Book Release: ‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep’
Press Release
Hauser & Wirth Publishers’ new book on Ed Clark—the definitive publication on the artist—explores his role in the pivotal developments of 20th-century abstract painting
To be released on 7 September, accompanying the artist’s solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street
‘I began to believe . . . that the real truth is in the stroke. For me, it is large, bold strokes that do not refer distinctly to seen nature. The paint is the subject. The motions of the strokes give the work life.’
—Ed Clark, 1997
Over the course of his six-decade career, American painter Ed Clark (1926 – 2019) had a profound impact on the history and development of abstract painting. The definitive publication on Clark recounts the story of his life and work through reprints of important historical texts by authors including Darby English, Anita Feldman, Geoffrey Jacques, Kellie Jones, April Kingsley and Corinne Robins; interviews with Clark by Quincy Troupe, Jack Whitten and Judith Wilson; as well as photographs, letters, and ephemera from the archive of Clark’s Estate and his papers at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. This book accompanies the artist’s exhibition, ‘The Big Sweep,’ at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street and, together, they assess his role in the development of American abstraction and demonstrate his place in its canon.
Born in New Orleans in 1926, Ed Clark studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went on to spend a formative period in Paris in the 1950s, becoming a member of a social and intellectual circle of American expatriate artists and writers, before going back to New York in 1957 where he emerged as a pioneer in the second generation of Abstract Expressionists. From the late 1960s until the last decade of his life, Clark split his time between New York and Paris and travelled extensively to other locales. Following the chronology of Clark’s life, the nine chapters in this book take readers to the various locations he lived and worked, reflecting the importance of place to the artist.
Clark’s experimentations and breakthroughs were key advancements in the story of modern and contemporary art: in the late 1950s he was the first American artist credited with creating a shaped canvas, an innovation that continues to reverberate today; and his revolutionary embrace of the common push broom as a paintbrush—a technique he first tried in Paris in 1956 and that, along with the shaped canvas, would come to define his practice—extended the language of American abstraction. Defying the discreet categories of gestural and hard-edged abstraction, Clark produced a unique form of expressionism. This book, taking its title from the name he gave to his push broom technique, presents rich illustrations that survey Clark’s most important works alongside archival images of the artist at work and portraits of him with his finished works. A Swiss-bound hardcover, the book offers vivid double-page reproductions of his work and striking detail images, enabling viewers to experience the seductive materiality of his paint.
‘Ed Clark: The Big Sweep’ privileges Clark’s first-hand experience through interviews and other archival material, using the unique capacity of the artist’s voice and personal testimony to evoke the texture of lived experience. Placing the artist’s own telling of his story in dialogue with excerpts from out-of-print monographs, contemporaneous press and reprinted texts, the book provides an overview of the story of Clark’s life and work and—despite the belated recognition of his achievements—ultimately stakes a definitive claim to his place in the historical record.
‘This is the essence of Ed Clark’s gestural abstraction; each painting is a summation of everything, his entire life, up to a particular moment. Each work has never been made before and will never be made again.’
—Kellie Jones, 1990
‘The moment I take the broom that gives a different kind of energy. . . . When I get into painting like that, you don’t get into something you understand, you just let it go.’
—Ed Clark, 2016
Ed Clark: The Big Sweep; Chronicles of a Life, 1926–2019
Release date: 7 September 2023
Edited by Jake Brodsky. Texts by L. Berrin, Ed Clark, Michel Conil-Lacoste, Ph. Constantin, Darby English, Anita Feldman, Geoffrey Jacques, Kellie Jones, R. C. Kenedy, April Kingsley, Cynthia Nadelman, Corinne Robins, Franklin Sirmans, Roberta Smith and Neil Vigor, Rachel L. Swarns, John Yau. Interviews with Ed Clark by Quincy Troupe, Jack Whitten, and Judith Wilson.
Book design by Garrick Gott
English, Hardcover
248 pages, 156 illustrations, 235 x 183 mm
ISBN 978-3-906915-77-7
£52 / $60 / €58 / CHF55 / HKD 475
Press Release
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Press Contact:
Kristin Brüggemann, Hauser & Wirth Zurich kristinbrueggemann@hauserwirth.com