American Painters in Paris : quatre artistes américains majeurs de l’Action Painting.

Un regards croisé sur l’oeuvre de Sam Francis, Paul Jenkins, Mark Tobey et Loïs Frederick.

Ces artistes ont en commun le goût d’une gestuelle libre et la passion de la couleur, ainsi que l’influence de l’Europe sur leur oeuvre.

Ces oeuvres incarnent une fusion des scènes artistiques américaines et européennes, orientales pour certains.

Chacun d’entre eux a puisé de ses voyages et de sa terre natale la source de son inspiration : l’explosion de la couleur en Californie chez Sam Francis, les paysages sauvages du Nebraska pour Loïs Frederick…

Tous ont partagé leurs vies entre les États-Unis et l’Europe. Tous ont vécu à Paris où ils se sont rencontrés dans les années 1950. Un Paris qui connaît à cette époque une scène artistique bouillonnante où jaillit l’expression de l’abstraction sous toutes ses formes.

Mark Tobey est le premier à s’installer ponctuellement à Paris en 1925, puis y voyage en 1955 où son premier solo show en Europe est organisé. En 1961, une rétrospective lui est même consacrée au Musée des Arts Décoratifs à Paris, une première pour un artiste américain. Trois ans auparavant, l’artiste a reçu le Grand Prix de la Peinture de la Biennale de Venise, premier artiste américain à recevoir ce prix si prestigieux depuis James Whistler…

C’est à Paris que Paul Jenkins rencontre Mark Tobey mais aussi la galeriste américaine Martha Jackson: elle sera l’un de ses principaux marchands. C’est à cette époque aussi que le premier solo show de Paul Jenkins est organisé à Paris au Studio Paul Facchetti. Loïs Frederick arrive quant à elle dès 1953 à Paris grâce à l’obtention du Fulbright Award, la même année que Paul Jenkins qu’elle rencontre ainsi que Sam Francis.

Tous ont produit à Paris où ils ont eu un atelier. Rue Decrès pour Paul Jenkins – Joan Mitchell dont l’atelier était à St. Mark’s Place à New York et lui échangèrent leurs ateliers pendant deux ans – d’abord à Arcueil pour Sam Francis et à la Cité Universitaire pour Loïs Frederick.

En développant chacun une technique qui leur est propre, tous s’inscrivent dans le courant de l’Action painting d’Après-guerre, entre spontanéité et maîtrise du geste artistique.

Mark Tobey est l’un des tout premiers à exploiter avec Jackson Pollock la technique du all over avec ses white writings dès 1935, ces surcouches de couleur blanche recouvrant totalement ses écritures calligraphiques. Sam Francis aussi utilise la technique du all over par le dripping, explorant des rythmes aussi variés qu’audacieux : deeps, mosaïques, blue balls, mandalas… Paul Jenkins explore quant à lui la technique du controlled paint-pouring qui l’invite à verser la couleur à même le pot directement sur le support, laissant le medium couler librement sur la toile tout en le dirigeant avec un couteau d’ivoire. Loïs Frederick enfin, scande sa toile de larges coups de brosses solides qui structurent puissamment l’ensemble de ses peintures. Sa palette est audacieuse jusqu’à utiliser les fluorescents qui irradient totalement son œuvre selon une volonté toujours plus vive de capter la lumière.

C’est aujourd’hui un privilège de présenter ce concentré de talents et témoins de l’histoire : ce florilège de l’Abstraction Lyrique, des années 50 en pleine effervescence artistique parisienne, jusqu’à son épanouissement décomplexé des années 60 et 70 et sa pleine maturité des années 80 et 90.

Mark Tobey
(1890-1976)

“A painting should be a textile, texture. That’s enough! Perhaps I was influenced by my mother. She used to sew and sew.” Mark Tobey

Influences from a builder-carpenter father and a seamstress mother have enriched the multifaceted work of a major protean artist: painter, poet and composer.

“Like Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian, Tobey sees the highest reality as spiritual rather than physical.” William Chapin Seitz

At the crossroads between European Cubism and Asian painting, Mark Tobey’s work is above all spiritual, drawing resources from Oriental religions and philosophies: Zen and Baha’I which he discovered during his numerous trips to Asia, the Near and Middle East.

A pioneer in the use of sign in painting, Tobey learned Chinese calligraphy, especially through his decisive encounter with the Chinese painter Teng Kuei in 1923.

Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, Mark Tobey is none the less fundamentally self taught, exploring the multiple possibilities of using abstraction: with Jackson Pollock, he is one of the first to have used the innovative technique of all-over as early as 1935 with his white writings – overlays of white colour completely covering his calligraphic writing – then tending towards more and more abstract works, in tune with a way of life that was becoming progressively more meditative and contemplative.

Close to the great dealer, Ernst Beyeler who was his neighbour and friend, Mark Tobey divided his life between the United States and Switzerland.

In 1958, Mark Tobey was the first American artist since James Whistler to win the International Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale.

“His art, though unassuming, is nonetheless a continual dialogue with the spirit. There are the Tablets of the Law whose indecipherable writing often moves us like messages from another world.” Michel Ragon

“I painted to stay alive” said Sam Francis.

Confined to bed for three years following an airplane accident in 1943 during his service as a pilot in the USA Air Force, painting became for Sam Francis a way of survival and the strength of his recovery.

“Paint only the background, the location of the infinite in painting.” Sam Francis

Using the all-over technique, Francis’s canvases express the infinite, the space with neither beginning nor end, parts of sky as Francis explored them when he flew over the desert.

Only the mark is form, subject to chance, which emerges spontaneously. The figure dissolves, leaving “the space that spreads between things” to appear.

Between Clifford Still and Mark Rothko for Color Field, and of Jackson Pollock for Action Painting and drip painting, Sam Francis was also inspired by the innovative practices of Matisse in terms of colour, dimensionality of space and the purity of form and simplification of gesture.

“There is no development in my paintings. There is a rhythm. They are all intense from beginning to end.” Sam Francis

Francis’s work is prolific, exploring rhythms that are as varied as they are audacious: deeps, mosaics, blue balls, mandalas… an explosive oeuvre, borrowed from mysticism, spirituality and philosophy – a discipline he studied – nourished by his numerous journeys around the world, from Japan to Mexico via India and France.

“In him there is a cosmic and metaphysical feeling for a form of nature that is both welcoming and excessive on the scale of Northern California and the Pacific.” Yves Michaud

The Sam Francis Foundation based in California is preparing the Catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, among other projects.
The Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946–1994 has already been published. The second volume, covering unique works on paper, is currently being prepared.

Sam FRANCIS
(1923-1994)

“I painted to stay alive” said Sam Francis.

Confined to bed for three years following an airplane accident in 1943 during his service as a pilot in the USA Air Force, painting became for Sam Francis a way of survival and the strength of his recovery.

“Paint only the background, the location of the infinite in painting.” Sam Francis

Using the all-over technique, Francis’s canvases express the infinite, the space with neither beginning nor end, parts of sky as Francis explored them when he flew over the desert.

Only the mark is form, subject to chance, which emerges spontaneously. The figure dissolves, leaving “the space that spreads between things” to appear.

Between Clifford Still and Mark Rothko for Color Field, and of Jackson Pollock for Action Painting and drip painting, Sam Francis was also inspired by the innovative practices of Matisse in terms of colour, dimensionality of space and the purity of form and simplification of gesture.

“There is no development in my paintings. There is a rhythm. They are all intense from beginning to end.” Sam Francis

Francis’s work is prolific, exploring rhythms that are as varied as they are audacious: deeps, mosaics, blue balls, mandalas… an explosive oeuvre, borrowed from mysticism, spirituality and philosophy – a discipline he studied – nourished by his numerous journeys around the world, from Japan to Mexico via India and France.

“In him there is a cosmic and metaphysical feeling for a form of nature that is both welcoming and excessive on the scale of Northern California and the Pacific.” Yves Michaud

The Sam Francis Foundation based in California is preparing the Catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works, among other projects.
The Catalogue Raisonné of Canvas and Panel Paintings, 1946–1994 has already been published. The second volume, covering unique works on paper, is currently being prepared.

Paul JENKINS
(1923-2012)

“Jenkins has contributed significantly to the definition of the notion of space which today governs a vast sector of contemporary painting.” Pierre Restany

Having studied four years at the historic Art Students League during which years he met Jackson Pollock & Lee Krasner, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Paul Jenkins is a major artistic figure associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Starting in 1956, he was one of the major artists to be exhibited at the famous Martha Jackson Gallery in New York.

