Ed Clark (artist)

Edward "Ed" Clark (May 6, 1926 – October 18, 2019) was an abstract expressionist painter known for his broad, powerful brushstrokes, radiant colors and large-scale canvases.

An African American, his major contributions to modernist painting remained unrecognized until relatively late in his seven-decade career, during which he pioneered the use of shaped canvases and a commercially available push broom to create striking works of art.

[1][2] In 1944, during World War II, 17-year-old Ed Clark dropped out of high school and joined the U.S. Army Air Forces, serving eventually with an all-black unit in newly recaptured Guam.

[1][2] Leaving the military in 1946 and unprepared for university, he decided to use GI Bill of Rights stipends to enroll in night classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied under Louis Ritman and Helen Gardner.

[1][2] Clark would later remark that a realist portrait, for example, no matter how well done, was essentially “a lie,” and “the truth is in the physical brushstroke and the subject of the painting is the paint itself.”[3][4] The young Chicagoan joined a Parisian circle of expatriate black American artists escaping U.S. racism, including writer James Baldwin and painter Beauford Delaney, and also grew friendly with such white artists as Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis and Al Held.

"[2] Clark hit upon his signature technique in the mid-1950s in Paris, when striving to cover a larger area of canvas with broader, straighter strokes than possible with his wrist and conventional paintbrushes.

Especially later when he placed the canvas on the floor, the broom in Clark’s hands spread color in wide, often horizontal swaths that spoke of energy and speed.

[1][3] He called it his “big sweep.”[6] From oils in his early years, he moved on to brilliant acrylics on large canvases, and softer, quieter dry pigments on paper.

[5][9][10][11] Extensive travels over the decades – from Nigeria to New Mexico, Cuba to China, with frequent returns to Paris – were opportunities for the artist to see light and color in new ways.

"[13] In 2014, upon viewing an exhibit of Clark's work at the Tilton Gallery, New York critic Barry Schwabsky wrote in The Nation, "He is, simply, one of the best living painters."

"[14] Reviewing a Museum of Modern Art show in 2017, New York Times critic Roberta Smith wrote that in a gallery that also included paintings by Willem de Kooning, Elizabeth Murray, Alma Thomas and others, she was most taken by "an effortless, thrilling abstraction full of floating light," an untitled work by Clark.