Our traveling exhibition, Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opens today at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania.Sam Francis's painting is among the seventy artworks appearing in this show.
Eyeball These Balls
Our traveling exhibition, Modernism and Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, opens today at the Allentown Art Museum in Pennsylvania.Sam Francis's painting is among the seventy artworks appearing in this show.
An admirer of the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, Sam Francis believed that blue expressed darkness and speculation, as well as the unconscious. When a Japanese critic proposed "Blue Balls" as this painting's title, Francis embraced the phrase for its suggestive connotations.
Source: Modernism & Abstraction: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (exhibition text, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 1999).
Pictured: Sam Francis, 1923–94, Blue Balls, 1960, oil, 90 3/4 x 78 3/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of S.C. Johnson and Son, Inc.