Executed in 1984, the present painting is an important large-scale example of Sam Francis’s late work. Untitled (1984) was previously in the collection of the Idemitsu Museum of Arts, Japan, and was included in a number of major retrospectives of the artist’s work, including the extensive Japanese retrospective that opened at the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, in 1988 and subsequently travelled to Karuizawa, Shiga, Kurashiki and, in 1989, Tokyo. Works from the Idemitsu collection were later shown across Japan in the major touring exhibition Sam Francis: From the Idemitsu Collection in 2002–03.

In the present painting, strokes, splashes and drips of ink-blue, green, orange and yellow frame the white plane of the composition. For Francis, this white field was not simply negative space, but an active element closely connected to the element of air, as well as to Zen notions of emptiness. The coloured forms gather around the edges of the support, while the central expanse of white remains charged by their movement and intensity. The artist developed exceptionally close ties to Japan, which were sustained throughout much of his career. His relationship with the country unfolded through repeated visits, friendships, exhibitions and collecting relationships, and Japanese aesthetics became an important point of reference within his practice. Francis’s first visit to Japan in 1957 coincided with an opening up of expanses of white space in his painterly compositions. His approach to pictorial space developed a particularly close affinity with the Japanese concept of ma, which describes the interval or tension between form and non-form, and the way in which spatial emptiness can itself create a sense of place, rhythm and atmosphere. From this period onwards, Francis increasingly incorporated substantial white areas into his compositions, allowing painted gesture and open space to define one another.

Colour remained fundamental to Francis’s practice. From the late 1970s onwards, he used dispersions – concentrated pigment preparations composed of paint and ink – to develop highly specific hues in his studio, including intense shades of deep blue that became characteristic of his later work. “Colour is the real substance for me; the real underlying thing which drawing and line are not,” Francis stated. In the present work, the dense blue passages provide the composition with its greatest visual weight. At the same time, the looping lines, splashes and fluid marks have an almost calligraphic quality, recording the speed and movement of the artist’s hand.

Idemitsu Sazō, founder of the Idemitsu Museum of Arts and an important collector of Francis’s work, first encountered Francis’s painting at the artist’s studio in the Chelsea Hotel in New York in the late 1950s. Francis was away at the time, and the Japanese art critic Tōno Yoshiaki was using the studio. There, Idemitsu saw Francis’s paintings for the first time and became so taken with one canvas, White Line (1958–59), that he asked Tōno to purchase it for his collection. This first acquisition marked the beginning of what would become the largest collection of Francis’s work in the world, with the Idemitsu Museum of Arts eventually holding around 160 works by the artist. At the time, modernist abstraction was still a relatively new area for Idemitsu, whose collection had until then centered primarily on works by the eighteenth-century Zen monk and painter Sengai Gibon, together with other Japanese and Chinese antiquities.

Sam Francis was the subject of numerous major institutional exhibitions, including at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1959, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in 1967, the Centre national d’art contemporain at the Fondation Rothschild in Paris in 1968, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1972, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1979, and the Museum of Modern Art, Toyama, Japan, in 1988. He was also included in 12 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1956, and participated in both Documenta II in 1959 and Documenta III in 1964 in Kassel. Francis’s work is held in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.