Overview
Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness (Sam Francis, leçon de ténèbres), subtitled “like the paintings of a blind man,” is Jean-François Lyotard’s book-length encounter with the painting of Sam Francis. It is neither a conventional art-critical survey nor a scholarly monograph. Its core is a sequence of short, aphoristic prose pieces written in response to individual paintings, with image and text set in alternation. The bilingual volume prints Lyotard’s French alongside Geoffrey Bennington’s English translation and reproduces the paintings under discussion.
The book is framed by Herman Parret’s preface and Geoffrey Bennington’s postface or epilogue. The main body belongs to Lyotard. Its order is deliberately non-linear: the paintings are not sequenced chronologically, and the prose does not build a step-by-step argument. Instead, the book creates a conversation between paintings and short poetic reflections. Continuity comes not from logical exposition but from a shared attention to what remains unpresented in presentation.
Preface
Herman Parret’s preface introduces the volume and frames Lyotard’s text for the reader. It stands as an editorial opening to the sequence that follows rather than as part of Lyotard’s own meditation on Francis.
Sam Francis. Leçon de Ténèbres / Lesson of Darkness
The central text consists of around forty-two short reflections, each attending to a painting; a scholarly review of the book describes the sequence as engaging forty-three works. The reflections are not arranged as a chronological survey of Francis’s career, nor do they advance a single art-historical thesis. They are best understood as a series of concentrated responses to particular paintings, in which Lyotard’s prose circles around color, visibility, and absence.
Lyotard’s reading centers on color and visibility. He treats Francis’s painting as an art that “pays homage to the visible marvel and bears witness to the visual enigma”: it affirms the splendor of the visible while registering an enigma or absence within visibility itself. Color is double in his account. It can console and cure melancholy, and it can also deceive, carry the viewer away, and point toward an absent truth. Lyotard’s concern is the subtle multiplicity of meanings in Francis’s use of color rather than a single style or technique.
Because the text is aphoristic rather than expository, its claims emerge cumulatively. The book does not present Francis as a representative abstract expressionist; it approaches his work as a sustained inquiry into matter, affect, and the force of absence. The equation of love and matter that Francis inscribed in an exhibition catalogue for Lyotard condenses something of that orientation. The sequence is also a reflection on painting as event: each work is treated as a visual occasion that cannot be fully translated into discourse. The writing returns repeatedly to the gap between what is shown and what can be said, to color as both a lure and a withdrawal, and to the “lesson” of darkness as a discipline of attending to what is not made present.
Epilogue
Geoffrey Bennington’s postface or epilogue closes the volume. It is a framing essay rather than part of Lyotard’s sequence of reflections, and it stands after the main text as a concluding commentary on the work.
Taken as a whole, Sam Francis: Lesson of Darkness is less a thesis about Francis’s career than an extended meditation on color, visibility, and the unpresentable. Its “lesson” is not a doctrine or a set of art-historical conclusions but a mode of attention: a way of looking at paintings that remains open to what exceeds statement.
The lesson the book draws from Francis is inseparable from a certain asceticism of response. Lyotard’s reflections do not interpret the paintings by assigning them symbols or narratives; they linger over the way color solicits the eye and then eludes conceptual capture. Abstraction is thus treated as an encounter with matter and affect rather than as a purely formal exercise. What is at stake is not the identity of a style but the event of a painting: the moment in which visibility is given and, in the same movement, marked by an absence that no discourse can fully recover.
The title’s echo of the Tenebrae office—a liturgy of readings and psalms accompanied by the extinguishing of lights—gives the book’s “darkness” a ritual and meditative inflection. Darkness here is not simply the opposite of light or a mood of gloom; it is the condition in which appearance is attended to as something that withdraws even as it shows itself. The volume’s significance therefore lies less in a new account of Francis’s development than in its demonstration of a mode of criticism: one that remains faithful to the painting’s resistance to statement and treats color as both a gift to sight and a limit upon what can be said.
