Brush Strokes | Sam Needleman

In1956, American artist Ed Clark picked up a mop and began sweeping his large canvases on the floor of his studio with paint. It was new. Even during radical experiments with the foundations of painting, it is difficult to find an artist who used a new tool with such enthusiasm and energy. And for so long: Clark continued to sweep with a mop for the next six decades, as his fall exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York this year demonstrates well. At the end of his life, he insisted he had made a significant step in the history of his art. "There is no evidence that anyone has used a mop other than me," he told artist Jack Whitten. "Go find it in a museum. I will be the only one with a mop." According to him, the mop gave Clark not width, strength, or distance, but speed. "It's modern times," he said. "Take, for example, the painting 'Locomotion' (1963), whose title gives an idea of its triumphant movement. Large strips of green, orange, blue, and white colors collide with clumps of pink, yellow, and other shades of orange, as well as with the edges of the canvas. Especially in the lower left corner, it is difficult to determine where the mop was applied and at what stage of the compositional process. The effect represents a skillful balance between improvisation and precision, freedom, and intention. Here and in most of the fourteen paintings at Hauser & Wirth, the mop allows Clark to draw attention to the surface of the canvas and its boundaries. The same is done with his original canvases of non-standard shapes, although only two of them are presented at the exhibition - the round "Untitled (Branches)" (1968) and the oval "Untitled" (around1970), both in the style of a colorful canvas, which was relevant at that time. The boundaries of the painting and of painting itself were important to him.

Clark was born in New Orleans in 1926. His mother was a seamstress who worked in a factory and took on odd jobs at home, while his father was a gambler without a steady income. After moving to Baton Rouge, the family joined millions of Black Americans fleeing the South during the Great Migration. They ended up in Chicago. Clark's first commissions, as he recalled in 1997 to poet Quincy Troupe, were at a Catholic school where "they needed pictures": angels on the board, Easter cards, the Madonna. "It gave me some confidence," he said.

During World War II, Clark served in the Air Force and was stationed in Guam. Upon returning to Chicago, he enrolled in the Art Institute, where he received a classical education that he relied on even during his abstract work. "You first learn to draw, and then to paint," he told Trupp.

In his book "1971: A Year in the Life of Color" (2016), an excerpt of which is included in the Hauser and Wirth catalog, art historian Darby English writes that when Clark finally began to attract attention in the late 20th century, critics leaned towards the idea of a "mystical transmission of Black culture in his paintings." In the catalog for "Quiet as It's Kept," a 2002 exhibition in Vienna where David Hammons gathered Clark's works alongside those of artists Stanley Whitney and Denise Thomas, one critic suggested that Clark's mop symbolizes "a type of labor available to African Americans...coming from the South to the cities." English argues that such a representation of Clark's work "aligns his practice with Black art and attempts to suppress his abstraction." Clark's paintings, he insists, ask to "be considered in a different light."

“You are obviously an artist,” Clark recalls learning from his teacher, the sculptor Ossip Zadkine. “You don’t think in three dimensions.” It’s no surprise that his first and foremost influence was Cézanne, whose works he first saw not on the walls of a museum, but printed in the magazine Holiday. “I could see that there was something there,” he said. “He moved things around while keeping the flat surface of the canvas.”

The fact that Cézanne changed artists' approach to the canvas is a position taken by countless abstract artists and highlighted in a recent book by British art historian T. J. Clark. In his book "If These Apples Fall," Clark writes about the "wonderful... clumsy commitment to two dimensions" in Cézanne's works, such as "The Bathers" (around 1876-1878), with a sky that "wobbles before us like an unfinished canvas." In this painting, Clark notes, "space is separated from the overall totality of time, light, and atmosphere and begins to become an independent entity." This description also applies to Clark's work "Untitled (Vetei)": the radiant sky-blue color in the upper third of the canvas and below it the pink transitioning to a purplish-gray horizon create the impression—though, significantly, not the actual form—of a sunset. The essence of landscape, the genre in which Cézanne made his breakthrough by blending foreground and background, is present in most of the works on display, up to "Dedication to the Sands of Spring" (2009).

In France, Clark also saw the paintings of Nicolas de Staël, a Russian-born French abstract artist. Clark was too shy to introduce himself in the year he arrived in Paris, but his encounter with one of the older artist's paintings, where Clark noticed that the field "directly approached the plane," made him abandon the imagery and depth of his school years: "I had never seen such large brushstrokes in a painting." He moved towards high modernism, where the main subjects were canvas, mop, wooden support, oil, and acrylic. Clark reached his peak in the 1980s when he used a mop for quick, decisive semi-circles. In the works "Northern Light (Paris)" (1987) and "Red, Blue, and Black (Paris Series No. 4)" (1989), they dance across the canvas, even though we are looking at the dancers from above.

“Where has Edward Clark been all these years?” asked critic Cynthia Nadelman in 1980, on the occasion of his retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The question resonates half a century later with more regret than revelation. An exhibition in one of the world’s most brilliant galleries is something that can be described as “late, but still.” There is such a thing as “too little, too late”: modernism has its canon, and Clark passed away in 2019. If any aspect of his work manages to continue shining in the long term, it will be his method. A lifelong return to the basics in painting to advance his art and his genre is a way of working that looks incredibly fresh under the good lighting of Hauser & Wirth.