Sam Francis

American (1923 - 1994)

Sam Francis was an American painter.
Based on ArtValue.ca records, Sam Francis's estimated art value is C$100,000 (*)

Sam Francis's work could be available for sale at public auction with prices in the range of C$25,000 - C$250,000, or even much higher.

From ArtValue.ca records, the highest price paid at auction for an acrylic painting work attributed to Sam Francis (1923-1994) was C$169,250 - paid for "Untitled" at Heffel in Vancouver on Wed, May 30, 2018.
ArtValue.ca has 61 auction art sale records for their acrylic painting results, with prices in the range of C$25,000 to C$250,000.

Heffel Auction House Biography and Notes

Sam Francis was a prominent member of the American Abstract Expressionists. He worked in the Bay area of California, USA, in the 1940s and in France in the 1950s. Like the porous canvas into which the vibrant pigments of Untitled, Los Angeles soak, he absorbed and made his own the most prominent techniques and priorities of American Abstract Expressionism, cognate abstract work in Europe and the tenets of Asian art (after spending time in Japan). Francis was included in critic Clement Greenberg’s pivotal 1964 exhibition Post-Painterly Abstraction. Greenberg chose 31 painters – among them Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Frank Stella, as well as Canadians Jack Bush, Kenneth Lochhead and Arthur McKay – to announce new priorities in abstraction. These included a greater emphasis on saturated colour across the field of the canvas and less dependence on painterly gesture, which the influential Greenberg argued had become mannered in the New York School. Though he boldly deployed the foundational drip technique of Jackson Pollock in this painting, Francis was part of the evolution of and away from the peak of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s.

(*) Value is calculated as an average of the top acrylic painting sale records from ArtValue.ca database.
This information is not intended to substitute professional advice.
To estimate the value of a specific artwork created by Sam Francis, follow some of the advice from our Valuating art page, or contact an art specialist if our automated estimate value is greater than C$2,500.