Authors: Kathleen S. Bartels, William C. Agee, Debra Burchett-Lere

Sam Francis (San Mateo, USA, 1923 - Santa Monica, USA, 1994) is instrumental in the international recognition of new American painting in the Fifties. For four decades his presence in Europe and Asia, and his native country, bears witness to the unceasing vitality of American art. His work is influenced by abstract painting from the San Francisco Bay Area, headed by Mark Rothko and Clyfford Still, and French artistic traditions of colour, exemplified by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard, who he discovers upon moving to Paris in 1950. Although initially Francis is linked to the New York School, his art never possesses the gestural imprint or the rawness of Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning, despite the respect he professes for them as artists. This exhibition of paintings by Sam Francis from 1947 to 1990 in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía is made up of sixty-five paintings and twenty-five drawings.