In Lovely Blueness No. 2

In the mid 1950s, Sam Francis inaugurated a succession of monumentally scaled paintings informed by a variety of artistic sources, including Abstract Expressionism and French Impressionism. With their spontaneous brushwork and lyrical interplay of primary hues, these paintings established Francis as one of the foremost colorists of the postwar era. The artist often found inspiration in literary works and kept a notebook containing titles of books and verses. He named this and a related painting (In Lovely Blueness No. 1, 1955–57) after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin, hoping to capture the poem’s sublime imagery and prophetic vision.