John Seed muses on Sam Francis' painting Basel Mural I in the collection of the Norton Simon Museum. Seed writes "If you haven't seen the Basel Mural, you very likely don't know what Sam Francis was capable of at the height of his powers… I also feel strongly that [the painting] has something to do with experience of flight. 'I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects,' exhorted the Russian abstractionist Kasmir Malevich, 'Comrade aviators, sail on into the depths.' That is the call that I think Francis was heeding, the lure of the depths of the unfathomable and the purely abstract."