Ed Clark
Ed Clark, Self-Portrait, 1947-49, watercolor on board, 12 1/2 x 11 1/2 inches (36.8 x 29.2 cm) Photograph by Tom Powel Imaging.
Mnuchin Gallery is proud to present Ed Clark: A Survey. This will be the first overview of Clark’s career in New York since the Studio Museum in Harlem’s retrospective in 1980. The exhibition will include paintings and works on paper spanning six decades, from 1962 through 2013. The exhibition will be on view September 14 through October 20, 2018. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 14 from 5.30 to 7.30pm. A fully illustrated catalogue authored by Antwaun Sargent will accompany the exhibition.
Affiliated with Abstract Expressionism, Ed Clark has continued to reinvent his unique abstract language over a sixty-year career. He is credited with being the first artist to exhibit a shaped canvas in the United States in 1957, a landmark innovation that profoundly expanded the possibilities of contemporary painting. He is also recognized for his signature process of creating paintings on the floor using a push broom, a radical gesture that transforms a humble symbol of menial labor into a tool of pure abstraction and high art. With these singular achievements, Clark established himself as a pioneer of abstract painting during a period when African-American artists were expected by many to create figurative work.
Born in New Orleans in 1926 and raised in Chicago after 1933, Clark went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago (1947-51) and L’Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in Paris (1952). Clark continued to live and work in Paris after the Academy, working alongside fellow ex-pat artists such as Sam Francis and Joan Mitchell. It was there that he delved permanently into abstraction, creating his first mature body of work; he explains that during this period, “I began to believe, from my conversations with other artists, that the real truth is in the stroke. For me, it is large, bold strokes that do not refer distinctly to seen nature. The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life.”[1] He has cited Paul Cézanne, Willem de Kooning, and, above all, Nicolas de Staël, as his greatest influences. In 1956, seeking a method of creating powerful, swiftly executed broad strokes, he developed his signature style of painting with a broom on a canvas laid horizontal on the floor, introducing a dimension of physicality and spontaneity to his process.[2] Clark would continue experimenting with this method for the rest of his career to new effects, trading in his traditional broom for a short-handled push broom shortly thereafter, and at times also employing rollers, rags, and his own hands to apply paint and dry pigment to his canvases.
Ed Clark working on The City, Paris, 1953.
Upon relocating to New York in 1957, Clark became a charter member of the Brata Gallery, one of a number of artist cooperative galleries on East 10th Street. Later that year, he exhibited there a shaped canvas, which has been widely documented as being the first shaped painting exhibited in the United States. A similar shaped canvas from that period, Untitled, 1957, is now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
After nine years in New York, Clark returned to France, where he spent time working in Paris as well as in Vétheuil, at Joan Mitchell’s country home. It was there, in 1968, that he inaugurated his series of oval paintings. The oval motif—both as a shaped painting and as an elliptical composition on a rectangular ground—would dominate his work for the next ten years. He has explained: “I began to feel something was wrong. Our eyes don’t see in rectangles. I was interested in an expanding image, and the best way to expand an image is the oval or ellipse. It seemed to me that the oval as a natural shape could best express movement extended beyond the limits of the canvas."[3] Clark’s first oval painting, The Big Egg, 1968, was acquired by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2013.
In 1971, Clark visited the summer home of fellow artist Jack Whitten in Crete. Noting the profound effect of a new light and landscape on his palette and imagery, Clark went on to travel the world over the following decades, seeking to capture the energy and atmosphere of different locales. From 1980 through 2015, he spent winters in New York and summers in Paris, while taking working trips to Ife, Nigeria; Yucatan, Mexico; Bahia, Brazil; Brittany, France; and Morocco, among other destinations.
Clark’s works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and the Detroit Institute of the Arts, among other institutions. His paintings can currently be seen in the traveling exhibition, Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, on view at the Brooklyn Museum from September 13 through February 3, 2019, and in The Long Run, on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from November 11, 2017 through November 4, 2018.
1. E. Clark and Q. Troupe, “For the Sake of the Search: An Interview with Ed Clark by Quincy Troupe,” in For the Sake of the Search, Belleville Lake, MI: Belleville Lake Press, 1997, p. 17.
2. K. A. N’Namdi, “My Life,” in Ed Clark: Master Painter, New York: G.R. N’Namdi Gallery, 2006, p. 7.
3. For the Sake of the Search, Belleville Lake, MI: Belleville Lake Press, 1997, p. 65.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Photography by: Tom Powel Imaging, Inc.
Ed Clark
Flash
1966
acrylic on canvas
44 x 58 1/2 inches (111.8 x 149.2 cm)
Ed Clark
Intarsia
1970
acrylic on canvas
119 1/2 x 219 1/2 inches (303.5 x 557.5 cm)
Ed Clark
Ife
1973
graphite and pastel on paper
30 x 40 inches (76.2 x 101.6 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
1974-75
acrylic on canvas
57 1/4 x 80 1/4 inches (144.8 x 203.2 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled (Paris Series)
1983
acrylic on canvas
47 1/8 x 55 1/8 inches (119.4 x 146.1 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
1985
acrylic on canvas
24 x 30 inches (61 x 76.2 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
c. early 1990s
acrylic on canvas
70 1/2 x 55 1/4 inches (179.1 x 140.3 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled (Egyptian Series)
c. 1990s
acrylic on canvas
60 x 70 inches (152.4 x 177.8 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
c. 1990s
acrylic on unbleached canvas
62 1/8 x 50 5/8 inches (157.8 x 128.6 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled (Bahia Series)
1991
acrylic on canvas
38 x 50 inches (95.3 x 127 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
c. 2000s
acrylic on canvas
80 1/2 x 62 3/4 inches (205.7 x 160 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2001
acrylic on canvas
36 1/8 x 48 1/4 inches (91.8 x 122.6 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2001
dry pigment on paper
29 1/4 x 41 1/2 inches (74.3 x 105.4 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2004
acrylic on canvas
77 x 51 3/8 inches (195.6 x 130.5 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled #2 (New York Series)
2004
acrylic on canvas
39 3/4 x 29 7/8 inches (101 x 75.9 cm)
Ed Clark
Blue & Red
2005
acrylic on canvas
69 3/4 x 60 1/4 inches (177.8 x 152.4 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2005
acrylic on canvas
53 1/4 x 66 inches (135.3 x 167.6 cm)
Ed Clark
The Tilt
2006
acrylic on canvas
40 x 30 inches (101.6 x 76.2 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2006
acrylic on canvas
47 7/8 x 66 inches (121.6 x 167.6 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2007
acrylic on canvas
44 x 60 1/4 inches (111.8 x 149.9 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2009
acrylic on canvas
50 1/8 x 73 5/8 inches (127.3 x 187 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2009
acrylic on canvas
53 x 66 inches (133.4 x 167.6 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2013
dry pigment on paper
38 3/8 x 48 inches (96.5 x 121.9 cm)
Ed Clark
Untitled
2013
dry pigment on paper
37 5/8 x 47 3/4 inches (95.6 x 121.3 cm)
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
Photography by: Benjamin Lozovsky/BFA.com
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.