 Greenwich, CT - Chalk & Vermilion
Fine Arts, parent of Martin Lawrence Galleries, announces the loan of over 100 pieces of original work by Abstract Expressionist artist
Sam Francis to
the Las Vegas Art Museum for a major retrospective of his work. The exhibition will be comprised of works dating
from the 1950s to the early 1990s, and will be drawn from the collection of David and Leslee Rogath,
owners of Chalk & Vermilion, and from the Sam Francis estate. The show opens on March 7, 2002 with a gala
reception for museum members, and will run through April 21, 2002.
Born in California in 1923, Sam Francis began painting as a form of therapy,
while recuperating from a World War II training flight injury. During his convalescence,
he began to paint, immediately gravitating towards non-objective painting. He was drawn
to Paris in 1950, and is associated with the rise of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s.
He returned to Santa Monica in 1962, and continued to paint, travel, and write. His works
have been exhibited internationally for over fifty years, in galleries and museums around the world.
In a review of a Sam Francis show in Los Angeles in 2000, art critic Bill Lasarow wrote:
"The hallmark dexterity of Francis's brushwork, his ability to orchestrate a delicious variety of convincingly spontaneous marks,
washes and gestures, and the playful interaction of numerous hues make for high visual hedonism. The constant careening of core
forms off of one another in all directions, and their spinning-top kineticism that add loads of incidental detail, takes
Matisse's proverbial comfortable chair and turns it into a rocket ship."
The Rogaths have lent art to the Las Vegas Art Museum before; they contributed over
40 works by Marc Chagall to a 1999 exhibition. In recent years, they have also
loaned art by Chagall and Francis as well as Pablo Picasso, Rene Magritte,
Andy Warhol, George Tooker, and Jean Dubuffet to major museums worldwide,
including the Whitney Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Museu Picasso in Barcelona,
the Pompidou in Paris, the Royal Museum of Brussels and the Louisiana Museum
of Modern Art in Denmark, Kunstsammlung Nordrhien-Westfalen in Germany, The
National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Yamaguchi Prefectural Museum of Art.
Martin Lawrence Galleries, America's premier gallery of fine art, represents many of today's
most important artists including Pablo Picasso,
Marc Chagall,
Andy Warhol,
Keith Haring,
Fanny Brennan,
Erté, Kerry Hallam,
Liudmila Kondakova, Thomas McKnight,
and Bruce Ricker.
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