The painterly abstraction of Sam Francis is most often associated with the American Abstract Expressionism. As a leading second-generation exponent of the movement, he created some of the most innovative explorations of colour and light in twentieth-century art. His work can be found in numerous public collections worldwide, including MoMa (New York), Tate Gallery (London), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the Guggenheim Museum (New York), the Carnegie Museum of Art (Pittsburgh), the Idemitsu Museum of Arts (Tokyo) and the Centre Pompidou (Paris). Francis’ treatment of colour and space was profoundly influenced by a 1957 visit to Japan, where he eventually established a studio. Although he returned to California in the early 1960s, he maintained studios around the world working in Bern, New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Tokyo. He was the first Post-War American painter whose reach was truly international.

Francis' works of the early 1970s have been referred to as Fresh Air pictures. Created by adding pools, drips and splatters of color to wet bands of paint applied with a roller, these works re-asserted the artist's interest in color. By 1973–4 many of Francis' paintings featured a formal grid or matrix made up of crossing tracks of color. Stemming from Sam Francis' most evolutionary period and combining a career-long fascination and connection with Japan, the present work is an important example of the artist's practice.

His works on paper have always been a complete part of the artist's practice, not mere studies or drawings, and the fullness of the composition and undulating use of color in the present work underscores this. Dedicated exhibitions to the artist's works on paper, including a diplomatic exhibition organized by the US International Communication Agency (now the US State Department) in 1979 further emphasize this.

Samuel Francis was born in 1923 in California. His family was defined by a rich heritage and culture, counting Samuel Pepys, Paul Revere and Henri Tolouse-Lautrec among their ancestors. Francis began painting in his early twenties. He privately studied painting under David Park, pioneer of the Bay Area Figurative School. During this time, Francis became part of the Abstract Expressionism movement as a second-generation artist. Though largely self-taught, by the summer of 1950, he was at the frontier of becoming a significant Post-War American painter. Francis travelled widely throughout his career. He enrolled at the Fernand Léger Atelier in Paris where he became familiar with Pierre Bonnard’s and Henri Matisse’s explorations of colour and light. The lessons he absorbed from his time in Paris resulted in immediate critical acclaim and led to his association with Art Informel, though he was never formally tied to any movement. Several years spent in Japan influenced his appreciation of the importance of whiteness and the idea of the void. His paintings, as the Japanese poet and critic Yoshiaki Tono aptly noted, are of a “completely calculated Innocence”, a reference to the intuitive simplicity and understated nature of Francis’ oeuvre.