“Jenkins is obstinately attached to the fundamental dynamic, an attitude that could be described as a refusal of the static in all its states.” Pierre Restany

Using the technique of “controlled paint-pouring” with which the artist pours colour directly onto the support, Paul Jenkins integrates perfectly into the Action Painting movement of the Post-War period, between spontaneity and mastery of the artistic gesture.

Nourished by New York and Paris, he was also inspired by the masters of colour: Henri Matisse, Paul Gauguin and Vasily Kandinsky.

“Jenkins’ colour range ignores all censure in the visual: his palette ventures well beyond the conventional limits in the upper reaches of the spectrum.” Pierre Restany

In the 1950s, oils on canvas covered in matter like a potter’s glaze: recalling his time in his early years working with a ceramist in Kansas City, Missouri. His work evolved naturally towards the affirmation of colour, in particular from 1962 with the new use of acrylic. This resulted in refined liquid forms, which stand out from white backgrounds, these Phenomena… inspired by Goethe’s colour theories.

“Jenkins is one of the great religious or better, spiritual painters of our century.” Paul Veyne

Paul Jenkins was especially influenced by the theories of Jung in the 1950s, as well as by Oriental religions and philosophies, infusing his entire output with a mystical and spiritual character.
He often travelled to Asia, especially to Japan where he worked with Jiro Yoshihara and the Gutai.

He wrote Shaman to the Prism Seen, a dance drama, presented at the Paris Opera in 1987.

Loïs FREDERICK
(1930-2013)

Loïs Frederick’s large, vivid coloured -even fluorescent in the 1970’s- and luminous paintings are “an hymn to the light” and an echo to the wild landscapes of Nebraska, her native soil.

“Of her native Nebraska, she has retained images of immense plains leading to Rocky Mountains. Latitude: Rome. Altitude: 2700 feet. Sun, light, whatever the season. Climate of contrasts…”Michel Faucher

Heiress of Matisse and Rothko, her work is a marvellous mix between the Color Field movement and Abstract Expressionism, a bridge between the American and European artistic scenes.

Thanks to the Fulbright Award, she went to France in 1953 to study painting in Paris – the Fulbright Award was then renewed the following year.

Rare woman painter of Post-War art, she shared her life with the pioneer of European Abstract Expressionism Gerard Schneider and rubbed shoulders with Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Zao Wou-Ki among others.

Gallery Diane de Polignac is preparing the Catalogue raisonné of works by Loïs Frederick under the direction of Laurence Schneider, the artist’s only child.

Major museum collections

Denver, Denver Art Museum
Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art
Lincoln, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Nantes, Musée des Beaux-Arts
Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Musée d’Art et d’Histoire
Paris, Centre national d’Art contemporain

Selected exhibitions

Artists West of the Mississipi, Denver Art Museum, Purchase Award, 1953
Mid-America exhibition, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art,
Kansas City, Purchase Award, 1954
Salon de la Jeune Peinture, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1954 & 1955
Peintres abstraits américains de Paris, Galerie Arnaud, Paris, travelling exhibition in Germany, 1956
Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, Musée d’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, 1957-1959
Salon des Surindépendants, Paris, 1962
L’École de Paris, Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 1963
Salon d’Automne, Grand Palais, Paris, 1970-1983
Salon Grands et Jeunes d’aujourd’hui, Pavillon Baltard, Paris, 1971-1974
Salon de Mai, Galerie de la Défense, Paris, 1976-1978
Loïs Frederick, peintures et gouaches, Le Grand-Cachot-de-Vent, Vallée de la Brévine (Neuchâtel, Switzerland), 1985
Les Années 1950, travelling exhibition in France, 1985
Aspect de l’Art abstrait des années 50, traveling exhibition in France, 1988-1989

Loïs Frederick solo show, Galerie Diane de Polignac, Paris, 2015 (Loïs Frederick exhibition catalogue published)

Catalogue Manager: Astrid de Rendinger
Graphic Designer: Christian Demare
Translators: Jane Mac Avock
Printed by BB Créations

Photo credits:
Photo of the Artworks: © Agence Photo F
© Reserved rights (p.4)
© Betty Freeman Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington (p.5)
Courtesy Estate of Paul Jenkins (p.6)
© Loïs Frederick Archives (p.7)
© Galerie Diane de Polignac – 2014
ISBN: 978-2-9548416-3-2 – Dépôt légal January 2015

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