Very First Stone

Sam Francis made this lithograph in 1959, right at the height of his Paris years, when his work was shifting from dense, jewel-like color fields toward something more open and breathable. The title, 'Very First Stone,' carries a quiet poetry that suits Francis well. A lithograph is literally drawn on stone (or a stone substitute), and the title may nod to that material origin while also suggesting something primordial, a mark at the beginning of things. By 1959 Francis had already painted large-scale murals for the Kunsthalle Basel and was finishing a commission for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York. He was working at an international scale, yet this intimate print pulls back to something more elemental.

Francis came to painting in a hospital bed recovering from spinal tuberculosis, and a kind of luminous emptiness runs through nearly everything he made. His abstract expressionism never quite matched the brooding intensity of Rothko or Pollock. He was drawn instead to light, to color pooling and drifting across white space. On this sheet, the white of the paper is not background. It is an active presence, the silence between notes. The loose, biomorphic forms feel less composed than arrived at, which is entirely the point. Francis trusted accident and the physical gesture of the hand. Look for the way ink pools at the edges of each form, darker where it gathered, fading where it ran thin.