TATE’s new IN FOCUS deep dives into Sam’s “Around the Blues 1957, 1962–3”

TATE’s In Focus uses previously unpublished archival letters, photographs, press materials, shipping records and curatorial documents to chart Around the Blues movements from 1957 to its acquisition by Tate in 1964. It explores the impact that the Parisian art world of the 1950s had on the development of Francis’s approach to abstraction, and how this context shaped the way Around the Blues was interpreted by critics, art historians and the artist himself. An essay on Francis’s love for air travel reveals how the psychological, physical and perceptual effects of flying inform his paintings, while another looks at different readings of Francis’s work put forward by Japanese critics and supporters when the artist visited Japan in the years of the ‘informal whirlwind’.

Published in July 2019, the project is authored by Natalie Adamson (University of St Andrews) with contributions by Elizabeth Buhe (Smithsonian American Art Museum) and Bert Winther-Tamaki (University of California, Irvine).

This In Focus project was made possible through support from the Terra Foundation for American Art.