Author Interview: Gabrielle Selz's "Light on Fire: The Art and Life of Sam Francis"
We’re back on ArtCurious with another great interview episode for you today. Today’s episode features a conversation about Light on Fire, the first comprehensive biography of the life and work of the abstract artist Sam Francis by award-winning author Gabrielle Selz. Drawing from exclusive interviews and private correspondence, including Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Selz traces Francis’s extraordinary and complex life.
Francis first learned to paint as a former air-corps pilot while he was encased, for three years, in a full-body cast. His insatiable desires spanned women, places, experiences, art movements, and business deals for Francis to reach equilibrium. He courted change and drama, even encouraging conflict because it forced him to retreat into his art. It paid off. As a young man, Sam saw his color-drenched abstractions fetch the highest prices of any living artist.
With an international scope, from World War II San Francisco to postwar Paris, to New York, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, Light on Fire reveals the intimate story of a man who sought to resolve in art the contradictions he couldn’t resolve in life. Throughout Francis’s life, he married five times, had homes on three continents and founded a museum, publishing company, a reforestation program, and several nonprofits. Today his paintings hang in museums across the world including MOMA, The Broad, The Tate, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
Light on Fire is a revelatory biography that uncovers the formative event in Francis’s life along with the fictions he created around himself and his work. As a result, Selz has affirmed Francis cultural permanence as one of the most important abstract artists of the twentieth century, accompanying the likes of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Joan Mitchell, and Willem de Kooning.
About the author:
Gabrielle Selz is the award-winning author of Unstill Life: A Daughter’s Memoir of Art and Love in the Age of Abstraction (2014) and Light on Fire: The Art and Live of Sam Francis (2021). Her essays and art reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, The Rumpus, and The Huffington Post among others.
Please enjoy this bonus episode, featuring my discussion, via Zoom, with Gabrielle Selz. Be sure to grab your copy of Light on Fire from Bookshop.org, below. If you prefer Amazon, that link is below as well.
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