Ed Clark was an African-American painter mostly known for his vibrant use of color and elliptical-shaped canvases. Born on May 6, 1926 in the Storyville section of New Orleans, Louisiana, Clark grew up in Baton Rouge and later moved to Chicago in 1933. In 1943, he joined the United States Air Corps and served in Guam during World War II. Shortly after his return to the U.S., Clark enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947 where he studied traditional painting until 1951 as a veteran under the GI Bill. He continued his studies in Paris at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in 1952, where Clark remained even after his GI Bill expired, as he felt it epitomized a society in which the color of his skin was less likely to determine his artistic career. In regards to Paris, Clark has stated, “[Paris was the] …freest of cities and a true magnet for artists. We would meet among artists of all countries, with no distinction of class, race or political ideology. We were artists, nothing else.”Although he returned to America in 1957, Clark’s years in Paris would come to inform his work for the rest of his career, and he would return periodically throughout his life.
Clark is credited as the first painter known to work on a shaped canvas, an innovation that was extremely radical during the 1950s and ‘60s. His first shaped painting was exhibited in 1957 at the Brata Gallery in New York, a cooperative gallery of which Clark was a charter member. A decade later in 1968, while living in Claude Monet’s first home in Vétheuil, France, he painted his first oval painting, now his most famous shape. The majority of the works in his oeuvre were executed on the floor, in homage to Jackson Pollock and his drip paintings. The key difference is Clark’s use of a push broom, a tool that became his signature. In adopting the push broom, Clark was able to imbue his paintings with a unique sense of speed and monumentality, creating distinctive records of the joy he possessed in the act of painting.
The artist’s work is included in the permanent collections of several important cultural institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Detroit Institute of the Arts; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, among others.
Ed Clark passed away on October 19, 2019 at the age of 93 in Detroit, Michigan.
I don’t think that I can begin to enumerate all the different ways that Ed Clark is important to the history of postwar American painting. Perhaps I should start by identifying some of the ways he has been left out. As Corinne Robins observed in a 1997 review, the seemingly inclusive chronicler and art historian, Irving Sandler, failed to mention “Ed Clark or any other artist of color” in his canonical book, The New York School (1978). Sandler is hardly the only art historian who failed to mention Clark in his survey of postwar American painting.
The career of Ed Clark, now 92, is the subject of this vigorous 40-year career survey, which establishes his singular exploration of the formal and narrative potential of color and paint. Mr. Clark sometimes stains but mostly he wields wide brushes and even brooms, magnifying impasto and brushwork in piled-up strokes that seem to squirm on the surface. More characteristic are broad bands and curves of color that zoom across or out of corners, achieving an almost sculptural force, as in the pale, propulsive streams of “Elevation” (1992), a tumult of sound, water and paint all in one.
Currently on view at the Mnuchin Gallery in New York is a career survey of Ed Clark, the painter known for abstractions created by moving a push broom across a canvas. Clark’s work is also on view at the Brooklyn Museum in “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.” With both shows in mind, we surveyed reviews from the ARTnewsarchives that spotlight the 92-year-old painter’s output. In one from November 1972, Lawrence Campbell notes that Clark may have been the first painter of a shaped canvas. Cynthia Nadelman, writing for the March 1982 issue on the occasion of a Studio Museum in Harlem survey of Clark, asks, “Where has Edward Clark been all our lives?”
Amid growing curatorial and market interest, the 92-year-old abstract painter is getting a solo show at Mnuchin Gallery. “Ed Clark: A Survey,” which opens in New York on September 14, features 40 paintings and works on paper from 1962 to 2013. The artist David Hammons, who also works with the gallery and is an avid Clark collector, was the “catalyst” for the survey, says Mnuchin’s Sukanya Rajaratnam.
September 14 is shaping up to be a monumental day in the career of the renowned 92-year-old painter Ed Clark, who’s best known for exhilarating abstractions that he makes by pushing paint across his canvases with a broom. On that day, the traveling exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which includes work by Clark, will open to the public at the Brooklyn Museum, and that evening, a few miles away, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Mnuchin Gallery will open “Ed Clark: A Survey,” with some 40 paintings and works on paper by the artist dating from 1962 to 2013.
