Sunny side up

ArtForum, March, 1999 by Peter Plagens

In 1962, Francis moved to southern California, where he would spend the last thirty-three years of his life. Francis's career there was one long, steady success story. He found himself always at or near the top of any list of "great" artists who happened to live in or around Los Angeles; his only competitors were Diebenkorn (who'd come down from the Bay Area), Ed Kienholz, and Robert Irwin. He had show after show, of canvases and, increasingly, works on paper. He made print after print after print. And it was when the assembly line really started cranking that his work began to turn a bit stale, a bit predictable. Except for the remarkable "Blue Balls" pictures of the early '60s (which were "inspired," as it were, by another illness, this time renal tuberculosis, which painfully swelled and discolored Francis's eponymous testicles), his paintings started to look like an ongoing technique applied to large or small formats, depending on what the market would bear, and varied in configuration (the almost-vacant "Edge" paintings, 1966-69, the transparent wet grids corralling his liquid primaries, the snaky-patterned pictures done more or less the same way, and so on) according to the influence of the moment (Minimalism, a Jungian therapist). Francis's aggregations of acrylic showed up in the galleries with the same frequency, repetition, and trademark status as Picasso's two-eyes-on-the-same-side-of-the-head had several generations earlier.

Acrylic, by the way, seems to me to have been to Francis what masking tape was to Al Held: It allowed the artist to do whatever the hell he wanted with paint with almost no resistance from his materials. Painting big, watery, drippy, allover abstractions in oil is terribly difficult. And the difficulty, in my opinion, lends a gravity, a seriousness, a mystery to Francis's paintings from the '50s and early '60s that is lacking from his work after 1964. Without the convenience of water-based plastic paint, I don't think Francis, in his all-too-frequent "off periods," would have veered as perilously close to the likes of Paul Jenkins and - dare I say it? - Peter Max as he sometimes did.

Francis's detractors - and there are many - intend to underrate him because they believe, consciously or not, that an expressionist abstraction (which is not necessarily the same thing as Abstract Expressionism) has to have come from a more or less ugly, bumptious urban environment like New York's (in fact, only New York's) in order to achieve anything beyond mere decoration. Francis's champions - and there are, well, at least a few - fail to see that a lot of his hot-housed "series" paintings are fairly unoriginal pastiches of his best work from the late '50s, inflated with deftness and scale and repetition that their baseline aesthetics can't really support. Agee, in his catalogue essay, keeps trying to find ways of saying that yet another specious Francis painting gambit (though not the ones in which Francis had helicopters and skiers dispensing colored smoke) is a winner. "The 'Matrix' and random 'beam' paintings [early '70s through 1980] accounted for some of the true high points in Francis's art," he writes. He follows close on with, "To experience 'Big Red II' [1979] . . . is to understand the special power of these paintings, which are still too little known." And finally, "After 1980, Francis's color poured forth, breaking loose from the formal structure of the grid. He worked with the easy, assured confidence that came from thirty-five years of experience, exploring all manners of medium, size, and scale." (This is why "hyperbole" is in the dictionary.) In the end, Agee says, Francis's "prolific output makes it difficult to grasp the true fullness or development of his art." Translation: Francis turned out tons and tons and tons of stuff, and a lot of it was crap. As bad art tends to drag down good art, Francis's best work tends to get lost, or, more accurately, buried. MOCA'S retrospective is sure to swirl with evidence for both sympathetic and unsympathetic views of Francis. Myself, I'll go with open eyes, and even a bit of a favorable bias: Although Diebenkorn's quality is generally more consistent, I've always thought the greatest Francises are easily better than the best Diebenkorns. I suspect we'll all come away from the show at least knowing that we've seen a lot of good painting.