THE IDEAL DEALER

André Emmerich

My initial encounter with the work of Sam Francis was on my first trip to Paris after the war in the summer of 1953 while still a journalist. His work was in a group show of new art organized by the influential French critic Michel Tapié entitled Un art autre (Another Kind of Art). On that same trip, I also saw one of his powerful paintings at the home of Darthea Speyer, who at that time was the cultural attaché for the United States embassy in Paris. She also organized Sam’s first one-man show at the Galerie du Dragon in the heart of the Montparnasse section of Paris, a show whose spectacular success reverberated a year later.

My response to Sam’s art was both immediate and profound. It stirred me deeply, and I found it exhilarating.

I returned to Paris in 1954, determined to be an art dealer and looking for artists to show in the gallery I planned to open in New York. But by that time, Sam had soared out of reach for a young would-be dealer without, as yet, even a location to call his own. But this did not diminish my growing admiration for Sam’s new paintings, which I found more beautiful than ever.

It was not until 1968 that I was able to woo Sam away from the Pierre Matisse Gallery and install an exhibition of his new paintings in my 57th Street gallery the following year. This began a long, happy, and intensely personal relationship with Sam that lasted until his untimely passing in 1994. It was marked by my frequent trips to Santa Monica to visit his studio and plan his almost annual exhibitions.

Slowly, over the years, Sam and I grew closer in our personal friendship and in his trust in me as his dealer and in my eye. The latter actually proved to create its own problems for me. The more he valued my eye, the more he tended to want to hang on to paintings to which I responded particularly strongly. As a result, he often decided to keep them for himself rather than ship them to New York. The only leverage I had was to remind him that New York in those years was the very epicenter of the art world, the place where his exhibitions had to compete with the best new art being produced and where critical judgments were constantly being formed and reformed. I pointed out to him that it was for his own interest, even more than mine, that he put his best foot forward on 57th Street. The other way to loosen Sam’s understandable grip on his best work was to plead and plead again the depths of my enthusiasm, which often moved him to let my favorite pictures come to New York.

In all our inevitably complex artist-dealer relationships, Sam always proved to be a generous and appreciative friend. That was why it was a continuing pleasure for me to go beyond what might be required from a dealer.

Thinking back on my association with Sam and his work, it is his infectious enthusiasm for the very act and art of painting that his work continues to radiate. To look at his pictures is to share the immense pleasure he obviously had in the making of his art. It is not by accident that the painting that hangs in our bedroom, on the wall we first see on waking in the morning and the last we see before falling off to sleep at night, is one of Sam’s magical paintings.

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