MILWAUKEE, WIS.- The Milwaukee Art Museum is presenting Sam Francis: Master Printmaker , sponsored by Sendik’s Food Market, as the inaugural exhibition in the Bradley Family Gallery, a new 4,000-squarefoot changing exhibition space in the Museum’s renovated and expanded Collection Galleries. It will be on view until March 20, 2016.

Debuting as part of the Museum’s reopening celebration, Sam Francis: Master Printmaker honors the 2009 gift of more than five hundred prints from the Sam Francis Foundation that made the Milwaukee Art Museum the largest repository of the artist’s works on paper. It is the first time the works are on view in Milwaukee.

American artist Sam Francis (1923–1994) is best known for his Abstract Expressionist large-scale paintings, innovative prints, and use of vibrant color. The exhibition’s fifty lithographs, etchings, aquatints, and screenprints provide a cross section of the most significant print series of Francis’s career.

“The Museum is honored to be a repository for the work of Sam Francis, a major force in twentieth-century painting and printmaking,” said Margaret Andera, adjunct curator of contemporary art. “This exhibition is a rare chance to discover an artist’s entire career, and the Museum’s rich collection of works on paper.”

Francis was one of the first post-World War II American painters to develop a reputation in the international art world. His work reflects his wide-ranging travels–from San Francisco to Japan to France–and artistic influences, including Impressionism and color field painting.

The vibrant colors associated with his paintings are equally in evidence in his prints, with stunning depths of inks he formulated himself. Printmaking was essential to Francis’s process throughout his career, as an opportunity to explore ideas relating to clarity and the possibilities of color. Francis was also instrumental in encouraging fellow artists to explore printmaking, and he invited artists to produce prints and artists’ books at his two presses, the Litho Shop, founded in 1970, and Lapis Press, which began in 1984.

Upon their acquisition, the prints joined the Museum’s Herzfeld Photography, Print, and Drawing Study Center, a repository of more than 15,000 rare prints, drawings, photographs, and book arts. In addition to housing the Museum’s collection of works on paper, the Herzfeld Study Center contains a library of monographs on artists, catalogue raisonnés, and reference materials, along with object files and artist files.