By Anita Feldman, Ed Clark: A Complex Identity
Essay in catalogue of Ed Clark's first Museum Retrospective,
Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, 1980.
That identity is a complex one. Educated at the Chicago Art
Institute and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris,
Clark has always operated out of a keen awareness of painting as high art
in the modernist tradition. Painting, for him, not only transcends its traditional
function as decoration, illustration, or documentation, but creates its own
audience and its own language. That language is not a local or provincial
dialect, but an idiom as universal as mathematics and as expressive as music.…
Like Henry Tanner or Beauford Delaney in earlier generations, Joan Mitchell
or Bill Hutson among his near contemporaries, Clark is defined as an artist
by contrast with the European background, not by absorption into it. As
an American in Paris, he painted with an energy that—to some European eyes—suggested
uncontrollable passion and even violence.…
What Clark brought to American-style painting was the “bold physicality”
identified by April Kingsley, in her introduction to “Afro-American Abstraction,”
with “the great African tradition.” This quality has been allied, for his
artist, with a need to unify very disparate elements, to set them into action
against one another and resolve their contradictions. The result, in the
large body of work he has produced, has been an art of rich emotional complexity
and bracing formal clarity.
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