Enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, Sam Francis also associated with the students and staff at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where he was exposed to the teachings of David Park, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still. Francis responded to the freedom and intellectual rigor associated with Abstract Expressionism, adopting its practice as his own visual language. Today, he is the best-known representative of the Bay Area’s second wave of Abstract Expressionism, although his own time there was limited.

In 1950, Francis moved to Paris, spending the next decade traveling throughout Europe and Japan. In Paris, he associated with other American painters like Al Held and Joan Mitchell, and he significantly influenced them, as well as other French artists who were beginning to explore Abstract Expressionism or Art Informel. Francis’s use of paint “corpuscles,” clusters of cell-shaped dabs of color on a white field developed during this time, and he began to restrict himself to simple geometric forms and a limited palette of primary hues.

In 1962, Francis returned to California, settling in Santa Monica, where he continued to be inspired by the direct experience of nature, especially the quality of California light. The significance of this is marked by the increasing role that negative space played in the balance of his compositions. He also branched out in his choice of mediums, becoming a practitioner of watercolor and of printmaking, producing a large number of lithographs in color and black and white during the 1960s and ’70s.