For abstract painter, his brush was a push broom
Ed Clark, 93, a noted abstract painter who achieved his distinctive effect by using a janitor’s broom to sweep paint across the canvas in giant, motion-filled strokes, died Oct. 18 at a care center in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan.
His death was announced by the gallery Hauser & Wirth, which represented him. The cause was complications from heart ailments, said his daughter, Melanca Clark.
Clark achieved widespread recognition relatively late in his career, which he had begun with art studies on the GI Bill after World War II. As an African American, he was long excluded from many white-owned galleries. He forged his artistic identity during the postwar years in Paris, where black artists such as Beauford Delaney and writers including James Baldwin had sought escape from the rampant discrimination they found in the United States.
Clark was working in his studio in the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, he recounted, when he decided that the painting on which he was laboring called for an unusually wide brush. He found one in the janitor’s closet. He would later dub his technique, in which he took a push broom to a canvas laid flat on the floor, “the big sweep.”
“That’s what the push broom gives you, speed,” he once told an interviewer. “Maybe it’s something psychological. It’s like cutting through everything. It’s also anger or something like it, to go through it in a big sweep.”
Clark’s paintings featured “all the colors of the spectrum,” he once said in an interview at the Perez Art Museum in Miami — from rich oranges, reds and purples to gentle pastels, sometimes in juxtaposition with one another. For some viewers, the sweeping lines formed by the bristles of his broom evoked the colorful strata of a sunset; for others they looked like waves.
Many of his works featured ovals and shaped canvasses, a practice that he was credited with helping to pioneer. He described his work as having a life of its own — “you just let it go,” he said — and told the publication Black Renaissance Noire that he sometimes let galleries decide “which way is up” when they displayed a painting of his.
By the end of his life, his work was exhibited in institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington.
Edward Clark Jr. was born in New Orleans and grew up largely in Chicago.
He told Bomb magazine that his paternal grandmother, who was black, was 14 when she had his father, and that the baby’s father was a white sheriff. Clark’s father could “pass” as white, the artist said, but never wished to do so. He worked a variety of jobs, including construction work, and was fired from one of them when his employer discovered his race.
Clark described his mother as a devout Catholic, and he attended Catholic schools before leaving high school to enlist in the Army Air Forces during World War II. After serving in Guam, he began his formal art studies, first at the Art Institute of Chicago and later in Paris at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere.
In 1957, Clark settled in New York and helped form the Brata Gallery, a cooperative that showcased the works of a racially diverse group of artists. He traveled extensively for his artwork, including to the American Southwest, the Caribbean, Brazil, the Mediterranean, Africa and China, seeking new landscapes and shades of light to inspire him.
Clark’s marriages to Muriel Nelson, Lola Owens, Hedy Durham and Liping An ended in divorce. Survivors include his daughter from his third marriage and two grandchildren.
During his formative years in Paris, Clark studied the Old Masters as well as modern art. But then as after, he was drawn inexorably to the abstract form.