Strokes of sky blue, French grey, slate and white dash across the surface of Gray Force, in one, horizontal rush of color, bordered in by two wide crescents of sandy taupe. Executed in 1972, the same year that Ed Clark received the prestigious Painting Award from the National Endowment for the Arts (the highest honor of his career), Gray Force exemplifies the formal and technical innovations that defined Clark’s practice. The work comes from the same important Washington, D.C. collection as two works by Norman Lewis, which, together, speak to the necessity of viewing Black artists’ work as integral to the narrative of art history.
Clark developed his signature style while living in Paris in the mid-1950s. He immersed himself in the community of artists working there, and found inspiration from contemporaries, such as Nicolas de Staël, and older artists, including Cézanne, alike. For Clark, who began as a figurative artist, working with abstraction was liberating; abstraction freed him from being “a slave to […] likeness,” as he put it, and allowed him to think and create on his own terms.i
He came across his iconic tool, the push broom, while in pursuit of a wider brushstroke. Dissatisfied with the regular paintbrushes available to him, the push broom became an economical alternative that allowed Clark to access “the big sweep,” as he came to call it.ii Working with the canvas on the floor, Clark would push fluid pigment across the canvas, with a velocity (indeed, a force)that the motion of paintbrush and wrist simply could not muster. The results are bold, and energetic; as seen in Gray Force, the central sweep of the brush threads together disparate shades in a striated band of moving color. Per Clark, “the broom can make something else happen to color,” and it is this something else, this transformative application of color to canvas, varying in tone yet united in direction, that makes Gray Force such an arresting work.iii “You have to want that straight stroke. It’s like cutting through something really fast; that’s what the straight stroke with the push broom gives you, speed.”
—Ed Clark
In addition to featuring “the big sweep,” Gray Force is a prime example of Clark’s second formal innovation, the elliptical canvas, which he first used in 1968. Dating just four years later, the oval canvas of Gray Force is fresh and vigorous; as Clark explained, “it seemed to me that the oval as a natural shape could best express movement beyond the limits of the canvas.”iv Indeed, the oval shape of Gray Force emphasizes the force of the push broom sweep of color across the center of the canvas. The rounded edges contrast against the strict linearity of Clark’s horizontal force, drawing into high relief the energy, and commitment, of Clark’s aesthetic innovations.
i Ed Clark, interviewed by Shawn Wilson, Aug. 23, 2005. The HistoryMakers Digital Archive, session 1, tape 3, story 8, accessed via New York Public Library, online. ii Ibid., session 1, tape 5, story 4; Clark, quoted in Jack Whitten, “Edward Clark,” BOMB Magazine, Jun. 2, 2014, online. iii Clark, quoted in Whitten. iv Ibid.
Provenance
Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist) N'Namdi Contemporary, Miami Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2017
Exhibited
New York, 141 Prince Street Gallery, Ed Clark, September 16–October 5, 1972
Literature
Corinne Robins, "Edward Clark. Push-Broom and Canvas," Art International, vol. XVII, no. 8, October 1973, p. 37 Lawrence Campbell, "Edward Clark 141 Prince Street Gallery," Art News, New York, vol. 71, no. 7, November 1972, p. 82 Benny Andrews, "Ed Clark Still Sweeps Them off Their Feet," Encore America & Worldwide News, New York, December 4, 1978, p. 32
Born in pre-Civil Rights era New Orleans, Clark joined the Air Force at age 17 and served in Guam during World War II. Afterwards, he utilized the GI Bill by enrolling in the School of The Art Institute of Chicago and later the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Perceiving that his race would impact the future of his career less in France than in the United States – he noted that “The French never put race on ID cards”– Clark decided to reside in Paris even after the expiration of his GI bill before settling in New York in the late 1950s.
Though associated with Abstract Expressionism, Ed Clark continuously and audaciously transformed his artistic language over a career spanning six decades. His experiments with color, form, and shaped canvas are a testament to his restless inventiveness, a quality inspired by the cultures of the many places he’s resided in and traveled to, including New York, Paris, Morocco, Brazil, Greece, Yucatan, Martinique, Nigeria, and China. From his figurative works to his egg-shaped abstract pieces, Clark has always imbued his art with a delicate balance of colorful energy and peaceful tranquility.