Sunny side up

ArtForum, March, 1999 by Peter Plagens

They weren't, however, too far-out to keep from catching on in Paris. The eminent French critic Michel Tapie included Francis in a couple of bellwether shows: "Signifiants de l'informel" in 1952 and "Un art autre" in 1953. Pierre Schneider called his 1955 solo at the Galerie Rive Droite "the most stimulating show in Paris." A year later, Francis made his American solo debut at Martha Jackson Gallery, and that got him into the Museum of Modern Art's influential "Twelve Americans" exhibition. He was also one of the seventeen painters included in "The New American Painting," the MOMA-sponsored show (which we now know was funded by the CIA through the USIA, to demonstrate to the world that American artists enjoyed unparalleled freedom to paint as they pleased) that toured Europe in 1958 and '59.

By that time, Francis was painting the pictures for which he'd be most remembered: mural-sized canvases whose oceans of glaring white are interrupted by continents, islands, peninsulas, and isthmuses of intense blue, red, and yellow deposited by an artist as terpsichorean as Pollock and as wristy as de Kooning. Stunning from afar, remarkably nuanced when perused up close, these vintage Francises seem to answer in the affirmative any question about Abstract Expressionism's ability to live by unfettered lyricism alone. When Pollock died at age forty-four in 1956, there were those who thought Francis would assume his mantle. But, for all the surface similarities of their work - scale, splattered or flung paint, horizontality, unified blankish background - Francis essentially rejected the tortured, Romantic heroism that Pollock had had thrust on him, and, to a great extent, that he had thrust on himself. In one specific, pictorial quality, however, Pollock was more at ease. He "framed" the compositions of his drip paintings naturally, letting the density and loopiness of the particular picture dictate the way the whole thing fit within the canvas. Francis, to the contrary, frequently overthought the way his quasi action paintings would adjust to his formats, and practically everything he painted after 1959 has a slight, but pervasive, art director's air about it.

While Abstract Expressionism in the later '50s hadn't exactly become the stuff of commercial art studios, it was, Agee writes, "losing its directness and sense of sureness as it gained wider and wider currency among artists." Meaning: For all its formalism, its attention to what paint itself can do, Abstract Expressionism needed an establishment aesthetic to rebel against almost as much as Dada did. Once it became standard operating procedure in many quarters - once it became, for instance, middlebrow enough for Francis to receive mural commissions (in Basel and Tokyo in the mid-'50s) - it lost a lot of its street cred. Still, Francis, with his acrobatic, show-offy splashes, puddles, and skeins of paint, hardly belonged to "Post Painterly Abstraction," Clement Greenberg's coinage for the work of painters like Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Frank Stella (though Francis was chosen for that 1964 exhibition, not by Greenberg, apparently, but by James Elliott, then curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). If anything, he should have been included in a show that never was: "An Even More Painterly Abstraction."