-painterly lyricism? William Agee's full-scale retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, should give viewers ample chance to sort these questions out for themselves.

Although Francis can't really be counted among the first-generation Abstract Expressionists, he does, as Agee points out, follow "hard on their heels, as part of something that might be called the 'one-and-a-half generation.'" On the one hand, Francis must be considered, along with Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, one of the developers of the big, "allover" picture - a more lasting monument to Abstract Expressionism than physical catharsis and "action painting." On the other hand, Francis was born nineteen years after de Kooning and eleven after Pollock, but only three years before Joan Mitchell (one of his artist-friends in Paris, and a definitive second-generation AbExer) and five before Helen Frankenthaler, with whose work his thinly, even transparently layered liquid mosaics share notable affinities.

Born in San Mateo, California, in 1923, Francis dropped out of the University of California, Berkeley (where he was studying botany, psychology, and medicine), to enlist in the army air corps at the age of twenty. In an abrupt end to a training flight in 1944 (no gas), Francis crash-landed in the Arizona desert and suffered a spinal injury, subsequently complicated by spinal tuberculosis. Bedridden, he began to paint for distraction. "Nobody thought I'd get well," he once said. "I painted myself out of this illness." After the war, he began studying art - under David Park and Still, in the existentialist milieu of the Bay Area's burgeoning Beat culture. If he'd stayed in northern California, Francis might have played Tintoretto to Richard Diebenkorn's Titian - that is, a prolific, reputable Number Two to a won't-he-ever-go-away Number One. His work also might have taken on some of the cragginess of Frank Lobdell and Hassel Smith, two still-underappreciated Bay Area abstract painters. But in 1950, Francis made a fateful decision: He moved to Paris, breaking out of the Bay Area's relatively small, cozy scene, but also, crucially, opting out of New York at the public acme of Abstract Expressionism (which culminated in the famous Time and Life spreads on Jackson Pollock).

Whatever positive effect Francis's eight-year stay in the City of Light had on his oeuvre, the sojourn had a lasting negative impact on his reputation. "San Francisco + France = Sam Francis" went one art-world witticism of the '70s. When New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote in a 1991 review that Francis's work "holds the eye more by decorative flamboyance than by genuine depth of feeling," you could feel presiding over that judgment Clement Greenberg's animus toward the Parisian aesthetic in modern art: "In Paris they finish and unify the abstract picture in a way that makes it more agreeable to standard taste." Francis wasn't, however, overwhelmingly influenced by the painters of postwar Paris. He found Jean Fautrier, for example, "very academic, but nice," and remarked that the comparatively gritty Jean Dubuffet was "interesting, but did not interest me too much." The guy he liked was the French-Canadian abstractionist Jean-Paul Riopelle, one of the headliners of l'art informel. The guy he really liked was Monet - the late Monet of the "Water Lilies" in the Orangerie, that is.

In spite of Francis's inevitable attraction to the School of Paris's biomorphism (refined from Picasso by the likes of Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy), he didn't allow it to turn his abstractions into polite simplifications of still lifes or landscapes. In Paris, Francis hung around with Al Held and Norman Bluhm, two artists whose work is synonymous with American expansiveness and bombast. Francis continued to paint large, allover pictures, cobbled like an alley in the Marais with rounded, sausagey blocks of layered, pale, translucent color. The canvases he painted during the Paris years strike today's eye as Francis's most contemporary and innovative pictures; they'd be more at home in a show with Robert Ryman, Brice Marden, and Robert Mangold than anything he painted afterward.