Ed Clark (1926-2019)

Ed Clark was born in New Orleans but moved to Chicago in his early childhood. He served in the US Air Force between 1944 and 1946, and from 1947 to 1951, attended the Art Institute of Chicago on the G.I. Bill. He traveled to Paris in 1952, and continued his studies at the L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere for two years. Clark found the style of education to be much laxer in Paris than at the AIC, but he found inspiration in acquaintances and unlimited access to great works of art. He was particularly influenced by the Russian-born painter, Nicolas de Stael, whose work Clark found to be somewhere between hard-edge and the gestural abstraction popular in post-war Paris. Clark’s work became increasingly abstract and he began working in a much larger format.

In 1953, he was included in an exhibition of American artists working in France at the Galerie Craven. He was the only African American represented. He returned to New York in 1957 for a solo exhibition at the Brata Gallery in the East Village and continued to show there through 1959, but with the emergence of Pop Art in the 60s, not much was happening for Clark in the US. He returned to Paris in 1966 for a one-man show at Galerie Creuze. Since the 1960s, Clark began using a push broom to push the paint across the canvas lying on the floor.

Clark termed his broom method “the big sweep,” and he told the writer Quincy Troupe in 1997 that what it provided was “speed. Maybe it’s something psychological. It’s like cutting through everything. It’s also anger or something like it to go through in a big sweep.”  (REF:  Russeth, Andrew. “Ed Clark, Key Postwar Artist Who Changed the Shape of Abstract Painting, Is Dead at 93.” ARTnews.Com, ARTnews.com, 2 Mar. 2023.)

Clark continued to work in his innovative method until his death, improvising and layering luminous colors in his studio. His estate is represented by Hauser & Wirth, NY.