Reckon | The Whole World's a Stage

i12bent:

Sam Francis (June 25, 1923 - 1994): Blue Balls, 1960 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“Of the West Coast artists that Martha Jackson brought to New York, certainly the most celebrated and ultimately the most successful was a painter whose reputation was well established in Europe before Americans paid him much heed. Sam Francis was born in San Mateo, California, and studied medicine and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley; in 1943 as a pilot for the Army Air Corps he suffered a serious spinal injury. Confined in a hospital for months, immobile except for his head and arms, he abandoned any thought of becoming a doctor and took up painting. In a wheelchair he visited the California Palace of the Legion of Honor and saw El Greco’s St. Peter, of which he recalled, “It knocked me out.… I probably would have died if it had not been for painting.… The picture by El Greco changed my life.” On his release from the hospital he studied painting with David Park, painted his first abstract work in 1947, received his BA and MA in art from Berkeley, and moved to Paris in 1950 where he studied briefly at the Academie Fernand Léger and had a painting in the VI Salon de Mai in Paris. Soon after arriving he established friendships with Al Held, Norman Bluhm, Joan Mitchell, and John Hultberg—future Martha Jackson artists.” - Harry Rand. The Martha Jackson Memorial Collection (Washington, D.C.: The Smithsonian Institution,1985).

i12bent:

Jack Beal (b. June 25, 1931): Figure in Black Tights, 1967 - oil on canvas (Smithsonian)

“An Abstract Expressionist when he left the Art Institute of Chicago in 1956, Beal has since become a dedicated realist who sees art as a potentially powerful moral force. He has great regard for Platonic ideals of truth, beauty, and goodness, and admires both the realism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting and the compositional authority of Renaissance art. Since moving to New York in the late 1950s with his wife, painter Sondra Freckelton, Beal has painted still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, although in recent years his most ambitious undertakings have been large-scale allegories and myths. In describing his approach, Beal calls himself a “life painter” and says he is committed to human over aesthetic concerns. Yet his intricate complexes of figures and surface patterns, along with his adroit handling of space, reveal his sophisticated, accomplished sense of composition.” - Virginia M. Mecklenburg. Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).