This brief but powerful incident and others like it would pay off hugely in later years, when a conversation with a New York acquaintance about a painting he’d made in Crete made him realize just how significantly his palette changes when he works in different places-an insight that would eventually send him around the world in a quest for new lights and colors to paint. It was there that he became aware of how startlingly fresh everyday colors can look in different environments he’s often repeated the tale of being deeply impressed by a specific shade of blue that he saw in the stevedores’ uniforms when he first arrived in France. It was both a shrewd and a lucky move on Clark’s part, because that initial trip to Paris furnished him with a toolkit of ideas, inspirations, and techniques that have shaped pretty much everything he’s done in the studio ever since. Finding that he still had a small amount of government money left after Chicago, he decided to pack up and move to Paris, where interesting things were still going on a century after the avant-garde first thumbed its collective nose at the Academy.Įd Clark, Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 77” x 51.” Bill funds he received after a wartime stint in the Army. His childhood discovery of a natural talent for drawing (along with the alternating praise and jealousy that comes with it) eventually led him to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1947, where he studied painting and art history on G.I. Like many artists who came up during the heyday of High American Modernism, he went through an itinerant and somewhat ad hoc apprenticeship that led him gradually through the complex labyrinth of Modernist figuration and out the other side to pure abstraction. His choice of painting tools-or, more properly, a single tool-was neither a gimmick nor a capricious gesture. There’s a palpable sense of conviction in Clark’s canvases 3 and a consistency of artistic vision that make it impossible to cavalierly dismiss him as an Abstract Expressionist stereotype ( oh, he’s that guy who paints with a push-broom). All images are courtesy of the artist and N’Namdi Contemporary, Miami. At the age of 90 he may be slowing down just a bit-an assistant now helps him with some of the setup when he paints 2-but despite that there’s still the same grandeur and beauty in his work, along with a calm swagger that’s always been a subtle but distinctive trademark.Įd Clark, Untitled, acrylic on canvas, 58” x 72.” Photos: Mariano Costa Peuser. Throughout postwar painting’s relentless progression of styles, schools, and paradigm shifts, he’s been steadily working away, painting what he calls his “big sweeps” 1 with a sense of quiet but unshakeable purpose. It’s wonderful to see this acclaim finally granted to Clark, because he’s been a constant but severely underappreciated presence on the international art scene for well over 60 years. A similar note was struck two years earlier, with the inclusion of Clark’s work in the Guggenheim’s collection-based survey “Art of Another Kind: International Abstraction and the Guggenheim, 1949-1960.” And 2013 saw the Art Institute of Chicago’s bestowal to Clark of its Legends and Legacy Award, a welcome acknowledgement of his importance as an African-American artist with a decades-long career, during which he’s made a significant contribution to modern art. The show presented a convincing visual argument that Clark’s relative absence from Modernism’s grand narrative has been a matter of sheer neglect rather than artistic merit. In early 2014, his bold poured-and-push-broomed paintings were the subject of “Ed Clark: Big Bang,” a retrospective at New York’s Tilton Gallery that also included a handful of artworks by Clark’s friends Donald Judd, Yayoi Kusama, and Joan Mitchell. It seems like Ed Clark is finally getting a bit of the recognition he deserves.
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